Australian quartet Spacey Jane’s third album, If That Makes Sense, signifies a new artistic era for the group. Written over the course of several years, and for the first time with other songwriters, If That Makes Sense showcases some of Caleb Harper’s most poignant and vulnerable lyricism to date. Straying from the timeline that their previous album creative processes had followed, the band took their time carefully crafting 13 tracks that delve into self-reflection and processing all of the emotions that come with trying to move forward while looking back. If That Makes Sense releases on May 9th, and is accompanied by a world tour spanning across New Zealand, Australia, North America, Europe and the UK.
Spacey Jane consists of Caleb Harper (frontman: vocals, guitar), Kieran Lama (drums), Ashton Hardman-Le Cornu (guitar), and Peppa Lane (bass). Formed in Perth, Western Australia in 2016, the band has had a string of successful accomplishments over the last few years, including their second album debuting at number one on the ARIA charts, as well as being Triple J’s most played artist in 2022. Despite their well-earned success, the band is committed to continuing to hone their craft and connecting with listeners both Australian and worldwide through their work.
Ahead of the release of If That Makes Sense and the accompanying tour, 1883 sat down with Caleb Harper to talk about the album, his time in LA, and his songwriting.
As of today, we are two weeks away from the release of your third album, If That Makes Sense. Can you walk me through the emotions you’re experiencing right now leading up to it?
Feeling sort of stressed about getting ready for the tour and the album launch. Just the workload is a lot. The actual music and the feeling of having the record out is one of excitement. I feel like… I can’t… Everything’s kind of out of my control now, in a lot of ways. There’s still stuff to do, but it’s really nice to know that it’s about to come out. Three years now, over three years since I started writing it, it’s finally over in a way. I almost feel sad, as well, because it’s no longer a secret. It’s a whole lot of feelings, mostly just really happy to show people what’s been going on for a long time now.
This record doesn’t have a specific overall theme or focus on a particular time of your life, but instead exists as it is, and is up for interpretation. Looking back on the creative process, did you go into it intending to create an album like this? Or was it something that came naturally during the creation?
I specifically didn’t want to feel like we had to give the album an overarching theme or throughline. I’ve never gone into writing a record thinking it’s going to be about this thing generally, the goal was just to have the 12 best songs that we can make in however long we have to write it. That was really the focus. There’s a kind of freedom in that, as well, thematically, there was no… Lyrical themes of a song wouldn’t be excluded from being something that could make the record. It really just felt like whatever fits, and whatever we love.
That’s really cool, to not be limited in any way by an overarching theme or idea. When listening to the album, the first thing that stood out to me was the exhale at the end of the first track. Can you share a bit about that creative decision and what it means to you?
It sort of ties into the title of the record, If That Makes Sense. It almost ties into the last question as well a little bit, it’s a whole bunch of thoughts that aren’t necessarily thought through. A whole bunch of loose feelings that I felt strongly for a second, like you write a verse, and there it is. I don’t really go back and change things, lyrically. I became quite married to them. I often don’t have a second verse written for months, and I’ll go and fix that later. To me, calling it If That Makes Sense was like, I don’t know what this is about. You say all these things, there’s this way of discounting what you said… undercutting it a little bit, undermining it, because you don’t… I don’t want necessarily [for] people to hold me to it. I’m not sure if I’ll always stand by it. The breath, in a way, is like [exhales]: here we go. Get ready to hear me word vomit, word salad my way through this record.
Not only is Is That Makes Sense the title of the album, it’s also the final lyric in the final song. How did you decide on “August” as the album closer?
That song is interesting to me, it took the longest to write. It was written over the period of September 2022 and then finished in March of 2024. Nearly a year and a half of slowly tinkering with it, and always having it in the back of my mind. Didn’t have a chorus for ages, until a couple months before finishing it. That last line, that counter melody, I wrote the last day of recording the whole album. I wrote it in the morning on the couch. I had a countermelody in there, a different one, that wasn’t quite working, and my producer was like, I don’t think you should have it if it’s not going to make the song better. I was like,
“alright I’m going to make one that makes the song better.” That’s what came out of it.
