All In The Mind

The premise is so simple, yet the example used to explain it gives you an insight into the place from which the music of Brisbane four-piece Drawn From Bees comes from. It is more intellectual than visceral, though that doesn't mean it's any less powerful and evocative rock'n'roll entertainment. As singer, songwriter and guitarist Dan James tells it, the idea comes from the potential limitations of method acting, which assumes that you can take your own experiences and use them to imbue your acting performance with the emotions felt in your personal experience. The problem is that all too often, our experiences are limited.

“Bands do this thing,” James continues, “which everyone does, which is drawing on your own experiences to create music. As a band, we always thought, 'Wouldn't it be it be really cool if we started creating these weird fantastical imaginative stories, just letting our imaginations run wild rather than do what everyone else does... which is, when you're eighteen you're talking about singing and dancing in a club and when you're older you talk about life coming to an end or something like that?',” he laughs.

“So hopefully, we're a pretty imaginative bunch and the idea is we don't want to get restricted. Plus we're all book nerds – my favourite book of all time is still The Count Of Monte Cristo.”

It's the tales of the Brothers Grimm and Lewis Carroll's Alice stories rather than Dumas that are probably more immediately evoked by the songs that make up Drawn From Bees' new album, The May King And His Paper Crown, replete as it is with dead children, ghosts, homicidal maniacs and all manner of scary fairytale archetype stuff.

“Oh yeah, there's a dark side to humanity,” James admits, “but I sort of hope as well that imagination can trigger concepts that are totally new experiences. Like to me that entire Count of Monte Cristo scenario is something that I could never have hoped to ever possibly experience, yet when I was reading it, I felt it as it was.”

The album is certainly meant to be a complete and immersive listening experience, though necessarily a concept album. The cohesiveness is something James puts down to taking the time to really hone in on what they wanted to say.

“This is the longest we've taken to make a record,” James explains. “We took one year to make it. Our first collection of records, we wrote four records in two years [two EPs, a mini-album and an album], so this is the first time we've taken a bit more time and really spent the time making sure that it's cohesive. Even to the point where I think there are maybe ten to twelve songs that we didn't end up using that are still floating around at the moment but that we didn't feel fitted with this collection of songs.

“To an extent, sometimes I like to think of everything as a record, not as a five-minute short-attention-span sort of thing. To us, when we put everything together, we're always thinking about the record; we're not thinking about whether we can do some radio stuff or anything like that. We're thinking about what we can do to push ourselves into creating something that is very unique. So the intentional journey is just to get lost in a collection of fantastical stories, a full journey record, not just, 'I like that songs'.”

Drawn From Bees have even gone ahead and pressed up The May King And His Paper Crown on vinyl as well as CD, though James found the limitations of vinyl demanded the dropping of a few tracks, which he found quite traumatic.

Drawn From Bees will be playing the following shows:

Saturday 6 October - Oxford Art Factory, Sydney NSW
Wednesday 10 October - Jet Black Cat Records, Brisbane QLD
Friday 12 October - The Loft, Gold Coat QLD
Saturday 13 October - The Spotted Cow, Toowomba QLD
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