CREATIVE CONVERSATIONS 140: SALARYMEN ON AN ODE TO DOGS, LEARNING BASS IN SIX MONTHS, AND SOCIAL MEDIA OVERWHELM

Interview by Adeline Chai.

Sydney-based indie-rock duo, Salarymen, have just released their single, I Forget About Time – a beautiful ode to dogs (and more broadly, pets) and how they change our lives for the better – while supporting San Cisco on tour.

Futuremag Music sat down with Renee de la Motte to talk about touring, songwriting, and the duo’s musical influences.  

FMM: Hey Renee, thanks for taking time to chat with us today! For anyone who doesn't know Salarymen, could you tell us more about how you started the band?

Renee: Yes! It’s kind of Thom and I’s project predominantly. We write and record everything, and then we get friends and musicians to play with us live as a four piece.

We started Salarymen right before the pandemic; the worst time ever to start a band. We just didn't know what was coming. 

 Thom had played in lots of different bands before, and I hadn't. This is my first band, so to speak. I was always a singer, and I really wanted to do something with that but I didn't play any instruments. I met Thom and he wanted to start his own band, and he was like, Well, we need a bass player, and I was like, Oh, where are we going to get one of them? Then he was like, Well, you're gonna do it. And I was like, What do you mean? I don't play anything. So, I learned the bass in six months.

We literally played our first gig in November 2019. We played two gigs before the pandemic hit. We initially didn't know that, of course. We didn't know that was going to happen, so we just started the band because we wanted to do our own project. Thom had been in plenty of bands where he was a drummer, mainly so. It was kind of his first time being up front and I also wanted to sing and kind of be up front, so we ended up with this. We have two lead singers effectively, which is a pretty interesting setup for a band. We write and record everything at home, not by choice. It's just too expensive to do everything in the studio, so we're lucky that we have that ability to record at home.

FMM: I remember reading that you learned the bass in six months, which is so incredible to me. Do you think you both have changed as people or as musicians since starting Salarymen?

Renee: Oh, yeah. To keep it short, our patience has grown a lot. You need to be patient, and you need to be willing to accept criticism and feedback when you're working with somebody on a song if you want to make it the best that it can be. Sometimes, that means scrapping your bit and going with somebody else's bit, so we definitely improved our negotiating skills and patience as well as time management. When you're in a band, you are doing almost everything yourself, so you get very crafty. Now, I can edit videos, I’m a graphic designer, travel agent, and marketing expert.

 FMM: I think as well, and correct me if I’m wrong, social media has become such an important part of creating and distributing music. It seems so ingrained in the way tmusicians promote their music nowadays. How are you navigating that?

 Renee: You're right, it's critical. Do I love it? No. Do I make the time for it? Absolutely. I think every artist has got to do it whether we like it or not. People are not consuming music in the same way anymore. Music is highly accessible on the Internet and you kind of need to move with the pace of change. If you're not on social media, you're denying yourself the ability to connect with a lot of fans who might like your stuff.

But, it is stressful because it takes so long to create that type of content. It's not like, I'll just slap up a selfie online. It's not like that. It's video content. We're on tour right now so we're like, oh, get a video of me doing this stupid thing and get a video of this, make sure you record this. It’s a very different way of thinking now, and it's having to feel like you're constantly capturing things. That’s overwhelming. You get back at the end of the tour and you’ve got like a hundred videos that you're like, oh. I don't know how I'm gonna put this together. So, it's important but as an artist, absolutely, we struggle with trying to find the time. It's a full-time job.

 FMM: Speaking of touring, I do want to ask you about that as well. You just came back from the UK in June and now you’re supporting San Cisco on tour. How’s the back-to-back touring been like for you?

 Renee: It's hard. Don't get me wrong, sometimes you’ve just got to go with the flow; you get a great opportunity, you go because when it rains, it pours. You don't know when you're going to get good things.

The UK tour was planned very far in advance and it was absolutely amazing, but we were pretty dead by the end of it.

FMM: Understandably so.

Renee: Yeah, you know, it's a logistical challenge organising everything ourselves, too. Organising your own holiday is hard enough but organising a tour, transporting gear across the country – I don't know, it drives you a little bit mental. It was amazing, though, and then we had a little break before going back on tour again with San Cisco, which has just been amazing too so far. They are such legends.

 FMM: I do want to talk to you about your recently released single, I Forget About Time. It’s amazing. I love that your dog, Chilli, was in the music video too! What was filming that like?

Renee: Honestly, it was so budget and so DIY. My parents have got an old nineties Handycam, and we basically had one day. It was a miserable and rainy day, so we were like, this might look really crap, but we just had no other choice because the song was going to come out in like two weeks. We needed to film it. So, it was just Thom and I, one day at my parents’ house, with their old crappy old Handycam, and we filmed the entire thing in about six hours.

