Marcus Teague; the Single Twin

Single Twin has been the ongoing side-concern of former Deloris front-man Marcus Teague for nearly a decade, an outlet which has only just resulted in a release in the form of the confusingly titled, Marcus Teague. Speaking to Max Easton from his mid-week lunch-break, Teague touched on the record's creation, reception...and that infuriating title.

During his 15 years fronting Melbourne’s Deloris, Marcus Teague began to write as Single Twin; a side project that saw him step back from his collaborative band venture and polished production to embrace the DIY aesthetic afforded by simple and modern technologies. With a minidisc recorder, a laptop, one microphone and a half decade worth of ideas, Teague eventually came to release the serenely beautiful Marcus Teague; a record that sees the meeting of sparse, acoustic arrangements with his own unique lyrical tapestry. Our review published last month described the album as "carefully tailored beauty," the labour taken with its few production elements resulting in a record of warmth and sincerity.  

It seems to have only been with the demise of Deloris in 2010 that Single Twin became more than just a creative outlet. Touring his record nationally in August following its quiet release in May, it’s a record that’s only now finding its way to its audience (interestingly, still receiving reviews almost two months following its release); an extended reception fitting of the considerable time fed into its synthesis.

You’ve just released the Single Twin record that you recorded over six years…that’s a long time to be collating songs and themes into the one album. Over that time, how many versions of you ended up appearing on the record?

I don’t know…that’s a good question. Over the course of all that time I guess it was pretty much ready to go four or five times, because it kept taking so long and I kept writing new songs, and deciding other ones weren’t up to scratch and not liking a mix on another song and kind of fiddling with that. I guess why I kept putting it off also was because I didn’t have enough money to make it. So I’d tell myself that I needed to save some money before I put it out, and in that time you’d come up with a different song or whatever, so it sort of blended into this big, big thing, but I guess the thing that kept it going was that I kept listening to it over and over again and I didn’t get sick of certain songs… I knew they were keepers or that they were done or whatever…I dunno, that’s a bit of a long-winded way to put it. [laughs]

Are you missing things that you’ve cut out now?

Not at all, because I know that they’re still around, so maybe they just weren’t finished or I didn’t like the sound of the guitar or whatever. There was nothing I really hated and ditched forever, it just didn’t do it for me at this time, other ones you were just sick of or you don’t like playing it anymore. The good thing about Single Twin for me is that it can encompass a whole bunch of rejected stuff as well as stuff that I like, or stuff that I think is in a state of not being finished, but I can be happy to put it out anyway.

It’s interesting how cohesive it is as a record then with how inconsistently it came together. Did you spend a lot of time after all that writing trying to wrap it into something that works as an album?

Yeah, I guess so. I guess a lot of it I recorded as I wrote it. So maybe I would come up with a guitar part, like it and record it, and for whatever reason, finish it after 3 minutes and thirty seconds or whatever. So that would determine the length of the song and I’d chop or add lyrics as need be. I think it sounds the way it does and sounds cohesive just because of the way it was recorded, which was just all on garage band, and not having much scope to change it as well. It was recorded mostly all in the same room and all that stuff…so I reckon that’s probably why it sounds the way it does.

I don’t think any of the songs on this album couldn’t belong on a Deloris record on their own…but I guess with Deloris, if you were writing a song that didn’t feel right as a sparse arrangement, you could add those rock elements if it required it. Did you ever feel limited by the scope you set yourself on this record; in that you had to keep them as minimalist, acoustic ventures?

No, I guess that was the idea of the whole project in the first place. To be able to write songs and not imagine them with drum and bass or having overt dynamic shifts or things like that. Some of these songs were written while Deloris was still going as well, there were a couple of ideas that we maybe brought up at a Deloris rehearsal that eventually became Single Twin songs…so there was never really a cross over. I just knew that I wanted to do something where you weren’t wondering why it didn’t have that stuff, that sounds fine on its own. And the whole focus is just the lyrics and the mood behind it, so it doesn’t need any of that stuff I don’t think.

