Hopetown

"At a certain point in a song there's a moment called The Golden Curtain, which just opens it up and takes you the rest of the way with a big smile on your face"
- Dave Dobbyn, June 2000

With Hopetown, his first album for a new era, Dave Dobbyn has come full circle. The album maintains the emphatic sense of place of The Islander. Its joyous spirit and rhythms of the album go back to The Optimist. But the beginnings of Hopetown go back even further, to when Dobbyn first got excited about making music. There's an eclectic bunch of atmospheres on the album, he says. Hopetown reflects the breadth of his musical apprenticeship. At school, we loved diverse stuff, from the Velvet Underground to Bing Crosby. We loved Motown, Burt Bacharach, Brian Eno. The studio experiments of Revolver and Sgt Pepper. The 'we' is Dobbyn and his co-producer on Hopetown, Ian Morris: his oldest friend and musical collaborator. Last year, the pair rekindled their bond for The Definitive Dave Dobbyn collection. They revisited their first hit 'Be Mine Tonight' and with 'Madeleine Avenue' paid tribute to their old stamping ground, Glen Innes. (Dobbyn and Morris went to school together, and formed their first band, Th' Dudes. Morris produced DD Smash's debut album Cool Bananas and later joined the band.)

We instantly picked up where we left off. As if there's not a lot of water under the bridge and in the long term, there isn't. It was really good to have that kind of security. I knew we could give the songs the extra dimension of the music we were influenced by: Lou Reed, Tom Waits, straight-ahead soul music. They worked together in the same way they had on 'Be Mine Tonight' over 20 years ago: Dobbyn bringing his talent for melodies, lyrics and endless ideas to Morris's domain. The studio. Together they worked on arrangements. We were a real production team. I had total trust in him, and that we could embrace the influences we had and celebrate them on the record.

Ian had the bigger picture on what we needed, which was great & it meant I could stand back. I'm always writing right up to the end, changing my mind every day. But the songs seemed to write and arrange themselves. Once we had the groove and the structure, everything else seemed to fall into place.

The early sessions for the rhythm tracks took place at Radio New Zealand's Helen Young studio. As Dobbyn taught the songs to drummer Wayne Bell and bassist Mark Hughes, he could also enjoy playing the studio's Steinway grand piano. This had a significant impact on Hopetown. Dobbyn's love for the instrument first expressed on 'Guilty' has intensified in recent years, as he has been playing it every day, wanting to become as conversant on it as he is playing guitar or singing.

The rest of the album was put together at Morris's own studio. With no clock ticking, it meant the spirit of spontaneity and experimentation was maintained. "You've got to push your own boundaries when you make a record, otherwise you won't rate it yourself, and no one will rate you or you'll just get too safe and cosy."

This enabled the introduction of unusual instruments including a flugelhorn, sitar, and hurdy-gurdy or diverse new rhythms such as Latin, African and the blues, all through the characteristic Dave Dobbyn filter. "In the middle of recording, this hurdy-gurdy arrived, a beautiful instrument made by some mad luthier boffin. Things like that gave us a sense of playfulness and naivety. We knew we could do all sorts of things: get orchestral if we wanted, use a horn section. We didn't have to confine ourselves to a four-piece band"

Hopetown has a celebratory feel to it after the introspection of The Islander. "It has a lot to do with the mood you're in" says Dobbyn.

"You want to have a good time when you listen to a record. Serious singer/songwriter stuff is all very well, but not for two albums in a row! I trusted the bond that I'd built up with the band, and that is carried through on the album. I've turned a corner since The Islander: to be open to the good side of people and not get too navel-gazing. In your forties you become resolute on a few things. Nothing really bothers you, and you're not afraid of expressing sentiment. Positive sentiment, rather than the lonesome melancholy of The Islander. There's a lot more imagination on this record. There were no insecurities. I just threw the ideas into the air and they came back as songs."

The album contains many of the rhythmic grooves Dobbyn has swallowed up over the years, and managed to give them a flow. This includes rhythms from an African album he found, the pared-back reggae of Ernest Ranglin (who was on a Womad bill with Dobbyn), the gospel of Leon Russell, funk of Doctor John and jazz of Art Tatum.

"I've always loved jazz since I was white-haired, Afro-ed Dude, staying at our manager Charley Gray's place, listening to his huge collection of bebop, his soul records by James Brown and Bobby Bland. Hopetown has a freshness that reminds me of an album I made years ago, The Optimist. Making this, I spent a lot more time listening than making a noise. There was a wisdom to that."

For all the diversity on Hopetown, it also contains the straight-ahead rock 'n' roll that has made Dobbyn songs such as 'Bliss' New Zealand favourites. Songs like that are public property. It's a little rock tanty, and a couple of songs on this come from the same place: 'My Kind of People' and 'She Rocks'. You've got to have something you can howl, something you can play air guitar to.

Last year, Dobbyn met one of his idols, Jimmy Webb: writer of songs such as 'Wichita Lineman' and 'Galveston'. He has always admired the ease with which some writers give their music a firm sense of place. It was present on The Islander and even more overtly on 'Madeleine Avenue'. "That song was perfect for it: I had something valid to say about it, and it was part of my make-up musically."

Hopetown is a statement in more ways than one. The name captures the atmosphere of the album and it's a play on the Auckland landmark Hopetoun Bridge which links the CBD with Ponsonby and Grey Lynn.

"There's a sense of vertigo when you're on it. Underneath is a motorway going in the opposite direction. Meanwhile you're flying into town, with an amazing view on each side. In a setting like that, there's some architecture you can relate to. There's so much more you can evoke in a song when there's a place to hang it on. I love that, it really excites me."

Just as The Definitive Dave Dobbyn made New Zealanders realise how crucial his songs were to them, its release was cathartic for Dobbyn himself. "There was 20 years of music there. It was like flinging open the doors for me. I thought, these are the possibilities, now here I go."