 There wasn't a lot of daylight to work with, because it's obviously winter now. So, we just went out to a bunch of parks and things like that. Honestly, Chilli - he was really cooperative. I was like, I don't know how this is going to go. This dog is either gonna shine in his moment on his silver screen debut, or he's gonna be totally not into it and it's gonna be the worst video ever made. So, it turned out 10 out of 10 for the budget, and the lack of preparation involved.

FMM: I love that it looks like a cozy home video. I know the song is very much about dogs and the happiness they give to us humans, but I was curious if there was a specific moment or event that inspired the song?

Renee: So not a specific event per se, but it's more like when I'm upset or I'm just really stressed out, I snap out of that immediately when I see a dog. It doesn’t have to be my dog, it could literally be like any dog on the street. And you're like, Oh, wow! For a moment there, I just totally forgot about all that stuff that was making me feel horrible, and that's what it's about. While I haven't gone through a really traumatic event, there's people who have lost loved ones or all these people in the deepest kind of depression, and their pets or dogs are keeping them sane.

Some people are like, oh, it's just a dog, but it's not like that for so many people. It’s honestly the difference between being miserable in one moment and just happy the next. That’s what it's about. It's about how much we love dogs, which is the surface-level explanation, but it's also just about the influence that they have on people's lives who are going through different things.

FMM: What I love about I Forget About Time and your other songs as well, is how cryptic the lyrics are. Without context, your single could be about anyone or anything, and as a listener I love relating a song to my personal circumstances. Is that something you set out to do when you’re writing a song?

Renee: Yeah, I was actually toying with the idea of not even saying that this was about dogs.

FMM: Oh wow!

Renee: Just because I think people can take whatever they want out of your songs. It’s funny, because, you know it could sound like I was writing about a really lovely boyfriend or girlfriend ,or whatever. But yeah, I don't like to be too explicit. I think that's the beauty of art and music as a piece of art. People can take whatever they want out of it and apply it to their own lives. So yeah, we try not to be obvious. Not that there's a problem with that, but we let the listeners figure it out for themselves.

FMM: I like that. Out of curiosity, do you have any individual quirks or personality dynamics that influence the creative process between you two?

Renee: Oh yeah, I like to be pretty silly when I write things. I like to write songs about unconventional subjects and I don't want to write just a love song or a breakup song all the time. I want to write things about interesting topics.

One of my favourite songwriters is Alex Turner from the Arctic Monkeys. I love the stories that he tells through his lyrics. For example, A Certain Romance from their first album. He wrote that about growing up in this kind of crappy small town and by the end of the song, you just feel like you know all the characters within that town, and that's difficult.

It's easy to write songs about like, “oh, I love you!” or “you wronged me!” but it's difficult to tell the unconventional stories. I like to challenge ourselves to write something kind of different. I haven't written that much music before either, so I take an unconventional approach to it. I write guitar parts on keys, for example, and Thom finds that really interesting. It’s actually a great match, because sometimes unconventional guitar parts give a song an edge. That's a little bit different to what other people are doing. Thom, on the other hand, he’s got a lot of experience. I don't have that much experience. If he brought something to me and go, I’m just sick of this song, I don't know what to do with it, I'll go, Give me half an hour. Then I'll just sing parts, and go back to put them down on the instrument that we think they would sound best in, so I think it's a really good match.

FMM: I love how you talk about creating characters and being unconventional in your songwriting, because I very much feel that in your songs and music videos as well. I almost feel like I’m being transported back to the sixties and seventies. It also seems to come across in your fashion too?

Renee: 100%, yeah. Fashion is very important to me, and Thom as well. I think what you dress yourself in, your style connects you to the thousands of people around you. It communicates to them, what are you about? What do you like? We're all using fashion to send signals to other people. It's like, Oh, you're like me, cool. Let's hang out.

I've always loved the sixties’ and seventies’ fashion. I just think it was absolutely beautiful. There was a focus on tailoring as well and pieces were made to last a lot longer. Everyone talks about fast fashion now, and it's great that we can get something for like 50 bucks off ASOS and have it delivered in three days, but I think people thought a lot more carefully about what they purchased back then. Often it was their mums making dresses for them, and I don't know. I just think it was so unique. People had less pieces. So the ones they did have, I feel like they were a bit more special in a way. Nothing was just like, I'll wear it three times and chuck it out because it only cost me 15 bucks. I just think fashion, music and art go hand-in-hand. A lot of people in bands have people dressed really well and people have really cool style that obviously differs across the genres. I think there's a very strong connection there between fashion, music, and art more broadly.

FMM: I also think what you said about fast fashion also resonates with music as well. I feel TikTok and other platforms have created this entire category of music that is meant to be consumed on social media. Songs are shorter, albums are more instantaneous now and I think it was so different in previous eras.