How do you flip that switch between those projects if your mind’s working one way and you’re in the other situation?

Essentially they all start the same, just me on a guitar or whatever. Maybe some I know are going to sound better with a wig out section or I could use other instruments coming in and out or whatever. But the whole basis of Single Twin was that you should be able o play it on your own and acoustic…and that is what the song sounds like. You know, you could have other little bits and pieces, but nothing so dramatic to make you really miss it if it’s not there when you’re seeing it live.

I guess on that note, there are a lot of different sounds and snippets that make their way onto the record. Were they incidental things that found their way into the single mic recordings, or did you have them in mind and seek them out?

I think that came, in hindsight, just from this period. I was made redundant from a job I had at the time and had about a year off, so really I had nothing to do but just kind of think about recording and things like that. It sounds horribly pretentious now, but I had a mini disc recorder and I would just walk around recording stuff. I don’t really know why, but that just fed into the songs, insofar as you spend a whole day at home and you don’t really have anything to do, or anywhere to be except to go and get lunch at some point, and you’re just fiddling around with the recording stuff. You go through phases of throwing everything at it…whether that’s sticking a microphone out the window to record someone singing across the street, or having these minidisc recordings from  walking through a park in Sydney. I don’t know why it makes sense, but it does at the time when you’re going through those experimental phases. I guess that’s all in an aid of trying to match the world sonically that you’re talking about in the lyrics, at least in my head.

The album’s been out about six weeks now and seems to have had a bit of a quiet reception. What sort of hopes did you have as far as how wide-reaching the record would be?

I don’t know, none really. I’ve always been very bad at releasing stuff with Deloris. We always released our stuff for some reason in October or November, of course when no one is talking about it. And this one, even though Remote Control have put it out, it’s essentially just me doing it…they’re not doing any publicity or anything like that, it was just an arrangement with them to get it on iTunes and in shops. So a lot of people found out about the record pretty much after it was out, whereas most media like to review stuff beforehand. I also thought it’s that kind of record, I sort of presume rightly or wrongly that it’s a bit of a word of mouth record and people will get into it after some shows or whatever, it’s not going to be in the window of shops or a triple j feature album or anything.

Yeah, it’s not a hype record at all.

Yeah, and I’m kind of happy with that. It’s a winter record as well, I think. It’ll be what it’ll be, maybe with the upcoming tour it’ll pick up some as well.

How are you feeling having it out there now? With how long you’ve poured over it, was it tough letting it out?

It was tough eventually getting to the point where I could actually put it out. You think about it for so long that it’s pretty easy just to keep thinking about it which is why it took so long, but having said that, I wrote a few of the songs like a month before it came out, so its maybe half six years old and half a couple of weeks old really. I feel relief that it’s out and I like that it allows me to just focus on playing them live now. I’m playing them in a five piece band at the moment and it’s really fun, and of course it doesn’t sound exactly like the record, but I still think it sounds pretty good, so that’s been the focus at least for the last few weeks.

It’s a great record, and it’s the sort of thing that, at least for me, allows for a very personal reaction. Is it enough for you to have a small few relate to it on a personal level, or do you have a yearning for a broader reception?

I guess the way to answer that would be that I want people - either small amounts or large amounts - to have a deep connection with it. I’d rather have a couple of people listen to it when they can’t get to sleep and that makes sense to them, rather than having sell out rooms of people who just like one or two songs before moving onto the next thing. That’s how I engage with my favourite music, and that’s how Deloris was always like as well. We had a couple of tracks on Triple J or whatever, but our core audience was only really 20 or 30 people in the capital cities who really loved it and couldn’t understand why there weren’t more people there. And that’s kind of fine. It’s not a way to make a living or anything, but, I don’t know… it’s important…and it keeps (and kept) us going for a long time.

You’ve hinted in the past that the whole Marcus Teague/Single Twin titling was, at least in part, a sort of an address of identity issues…it’s also an incredible pain in the arse to write about, and anything I’ve read about the album tends to really latch onto that. How much of it was a symbolic intention and how much of it was feeding something for the media to latch on to?

