Aaron Frazer

Soul music is powerful - you’d be hard pressed to find any artist that isn’t influenced by it in some way or another.

Aaron Frazer’s debut record, Introducing..., reads like a textbook on the soul superstars that have come and gone. It’s the work of someone with a profound appreciation for a bevy of different genres, and it’s very immediate that understanding Aaron’s lifelong appreciation for soul music is integral to the listening of Introducing.... Perhaps surprisingly, Aaron also expresses an admiration for a variety of Aussie soul and funk. “Surprise Chef, Nai Palm and Hiatus Kaiyote - I love those guys,” he says. “Around like 13, I heard The Cat Empire for the first time, and I loved it, hearing a contemporary band that had horns and was soulful, but also very irreverent and had some hip-hop. They’re a great band!” Introducing is a reflection of all these influences, plus some; “I love so many records, so many different artists, so many different genres, that I could spend the whole day talking about. “This album felt like an opportunity to be eclectic, and not trying to put myself in a box, and for other people and listeners to not put themselves in a box” These old school vibes didn’t end with the songwriting, creating a traditional and true-to-form environment being something important to both Frazer and the album’s producer, Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys. “Some of those old recordings just sound so weird, so wonky. If you’re just going about things in a sterile, by the book manner, you’re gonna be like ‘why doesn’t my record sounds like that!?’” Aaron laughs. “For a lot of the recording and producing, there was a lot of experimentation of things like; ‘put the microphone on the ground, or under the drum set, let’s see what that sounds like’. Or what happens if we crank the preamp up way too much, let’s see what that sounds like,” he details. “Especially on drums, no more than three microphones generally, and just doing other weird things, I love the super fancy microphones, but I also think that getting some old Radio Shack mics, using some old ElectroVoice and just seeing what it sounds like, that’s my favourite stuff. “ Something that’s common among those older, traditional albums that influenced Aaron is recording as a group, not isolated, as is so common today, to get that authentic, classic soul sound. “This was the first one I’ve done that was the most ‘at once’, prior to this, with Durand Jones and The Indications (Frazer’s band) we’d just record the basics together.” This group sentimentality something that’s of the utmost importance to Auerbach, something he likes to implement in all the albums he produces. “I think the Auerbach method these days kinda reminds me of a barn raising, you get a bunch of people together, then get this giant structure together, when it might usually take you a month.” There’s no doubt that Dan Auerbach has had a lasting impact on modern music, working with artists from a plethora of different genres. Aaron details that his relationship with Dan was definitely exciting, but a long time coming. “He called me while I was making some dinner, and he was like ‘Hey, is this Aaron? This is Dan Auerbach.’ And I was like ‘oh shit!’,” he laughs. “It was very surreal, but on the other hand, we’d had all these kinds of strange parallels in some of our musical journeys, in terms of our listening, and our influences”. The ensuing work they did was massively collaborative, with most of the album being penned in each other’s company. “We wrote all the songs together, some were in varying stages of completion, like ‘If I Got It’, I had the chord progression, and I had this hook I wanted, and he helped me fill in the blanks.” Aaron says. For these sessions, Dan went far and wide and got together some of the best session players and writers to ever grace the world music stage. It was a mix of “old timers”, and “young cats” as Aaron put it. These “old timers” were legends like L Russell Brown, who’s worked with acts like Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons, Frank Sinatra and Donny Osmond. “He loved my vocals, which was very flattering. He understood where I was coming from, and that’s hard, it’s hard to write for other people’s voices, that’s a gift in itself. But falsetto, it’s a separate instrument and I love what we came up with.” Auerbach also wrangled the legendary Memphis Boys, who had stories upon stories about working with some of the soul and funk trailblazers of the past, which Aaron says was an unforgettable experience. “What I learned is just if you listen, talk a little less, listen a little more, the stories just come tumbling out of them. (Keyboardist) Bobby Wood, would just walk up to you and be like ‘I was in the studio with Aretha Franklin’ and tells you some crazy shit!” he laughs. To Aaron, it was important to have these “old timers” and “young cats”; people from all walks of life, to get a range of views and opinions. “That’s what I tried to cultivate when I produce my own records with The Indications, just getting a range of perspectives and experiences.”

BY BENJAMIN LAMB

Introducing… is out Friday January 8 via Dead Oceans/Easy Eye Sound.