The Jungle Giants are in the midst of their massive sell-out regional tour, taking to each corner of the nation.
Sam Hales has been a busy musician this past twelve months. As the vocalist, guitarist and primary songwriter of indie pop piece The Jungle Giants, Hales has headed across the globe this year with the both the band and off on his own songwriting adventure, playing Latitude Festival in the UK, hopping on stages through Europe, playing the Formula 1 Grand Prix in Singapore, jumping up in Warrnambool for a special appearance alongside Sycco for the triple j One Night Stand, and bunkering down in L.A for a songwriting session.
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Now currently on a regional Australian tour, Hale has his head down in making mode, pulling together album number five.
“I’ve been focused on writing and recording at the moment which is nice because I have a new track ready to drop very soon which I’m really excited about. I spent about eight weeks in L.A doing some writing and then I was in Europe as well doing some writing and touring as well. Now I’m just back. It’s been a big adventure but now I’m sifting through my thoughts and sifting through my songs and it feels really good at the moment. Life is a little slower at the moment which I’ve been looking forward to,” he says.
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Number five sees Sam Hale hone in on himself, learning about his methods of working, developing his instrumentation and ultimately reawakening his individual self. The L.A writing residency saw Hale collaborate and sink into the world of synths – two areas that are relatively untouched for Hale in his The Jungle Giants role.
“I’m always writing and there is something always on the boil but for me this was about working on things that I’m not good at. I wanted to make some more synth-orientated stuff. I’m pretty synth illiterate – I can play the piano but it’s a whole different kind of world. I wanted to focus on that and build up my skill set and put songs that weren’t necessarily in the synth space into that world and see what happens. It was experimenting,” he explains.
“I was just looking for something different. I’ve never been huge on collaborating with my songwriting and I have a couple of friends there that I met to work with because I thought, ‘now that I have gotten quite deep on the record, now might be the time to bring it to some friends and see what happens’. It was really cool – I think a lot of great things came out of it but I think I learnt a lot about myself which is the best thing to come out of that experience with. I learnt how I like to work and who I like to work with. It was a trip of self-discovery in the end.”
“In the end I realised I like to work solo”, he laughs. “I do like to collaborate with people but when I start to work on something for The Jungle Giants with other people it starts to not sound like The Jungle Giants. It’s like a relationship, you start to take the other person on and for me I’m very sensitive to other people.”
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In the same vein, Hale is also adjusting to a major personal life-change, the single life, and relearning who he is on his own without the reflection of another person penetrating his own personality. This exploration has also injected itself into his songcraft, becoming the backbone to the impending album’s lyrical body.
“This record more than any other has such a heavy lyrical theme that I was leaning on because I had a huge life change because I split with my wife – well we were engaged but were pretty much married because we were together ten years. We’re still really good mates which is a positive thing but part of the lyrical focus is about the phase of having to rediscover yourself after being with someone for so long in so many ways. There’s the day to day, there’s reintegrating with dating life, there’s so many factors of self rediscovery. I had to go through that and every song that I wrote that didn’t touch on that felt fake,” he explains.
“In my mind I thought ‘Okay I just have to toughen up and write about this’ and that was such a good thing for helping with the break up and moving on and the healing effect of music. I’ve really found that in this album. The rediscovery has been really liberating because I’ve been able to really look at myself and discover what I want.”
Whilst the journey is still fresh, Hale has made strides in his recovery, a benefit to both him and fans of The Jungle Giants who will receive the sonic goods soon.
For now you can hear their other tracks live during their regional tour, where they are playing Theatre Royal in Castlemaine on Friday 13 December. Pick up your tickets here.