I guess it was a few things. One of them was definitely the confusion; I knew it’d be confusing and I enjoyed that. The nuts and bolts of making the album are you trying to get tracks recorded, where you’re pressing enter on your keyboard a lot, and then you have to go and do the dishes or whatever. There’s not really much myth attached to just recording a record. The classic example is Bon Iver. Years ago he gets his heart broken and goes and records an album in the woods, but he’s still got to power up his computer, and he probably goes through his emails and stuff, but you just don’t hear that mentioned in the story of who Bon Iver is. When I was going through album titles for the record, I thought ‘here’s this thing that I’m trying to be very pure about it; can I write a song that is just a guitar and a voice, with no reverb on the vocals or anything.’ Then if I called it something, when I go and talk about it, am I going to attach some false myth by coming up with a beautiful name? But I thought it’d be sort of funny, but also really true, to call it Marcus Teague. Essentially it’s a solo record, and that’s my name, and just because I play under Single Twin…I dunno…it was poking fun at the idea that the solo artist is this mythical creature. Either under a pretentious name or a guy that dresses like Bob Dylan and lives out of a suitcase or whatever. By calling it under my own name, that sort of gives it some weird myth anyway. I just found it kind of interesting and kind of decided to circumnavigate all the other myths and storytelling on the record and just be really dumb and honest and call it my own name.

I guess it helps that it works with having some relevance with the themes in the songs anyway…

Well yeah…and of course it’s just a guy singing it. A lot of those songs are about really fantastical ideas, but I’m still just trying not to fuck up a G chord or whatever.

Do you not rate yourself that much as a guitarist then?

No, it’s not that…It’s just the vehicle for the song. I don’t go out of my way to learn to be a better guitarist or anything. When I say ‘fucking up a G chord’, I mean like, you’re finger-picking and you’re at the 3 minute mark and you know that if your fingernail is rubbing on the wrong string then you’re going to screw up that take.

You were that careful about your recording?

That’s the thing about recording in garage band is that it’s really difficult to edit anything. When you get to the end, especially with nylon, it’s really sensitive. Its good though, it made me be better…I played those songs from start to finish and it ends up being exactly what it is.

The track-by-track analysis you wrote for Mess and Noise was really interesting, and I suppose in the same way for any piece of writing, it was interesting just seeing how different your intentions were to what I’d taken from the songs. When you went back to write about those songs, had your own ideas about them evolved?

Yeah, I guess so…that’s true. But I’d also say that when writing about it, you still don’t have to be 100% truthful. I wouldn’t say that what I wrote for Mess and Noise is definitive by any stretch. And there’s always ideas…one song can be about a dead friend, but it might also be about the fact that the guy next door has a really loud washing machine and that keeps you up at night. Those sort of things can still coexist and it doesn’t have to be any one way. These things take a long time, and songs end up being about something, but they can also be about the fact that you were at home watching TV and decided to play guitar and you just came up with a riff that you liked. There’s no way to describe the nuts and bolts of it…and you can also just add stuff to it later on if it suits your fancy as well.

So where do you go from here? Is Single Twin likely to be an ongoing thing?

Yeah, I think so…I think Single Twin will always just be what I do at home. I went through this fantasy for a while, about writing an album, but then recording it all in one take just sitting in your kitchen. I feel that Single Twin is just my thing to do and experiment at home…and I feel like I’ll do that forever, cos ill always have a home of some sort and a guitar. I feel pretty serious about playing a lot of shows at the moment, so we’re going to do that for a while. But I dunno, it’s just fun…and I think I’ll always have those ideas to play around with as well. I like the idea of releasing a lot as well, it took so long to do that album, and I still have another 30 or 40 songs that I haven’t finished…so I’m going to put out at least another EP at the end of this year, if not sooner, and maybe another record the next.

Marcus Teague by Single Twin is out now on Remote Control Records, while he tours nationally on the dates listed here.