Marlon Williams says added his "classic little Māori strum" into the riff. Photo / Fiona Goodall
Marlon Williams says added his "classic little Māori strum" into the riff. Photo / Fiona Goodall
By Jana Te Nahu Owen, RNZ
RNZ’s Music101 continues its look at nominees for the Apra Silver Scroll awards, finding out from artists when the first seed of their acclaimed song appeared, inspiration, music production and more.
In this “Anatomy of a scroll” Jana Te Nahu Owen managed to catch the very busy Marlon Williams (Ngāi Tahu) in a cafe in Melbourne to talk about his song ‘Don’t Go Back’ from his album My Boy.
“My song Don’t Go Back is a cautionary tale about not going back to a party that you’ve just left.
“Because as the adage goes, nothing good happens after midnight. It’s a warning to all people at all parties.
“I’ve certainly had bad experiences after midnight, I’ve had most of my bad experiences occur after midnight. At a wild party, that’s when you do stupid things.”
The song is actually a quasi-sequel to an earlier work by Williams.
“It actually harks back to a song off my last record, Party Boy. It’s really a part two in some sense,” Williams says.
“Party Boy was sort of an outside looking in to what’s wrong with the party boy, and what sort of trouble a party boy can get into, and Don’t Go Back is sort of a rewind, words of advice to said party boy to think about what he’s up to.”
Williams said he and his collaborator Mark Perkins were listening to Love You Inside Out by the Bee Gees and it inspired a bit of the Don’t Go Back sound.
“There’s something in that song, the like, audacity of it and the style of it that I wanted to try and capture in a new song.”
Williams added his “classic little Māori strum” into the riff, as well as the ruru sound that echoes throughout the song.
“We were recording the song up in Waipu and while we were recording every time there would be a quiet moment you’d hear the ‘hoo-hoo’ up in the background.”
There was about a year between the first work on the song and final recording.
“It didn’t really change that much. I think it’s because that’s so much in a certain kind of world, it sort of follows its own logic when we went to record it again for the record.”
