South Australian indie-Americana band Sturt Avenue have released their debut album ‘How Do You Think It Should
Be?’. Catalogued across these eleven tracks is a true account of an awkward transition to adulthood, complete with love, nostalgia, sorrow, heartache, joy, yearning and profound happiness. The album is infused with indie-folk, Americana, country, rock and blues sounds, and draws influence from Conor Oberst, The Mountain Goats and Big Smoke.

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‘How Do You Think It Should Be?’ was an exercise in collaboration. The title was suggested by our bassist Isaac, and I have been in love with it since he first brought it up. For me (Bryn Soden, songwriter and lead vocalist of Sturt Avenue), it has several layers of meaning; on one level, it speaks to building a life from considered intentions, on another, it reads as an indictment of blind criticism without any alternative suggestions. The reason I chose it as the album title, though, is that it is in essence the question I was asking each of the band members as we brought these songs together. While the lyrics and chord progressions were written by me, when it came to the process of turning them into actual real-life songs, my goal was to give everybody in the band the space to do what they do best. I wanted this record to feel like a band record rather than a singer-songwriter one, and I feel that, by giving my very talented friends some space to flex their skills, they in turn helped me to create something that is greater than the sum of its parts.

The songs themselves were written over the course of several years, and they represent a number of different turning points in my life. I find it difficult to engage with the songwriting process unless I am writing about something real that I have experienced and am keen to reflect upon. As a result, catalogued across these eleven tracks is a true account of an awkward transition to adulthood, complete with love, nostalgia, sorrow, heartache, joy, yearning, and so many moments of profound happiness, gone for now but not forever. While the impact of all of these emotions may fade with time, they still hold their meaning through the flow of the years, and so each song is a record of a real emotion, a perfectly contained moment in time preserved in the amber of the sweet melodies my beautiful friends helped me to craft.

‘How Do You Think It Should Be?’ was a labour of love. The first piece of the puzzle was put in place back in February 2019, when myself and Bryce Lehmann (drummer) headed into the now defunct Holy Roller Studios in Prospect, SA, to record drum takes with Patrick Lockwood for most of the tracks that appear on this album. At this point, many of the songs were a couple years old already (the oldest I believe being Bell Curve Blues, originally written back in 2015), but had only been performed by the band a handful of times.

The intention behind this session was to have the ground-work laid to overdub the rest of the band’s contributions over the course of the next few months in the home recording space that I had set up in my bedroom. This space consisted of a single hard-working old laptop generously donated by an ex, a large sound-absorbing booth built from dumpster-dived carpet and hessian with the assistance of my godfather Bradley (a big shout out should go to the carpet store employee who let me jump into a dumpster full of rusty razor blades to retrieve the carpet scraps I used to line this), and a 4-input USB audio interface from the good folks at Steinberg.

In terms of mics, the hardest worker of my collection was probably the Rode NT2-A, a beautiful condenser microphone which was used for everything from vocals to room mics for instruments to amp mics. A shout-out is also warranted to the pair of Shure SM-57s and the SM-58 supplied by my dad John (backing vocalist and lead + slide guitar player for the band), which he had purchased back in the 90s to record his old band ‘Spinning John’.

As can possibly be surmised from the details of this exceedingly DIY setup, the overdub process was fraught with difficulties. Latency issues cropped up all over the shop, and many takes needed to be comped to achieve the versions that were landed on in the end. Any practiced recording engineer would probably blush to see the project files from this album. While I mostly opted to work harder instead of smarter, and stick to the original approach to get these tracks finished, things changed when the band decided that one of the newer songs from our set ‘Sirens’ deserved to be on the album.

To record this particular track, we again enlisted the assistance of Patrick Lockwood at Holy Roller, but this time opted to live-track drums, bass, acoustic guitar, and slide guitar at the same time. Though more takes were required to achieve the desired outcome, the rest of the recording process for this track was then made infinitely smoother as a result, and the finished product (perhaps the highest-energy song on the album) has a much more live-in-the-room feel as a result.

While the band opted to finish the rest of the tracks with the initial approach of overdubbing each layer, I have personally sworn off the process for future Sturt Avenue releases, as at this stage it has consumed far too much of my life to subject myself to again.

The album was mixed by myself and our dear longsuffering friend Patrick Lockwood. While he originally worked out of a space in Holy Roller Studios, he records and mixes music under the moniker Electric Ant Studios. He also operates a very nice jam space in Adelaide if you’re in a band from these parts, and you’re looking for a place to crank out some tunes.

We first worked with Pat on the Bromham recordings (keyboard player Dave’s thirteen-piece folk band) and had gotten a sense of his excellent ear and impeccable ability to translate vague musician speak into meaningful adjustments to the mix. Pat is an expert at taking an ambiguous statement like “Can we make the guitars sound a little edgier?” and finding the perfect plug-in to create the sound you were so ineffectually trying to describe. While I can take a little of the credit for things like panning and levels, it was Pat who made the mixes for ‘How Do You Think It Should Be?’ actually sound any good. We are forever in his debt.