The Vanns Through The Wall

Rebecca Varidel
31st Oct 2019

The Vanns kicked off their debut album tour last weekend at the Zoo - Hidden Lanes Festival and save the best for last when they hit our hometown all ages at The Metro Sydney 7 December. Somehow I managed to temporarily prized Cam away from keys, guitar and a real bed, to grab the scoop on the five inspirations for the album Through The Wall

Love (or lack thereof) It’s hard to provide a list of key inspirations for the album without including the fundamental theme of the whole thing, which is that it is a relationship/break up record. It is, for the most part, about two relationships and two break-ups, which in reality, were completely independent of one-another, but were morphed into one by Jim and I via co-writing to create a SUPER BREAK-UP that rampages mercilessly through the city of love throwing buses and crushing buildings

Esoteric references The album has a few of them. There’s a line in the song ‘Thieves’ that goes: “nothing at all, nothing at all, nothing at all”, and I just wanted to go on record saying that yes, as in the Ned Flanders quote. There’s also a SpaceX shoutout in ‘Red Eye Flight’ (I was reading Elon Musk’s biography at the time) as well as a few mentions through-out the album of the song ‘Tell Me Something Good’ by RUFUS and Chaka Khan.

Breaking Bad Whilst we were in Melbourne recording the bulk of the record, we were sleeping on a living room floor for the best part of a month. It was during this period of time we realised that an engaging TV series could help to take our minds off of some pretty uncomfortable living conditions. Not that any of the lyrics on the record were inspired by Breaking Bad, but who knows how the excitement of getting home every night to get into the next episode could have affected a guitar take?

Collingwood For the last two weeks of recording, it was just Oscar (Dawson), Jim and I, working in a small studio room in Collingwood we nick-named ‘The Sack’, due to the ceiling and walls of the studio being festooned with burlap sacks. Jim and I rented a groovy Airbnb a short walk from this studio for these two weeks (we had finished Breaking Bad by this point and we were pretty off sleeping on the floor). I guess I’d consider Collingwood an unquantifiable inspiration, but I don’t see how the elation we felt from getting a real bed in a cool suburb didn't make it to record.

Wanting to make an album Inspiration is a weird thing. I find it hard to pinpoint exactly where it comes from and which parts of creativity it directly affects. As simple as it sounds, the main inspiration for making the album was realising that ‘The Vanns’ had released a bunch of EP’s and singles in the past, and everyone in the band felt like it was time. We decided we were going to make an album before any songs were written. That decision inspired all of the songs on the album.