The song starts as this… it captures so much for me, the move to LA. It starts with this kind of guilt about leaving family and friends, and a life here, and not feeling like I was being fully honest about my intentions about being in the US for a long time. It ends with predicting a breakup and grappling with a relationship that was about to end. I’m hanging on but I really want to let go. So much of that story is about the move, and long distance, and isolation, all these things that, for me, sum up the record. I cried singing the last lines in the studio, and finished the record with that. I was like, that’s perfect. That’s how we should wrap.
What a perfect ending to the process, a complete emotional release. On the subject of your move to LA, I’m curious how the environment impacts your writing. Do you feel your third album would have been a completely different project if you were elsewhere?
Yeah, I think so. Environment is both, like… emotionally, so much isolation. I moved there with someone, and they moved away, and I didn’t have the friends and consistencies, the stalwarts in my life that had been there for so long here in Perth. That was really weird, and made me reflect a lot and look inwards, trying to figure out where I was without all these reference points in my life. I think there’s also an upside to that, it helped me dig deeper and understand myself better. On the positive side, I worked so much more, I didn’t have so many distractions. It was like, I’m here to make a record. Also, just the opportunity to work with so many amazing people. I felt really inspired and influenced by a lot of great songwriters, just got to bounce ideas off of people so much. It felt like a really fulfilling time. I was always inspired and excited by it.
This is your third album as a band. How did the creative process for If That Makes Sense differ from your previous two records?
The biggest thing was the way time manifested. The amount of time… For me, I would just disappear for a couple of months and go make music, write songs, and then pop up and be like: hey guys, here’s a batch of music. No one was saying, ‘hey this is when we want to go and record,’ it was really just me being like, I want us to be in the studio at this point. The team was like, “wait until you’ve got the songs.” I think for me, I need some sort of timeline. But yeah, I would spend a lot of time with different songwriters for the first time ever, and that was really cool. [I] explored a lot of different avenues and wrote so many songs. There are almost 30 songs that aren’t on the record. Sitting on the cutting room floor somewhere, just a chorus or maybe a whole song, or whatever it is. I think that meant that I really refined what this album’s going to sound like well before we even recorded.
What was it like working with collaborators and different songwriters? How was it going from writing on your own to writing with other people?
It was awful at first, and I really didn’t enjoy it. I felt like… It’s like being naked in public. How do you get that vulnerable with strangers? I also found it really hard… because I felt so vulnerable, I wouldn’t let my guard down fully. I don’t think I was doing very good work. I also found it hard to advocate for an idea I liked if someone else didn’t like it, or the inverse of that, tell someone I didn’t like one of their ideas, which is a really great thing to learn how to do. I think I’ve gotten that.
Still, there’s discomfort around it, when it feels like this line or this idea is me, and you’re telling me you don’t like it. Like, fuck, that’s devastating. So at first that was really hard, but overcoming those things, for me, was like, the greatest thing I think I’ve done in music, for me personally. Feeling like I can walk into a room and be excited, and inspired by people, and not nervous about what we’re going to do and if something good’s going to come out of this.
I think it also helped me collaborate better with my bandmates, too, which is really cool. Because I saw it less as this kind of fucked up type family that’s so emotionally involved, and who I love, we’re all very good friends, and more of like: hey, let’s work together as friends and artists and make the best thing. That was a nice shift, I think.
When it came to writing this record, what did you find yourself inspired by?
I found inspiration in looking back and looking in. I was so… I keep saying isolated, I really did feel like… I’ve said this in a couple of interviews, I felt like my whole past was compressed into this one flat plane. I could see it all so much closer than I’ve seen it before, and that was really interesting. It was almost like time became less linear for me, or my history. I live in Perth, I’m from Geraldton, a small country town, I went to college in another part of the city here… All those parts of my life I often compartmentalize, they’re like another person, the old me. But in LA, it felt like it was all there. My Australian life and my American life, or something like that. That’s where a lot of the songwriting came from, where a lot of the themes came from.
Given how reflection and looking inward played such a vital role in this creative process, what was the most significant thing you learned about yourself throughout the creation of this album?
I think I found a lot more fear in myself and uncertainty than I thought I had, but I came to love that almost. Moving to LA, or being in LA, felt like getting knocked down a peg or two. We kind of thought we had it made here in Australia, we’ve been really fortunate. Going to LA was like, woah, I can learn so much. I can be so much better as a person, as an artist, as a songwriter, whatever it is. There was a lot of acceptance of like, oh, there’s improvement to be made here.
