Eskimo Joe’s Kav Temperley
Has Embraced the Machines On New Album
By James Murphy
On October 19, Eskimo Joe front man Kav Temperley releases his second solo album, Machines of Love and Grace, which features the latest single ‘Last Of The Wine’. According to Kav, the track’s title features no subliminal messages or hidden meanings regarding his band’s mega-hit, ‘Black Fingernails, Red Wine’ but rather drew inspiration from the COVID-19 pandemic, and his mother-in-law.
In 2020, just as the world began to shut down, Kav Temperley and his wife returned from recording their HatJam pocast in the United States. Kav was struck down by a mysterious illness, which was potentially COVID, but the world was still devoid of RATs and PCRs, so he was unsure. He isolated from his family, to be safe, and engaged in conversations through the window with them. One such conversation, with his mother-in-law, inspired him to write ‘Last of the Wine’.
“She had worked in women’s refuges for years” Kav explains, “and she kind of brought up the idea that this lockdown period is not going to be great because there’s a whole lot of people who probably are locked down with their abusers and somebody needs to talk about it and it should be you.”
“I started to kind of muck around with it, and I started to come from a really personal place. I was just thinking about that moment, when you’re there with someone and it might not be going great, but then you have a glass of wine and you’re laughing and so things aren’t so bad and you drink more wine and then suddenly it starts to go a bit bad because all the demons come out.”
“ I also wanted to offer this idea of hope. I just imagined this person who was in a complex relationship, but they would have the glass of wine to feel that feeling of the heaviness lifting, they would look out and just imagine the person they love, thinking about them across the other side of town.”
Throughout his career, Kav has used his platform to contribute to political causes, including water conservation and closing the gap but he has always kept his songwriter devoid of overt political messages.
“This is no disrespect to friends of mine. I mean, one of the collaborations I have on the record is with John Butler and he’s amazing as far as his activism goes; he puts his money where his mouth is”, Kav says.
“On the other side, I’ve always thought that music and art sit outside of that. It should be a mirror for people to look at and actually get the reflection back, which might be ugly sometimes but I think it shouldn’t be a political thing.”
“It’s fucking hard because artists by default are always going to lean to the left, they’re always going to be humanitarians, they’re always going to be, speaking up for people who don’t have a voice and that’s just how it is. So I don’t know if you can ever remain in that place.”
“My biggest passion is leaning into the story writing of songwriting and I also believe that once you write these stories, they stop being about you and they start to become about the people who are listening to them.”
Some of Kav’s earliest Eskimo Joe tunes were autobiographical, he says, but conversations with fans quickly shifted his approach to his artistry.
“People would come to me and be like, ‘Oh, I love that song, ‘Liar’ because me and my wife, we do this thing and then she burns her feet by the fire. And I remember really early on saying, ‘Oh, no, that’s not what the song’s about. It’s actually about this, this and this’, Kav recalls.
“You can see the smile start to fade from their face because you’ve killed their whole entire storyline, which means so much to them. And that because it’s their song.”
Similarly, while some musicians take offence when fans get the phones out of their pockets and start filming during gigs, Kav has once again taken the fans’ perspective into account.
“In the past, if you were in a conversation with someone and they pull out a phone, you’d be like, `well, I’m boring because you’re clearly more interested in what’s going on the phone’. Now, if you’re at a gig and people pull out their phone and start filming, you know that you’re doing something right, that this is a special moment.’
Instead of raging against the changing times, Kav has adapted and integrated technology. As well as being a producer for emerging artists and a podcast host, he has even launched a series of NFTs.
“I’ve written this original song which only exists on this NFT and it’s the same song rewritten seven different times in seven keys. The guy who I worked on the artwork for the record with has done the artwork for these [NFTs] and they look like animated playing cards.”
Having just completed a national tour with Eskimo Joe, and with a new solo album to drop this week, Kav Temperley is a creative machine.
Machines of Love and Grace is released on October 19.
You can watch Last Of The Wine Here:
No Comments