Tenuous Reign

Forming in 2008 from the ashes of prog-rock band Glasshouse, Drawn From Bees have since spent their time exploring the world of art-rock, drawing inspiration from cinema and literature to create thematically driven works. Their latest album The May King & His Paper Crown sees them at their most literary with a narrative-driven concept album, exploring love, loss and the fragility of power. Dan James speaks self-deprecatingly down the line about his influences and the band's current tangent joking, “that's the long answer – I don't think I give short answers”, but his responses showcase the thoughtfulness that goes into their music. When asked what prompted the move to a concept album, James responds with enthusiasm.

“Easy answer is we're basically book nerds and we love reading books and all that sort of stuff. But the more complicated answer is we're trying to create a collection of stories and feelings and concepts that are alien to us,” James tells. “Because, I mean, the amount of times I've read books and I've been completely involved in something... like, for example The Count Of Monte Cristo, when the son of the Commandant is about to have a duel with the Count. I remember reading that book and completely visualising this and going, 'This is like nothing I've ever felt before' because the situation is completely alien to me. I mean, if I wrote about my own experiences, after about five songs I think I've pretty much done the entire gamut of my emotional possibilities. So the idea of doing a concept album is just to push us out and challenge us a little bit more to try and create something new. And rather than try to limit yourself to your experience you limit yourself to your imagination, which is really… I mean your imagination can go as far as you want it to go.”

The May King... is intended as a complete story, rather than a collection of songs. A lot of work went in to the structure of the album and James states that, “It was a very sort of carefully planned journey from beginning to end. I think we wrote nearly thirty songs for this record and we chose the songs that worked for the flow of the record.” So how does the band transform that into a live experience and still include their older tracks into the mix?

“Everything flows, in this case, from the narrative,” James explains. “In the sense that there are going to be two acts and we chose songs specific to suit the narrative. I think the first act is: Boy comes into town and boy falls in love with girl. Town is run by tyrant. Tyrant is in love with the girl as well, so the tyrant kicks the boy out. Boy goes away, raises an army, comes back conquers the town and installs himself as king and wins the girl. And that's the first act,” James pauses for breath and continues. “And then the second act is: The factions in the town that didn't want him attempt to assassinate him and he's saved by the general of his army, who's his best friend and they continue to rule. And as they continue to rule they start to realise that they're conquerors and that they have no idea how to rule a town. So the town… the people start to starve, there are riots in the street and eventually the factions come to his best friend the general and the best friend ends up being convinced to do a Brutus-like assassination of his friend, in order to bring the balance back.”

The literary influence is pretty clear there, but the band is apparently inspired by all kinds of media.

“Books, films, you name it,” James states. “We're constantly sitting around talking about this stuff. There's one where we drew on, it's called Maniacs, and it was... we did an allegory of Alice In Wonderland but applied the Tea Party to the tea party. And talked about these mad hatters who are running a tea party and they're the maniacs that have come to take the planet back. And so yeah, we just sit around and talk about the nerdiest stuff. I think we probably spend more time in my studio drinking tea and talking shit then we do recording.” He gives a few more examples and then continues. “And we just sit there and it's almost like we're just sitting at some sort of X-Files-like board just going, 'What about this?' and we're just throwing ideas around and having fun with these narratives. And we're drawing on everything, there's no particular style. We draw on a television ad, we draw on a theme that's… that's one of the bonuses I think of moving into the imaginative scope rather than constantly going, 'Well I'm an 18-year-old, I go to clubs a lot, that's what I do'. Where are you going to go with that? After you've just sung the, 'I just want to dance' song, what else are you going to sing about?”

Drawn From Bees received a touring grant from the Contemporary Music Touring Program to promote the latest album which has let them get a lot more creative with their live show, bringing a mini-orchestra, narrators, projections and extra musicians into the mix. It's not just the new possibilities that make the grant exciting though.

“The biggest one is that we can achieve [the tour] without going broke for a change,” James exclaims excitedly. ”That's pretty much a huge one. I mean even some of the larger bands that we're friends with who tour a lot, they're still not making very much money out of touring and shows, so… even just moving four or five musicians around is an incredibly expensive proposition. Before you hit a venue you've spent easily $1000 on flights, if not more. So being able to move your band around and play in these great venues like Yah Yah's in Melbourne or Oxford Arts [Factory] in Sydney, it's a difficult proposition to do without help.”

The new instrumentation is exciting for the band though, and it's not just the new album that will benefit. “There's a lot of songs in our back catalogue that we have really wanted to do [with strings and brass]” James elaborates. “And the Powerhouse show in particular enables us to pretty much put no limitations on what we can do live. I've always loved the Wayne Coyne attitude of: you put new things on stage, or put things on stage to create a bit of chaos or an unknown quantity, and that makes everything much more exciting. And for the band, it gives us a whole different lease on it. I mean, strings and trumpets and things aside, we've got a keyboardist, we've got a third guitarist. We won't be able travel with most of this, so there will be a cut-back version for the travelling but as long as we're in Brisbane, we're able to do what the hell ever we want.”

Drawn From Bees will be playing the following shows:

Thursday 25 October - Brisbane Powerhouse, Brisbane QLD
Saturday 3 November - Grotto Fest, Marburg QLD
Saturday 17 November - Pure Pop Records, Melbourne VIC
Saturday 17 November - Yah Yah's, Melbourne VIC
Thursday 22 November - Beach Hotel, Byron Bay NSW
Friday 23 November - The Venue, Townsville QLD
Saturday 1 December - Buddha Bar, Cairns QLD