Stormcellar - Hired Guns & Borrowed Glory (2012)

Hired Guns was recorded on location at Bawley point in NSW, a sleepy coastal surfing town 5 hours South of Sydney. We recorded the album live, in house set in a native rainforest, about 1km back from the beach. You could hear the distant susurrus of the waves crashing at night, when the recording had finished for the day.
The location was two houses joined together, with a big hall at one end and a kitchen and sleeping accommodation at the other. The recording room was large, light, airy and principally wooden construction.
On our previous album, Carls Chair, we had recorded completely live on the porch of an old farmhouse in Cumnock NSW, and we wanted to continue the same live feel, but with more control. We lucked out on the elements and rain last time and we weren’t game to push our luck twice.
We started with the drum sound, working on the principal that they were the only thing that couldn’t be replaced in the studio. We put the drums, bass, and guitars in the big room, put the guitar amps out in the corridor sealed them inside the Reactors (two sound insulated wooden crates we built for this purpose) and put me at the other end of the house with a wireless headset to hear the band and sing into the super expensive Mike our friend R.O had lent us.
We recorded for a week on location and then brought it into Goose Studios in Leichhardt, the haven of our recording engineer and producer for the project, Pete Doherty in the inner west of Sydney (Little Italy). 6 months worth of Tweaking later, we’d added Fiddle from Fettler (Mike Kerin, ex Slim Dusty Band, Flying Emus, Righteous Prannies), backing vocals and harmonies from the lovely Southern Belles (Jo Fitzgerald, Kate Doherty and Mika Handa), random sound effects, Banjo, Low G Harp (almost a sax) and released it before we ‘fixed’ it to death.
Hired Guns & Borrowed Glory spans the styles they’re now starting to call ‘Ozicana’ -it’s almost but not quite blues, almost but not quite country, almost but not quite folk. Hired Guns pinches shamelessly from all the styles we love, with songs that we’d been playing live for a year before the recording (eg: same old blues) and some that were made up on the spot (eg:hard times).