Mike Noga, The Balladeer Hunter

With his second album, The Balladeer Hunter, Mike Noga has already found himself widespread acclaim. A far cry from the sounds he created as drummer of Australian rock staples The Drones, Noga promises with The Balladeer Hunter that this is more than a side project.

I get a phone call at 5pm on a Tuesday night. At the other end is Mike Noga, the husky-voiced all-rounder who has used the last two years on break from his role as drummer of The Drones to create his second album The Balladeer Hunter, a startling slice of Australian folk. He’s calling from a violently wettened Melbourne, where the flood warnings he reports to me are embodied by the sheeted sound of rainfall over the phone line. At my end in Sydney, the steady hum of Enmore Road’s traffic and the shrieks of the overhead flight path create this two-ended cacophony of background noise. If this were an interview for The Drones, it’d be somewhat appropriate; their ferocious ganglion of sound, our conflict of nature and transport. But Mike Noga’s not representative of that Australian rock staple tonight. Tonight he’s the relaxed folk chanteuse, making sure we actually had an interview time slotted, joking that he was just checking to see if I was doing okay.

“I’m currently in this weird in-between phase where I’m done with the album and not yet ready to tour,” Noga comments, “So at the moment, I’m just kind of sitting at home behind a computer all day, working on something or other.”

After dusting off The Balladeer Hunter, Noga and his band were invited to tour Europe by alt-country juggernauts Band of Horses, an invitation that sent the barely formed band into the depths of Europe for a series of massive support slots.

“It went over really, incredibly well,” Noga enthuses when the subject’s breached, “more so than we could have ever imagined. Band of Horses are huge over there, I had no idea. So we were playing to these massive audiences of at least 2, 000 people every night. And I guess it’s something with European audiences compared to ours, and I’m guilty of it too, but at home, when some support band is out playing the Enmore or wherever, the whole audience just talks over the top of them if they’re some no name band from the States or something. But on this tour, we’d get up on stage and mumble something about being from Melbourne, Australia and everyone would come rushing to the front to listen. You know, we sold out of merch in the first couple of weeks, we’re signing autographs for people…it was dream come true kind of stuff.”

“We’d never played the songs live before, so it was pretty nerve racking…we kind of did it all backwards, because now we’re touring Australia playing these tiny venues that we’re not sure people are even going to turn up to. I got a lot of confidence out of them though…I found my inner lead singer.”

The Balladeer Hunter is a gorgeous record, the second that Noga has penned with his name on the cover. His first album Folk Songs, released under the Mike Noga & The Gentlemen of Fortune moniker, was a sleeper debut; lost to the public by circumstance.

“The first album I put out, I’d only just released it when I joined the Drones, and literally a month later we left for a six month tour of Europe. So it never really got a chance to do anything. With [The Balladeer Hunter], it just worked out that we were taking some time off, that Gareth [Liddiard, Drones frontman] was putting out his own solo album, and I’d had plenty of time to think about it beforehand. I’d had some of these songs ready for a few years and had been thinking of it for a long time too, up to the order the songs would appear and the artwork and everything.”

The Balladeer Hunter is a far cry from the work Noga is known for, trading the electric guitars and yelps of The Drones for something much more traditional. Violins take hold whenever a harmonica is absent, with anything from Irish folk to feathered blues tinging the acoustic stylings stripped from his old-time influences.

“There’s really two sides to the music I like, and while I’m playing that rock ‘n’ roll stuff with The Drones, I’m writing the songs that appeared on this record. I listen to classical music and a lot of the old classics like Dylan, Springsteen and Neil Young, I don’t listen to much of the sort of stuff I play with The Drones.”

“What I really wanted from this record was for it to have a sound that was kind of timeless, that I’d think people would listen to in a few years,” he continues, “there are albums I really like now, like the Arcade Fire record I think is very good, but I don’t think I’m going to pull it out to listen to in ten years. Too many new records are so large and overproduced, but I’ll always be pulling out Neil Young albums to listen to, they have that timeless quality. And when I went back to listen to them to find out what common thread there was between them, they were all very simple and people made mistakes…someone would pass over a bum note or something, and I think they don’t date as much because of it. So with this record I had the songs written, we went into the studio, recorded them very fast, and it has the sound that I was going for.”

By no means is The Balladeer Hunter a slapdash record. Its raw recording philosophy not at all reflected in the tight and metred playing that the album features. Noga acknowledges the instant comparison his album will receive to Gareth Liddiard and The Drones, and while he doesn’t seem too fazed by it, he rightly notes that they’re essentially incomparable. Which brings us to how and if he’s going to fit in all these projects.

“This is definitely not a side project for me,” he explains, “I enjoy this and think about this just as much if not more so than The Drones. I’ve already started writing for the next album, and you know, we’ll get back in the studio to put out a Drones record some time at the end of this year to be released early next year…but it won’t really change much for me. We tour so sporadically these days that there’s no reason for me not to keep doing my solo thing.”

In our recent interview with Gareth Liddiard (which you can read here,) he passed over a comment on the poor record sales of his solo debut ‘Strange Tourist;’ "Fuck all people know who I am, and I know that cos I’m looking at the record sales." Noga on the other hand wouldn’t have a clue.

“I don’t really care about record sales at all, I mean I don’t know what they’re like at the moment, I haven’t checked or anything - I guess I’ll know when a cheque arrives in the mail in a few months time for thirteen dollars - the important thing to me is that the record’s out there. I can look back sometime and say that I put out a record that I liked. It would be pretty nice if people came out to the shows though.”

Mike Noga’s triumphant second record is available now through Other Tongues, while he sets out for a national tour throughout May on the dates found here.