When speaking about this album, you mentioned a really interesting quote that someone once shared with you: ‘art is like stepping off a cliff into blackness and not knowing if someone will be there to catch you.’ What are those moments when you feel like someone caught you? When do you feel most fulfilled or reassured in your work?
That’s a really great question. We are really lucky to have an amazing management team out in LA now. We were self-managed, and Kieran [Lama], our drummer, was our manager. He’s still on the management team. I feel like they, for me, were like… It’s funny, they’re so hands-on, but they’re not like ‘no, not this song, that song’ or whatever, they let us be in terms of what we’re making. Having their validation, and the excitement of them… Sometimes it’s really easy for me to feel like, who knows what’s going to happen with this project, if it’s going to go anywhere. I remember in one meeting, our manager was like, I can’t remember how he phrased it, but he was essentially like: I think this can be the biggest thing ever, I have so much confidence in this thing. Just hearing him have that mentality… They have just been so amazing and supportive of us in that process.
That’s so great to have a team that really believes in you and your work. I wanted to talk a bit about the visuals that go along with this album, specifically the “All The Noise” music video. There are super high-energy scenes, along with some quieter moments, which is a really cool dichotomy. Could you share a bit about the video and the vision behind it?
So much of the credit has to go to Dan Lesser, who is the creative director for a bulk of all the visual work you’ve seen on this record. He’s a good friend of ours, is Australian and American, went to college in the US but grew up in Sydney. I lived with him for a bit last summer and we’ve become really close. He gets us, and is just the most energetic guy. When it came to “All The Noise,” it was our first song back in a long time and we wanted to swing really hard with the visuals. The song is a bit weird, it’s a bit of an outlier on the record. The album’s not necessarily like that, for the most part.
We were like, “let’s do a video that feels also like: woah, what the fuck’s going on here?” The song is referencing this idea of my parents meeting, and me not really knowing what happened, and why it fell apart. My mom’s from a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, the most northern town in Western Australia. My dad worked down in the mines in the middle of nowhere. There’s this desert-y, isolated, spooky feeling about the imagery in the song, I think. There’s this anger and rage in those verses, but then it releases into this confusion and tenderness in the choruses. All those things came together in the video; a lot of it was Dan’s idea. He came to me and was like, this is what the song means to me, or this is what I hear in the song, and here’s how I want to represent it. I think he really nailed it.
It turned out awesome, I think it really encapsulated all of the various emotions present in the song. Reflecting on the album creative process, I was curious if you have a favourite moment or memory, maybe a session that stands out or a moment when something clicked?
There are so many! I think one that was really fun for us was for “Estimated Delivery.” The drum beat in that song, originally, was a Splice sample. Some really old break beat sped up, and it was just repeating on the song. We wanted to make it in the studio, make it our own and change up some of the kick patterns and put fills in things. We didn’t want to use the Splice sample. God bless Splice. But, we basically created it through a whole bunch of ways. Kieran played it live, and then there are two drum machines. There are these robotic MIDI-controlled arms, essentially, like a ball, and a little pin comes out of them. You put one on either side of a high hat, and you send 16ths to it, so it plays perfect 16ths on a high hat, and you can manually choke and open a high hat so it feels natural.
There’s a robot playing drums, there’s two drum machines, and we ran the whole thing through tape, and distorted the fuck out of it. That was really cool. It took us a day to make that beat, or like a day and a half. That was so fun, I think, because we had so much time in the studio relative to anything we’ve done before, we got to explore things like that and really have fun. That was pretty special, because we were all just there. A lot of it was drum machine programming, and none of us can really do that well. So we’re just standing around like, wow, this amazing thing is happening. It was very fun.
It must have been so rewarding, too, for it to finally come together after spending so long working on it. To wrap up, you are about to head out on tour, which track from If That Makes Sense are you most looking forward to playing live?
I think about that all the time, especially right now, because I’m rehearsing. I think for me, it’s between “Through My Teeth” and “Falling Apart.” Maybe “August” as well. But, maybe “Through My Teeth.” I think that is such a fun song. We all play instruments on it. It’s nonstop. We all play all the time, which I think is really cool. I think we’re going to open the set with it, so it’s going to be really fun.
If That Makes Sense is out now.
Interview Brigid Young
Photography Evan Brown