Renee: I agree, that’s the dark side of what social media is doing to music. It's putting it in a little box. It's “you’ve got to grab people in the first 10 seconds,” and if not, they won't bother. So, I think it's reducing the value of music and art. When we write a song, we can spend months on it and it does feel a little bit like the music industry is rewarding this kind of model of just churning out songs that are kind of clickbait songs. They grab people in the first 10 seconds. I think it's the music industry not telling artists to take their time and perfect their art. It’s like, Oh, is it going to go viral on Tiktok? Well, if it’s not, then next. That’s not what making music is about, and I don't think artists at the moment feel like they'd be rewarded for spending months, or even years, on a body of work if that’s what it takes. It’s a quantity over quality approach at the moment, I think.

FMM: I also wanted to talk to you about The Beatles, specifically. I know you both have said they inspire you in some of your other interviews. I wanted to know, what is it about the band that excites you as an artist?

Renee: I think if you look at where they started and how they progressed, they were doing some stuff that just had never been done before. It was new, and there was this wave of excitement going across the whole world at the time, like people had never seen this kind of stuff before. Throughout their albums as well, they had that traditional kind of more poppy style they've got, but they also went a bit psych. Well, they went fully psych at different points. Between their albums, they've touched on every type of rock, every type of guitar-based music, so I really appreciate that part of it. Every year, they’ve changed and evolved – they looked into new genres, and they were extremely experimental as well.

And you’ve got to remember, when we write a song now, the chord progressions have been done hundreds and thousands of times. I guess it is a thing that a lot of stuff has been done now, but when The Beatles were doing it, it hadn't been done so the world was kind of gobsmacked with everything new that they were coming out with.

It was just a really exciting time, as well as a time of a lot of political change for women and minorities in particular. It was chaotic in the sixties so there's so much inspiration there. They [The Beatles] were just so talented and in tune with each other that they would get in the studio, have a song that they wrote like the day before, record it all live, which means you've got to be perfect. Today, you have the luxury of chopping and changing and picking your best take, so modern recording technologies have changed the game. The Beatles were just so insanely good that they would have a song they wrote an hour prior, get in there, record it in an hour, and then move on to the next hit. You did have to really know your stuff or else you just couldn't do it, so that is really inspirational. I don't know - I'd be an idiot to compare Thom and I to Lennon and McCartney, but that's the songwriting vibe we’re kind of going for.

FMM: I love that, and is there a genre you’d like to venture into?

Renee: Yeah, one of our biggest influences – a lot of Aussie bands would say this - is Tame Impala. Everything that Kevin Parker touches is awesome. He did some stuff with a French musician who was his girlfriend at the time, that was all melodies and echo chamber. We love early Tame Impala. We do have a song actually called Rerun, where we went into that kind of psych territory. That's something we would like to do a lot more. We’ve been predominantly kind of Indie-rock, pop, dream pop, but I really want to do more psych stuff. It's just so cool.

FMM: That’s so exciting for you both! Has there been a special moment so far that stands out to you while writing in the studio with Thom?

Renee: I think one of the most special ones was a song that we wrote called Echoes. We released it about a year ago, and that was dedicated to two of our friends, who passed away very quickly in succession, which was really a shock to the system for our broader friend group. It was really surprising when it happened. It’s quite depressing but it's beautiful, you know. That's probably the first song we've written about something as heavy as grief and loss. That was dedicated to them, and the organic support that song got blew us away. We knew it was special when we finished writing it, but it wasn't really a radio track, if you know what I mean? It was kind of slow, but that's not why we wrote it anyway. We wrote it as a dedication to our friends and it’s our most streamed song today. People clearly could feel that emotion through it. They were leaving these beautiful comments on it, about how much the track meant to them and what they felt when they listened to it and that’s what you write music for. You write it so people can connect with it.

FMM: I’m so sorry for your loss. I think it’s so beautiful when people react that way because when you create something, you don’t really have control over how people are going to respond. Have you had a memorable moment at shows or while interacting  with fans?

Renee: Yeah, no, we had people who I'd never seen before singing along at our shows. Sometimes, you get people coming along and singing, but you know them. To see total strangers singing your lyrics back to you is actually so fun. We all look at each other and we’re like, “Oh, look!

There were some really young people who'd seen us perform at Lost Paradise, and they'd come to one of our headline shows, and they were like, “You’re all I've listened to since that festival, and your stuff's really good.” It's good to see everything coming full circle – people seeing you somewhere else, then becoming a fan and coming to your own show and singing the words back to you. So, yeah, that's always pretty special.

FMM: You also have an EP coming out in September, right? What was the recording process like?

Renee: Yeah that’s it! Again, all at home. We're always in a perpetual rush. We're always rushing and there's not enough hours in the day to be a musician. We have day jobs as well to fund all of it. So yeah, we just do a few hours here and there, but a lot of artists can't do that. They have to book in studio time, and that means they've got, you know, eight hours to record their track, or however long. We're very different in the sense that we will continuously come back to a song and work on it a little bit here, a little bit there. We might do vocals one day and a few days later, I’ll go, I didn't really like that, so I'll do it again. We have a lot of flexibility and a lot of choice, which I don't take for granted. I think that's important in the creative process, that if you do something and you don't like it, you're not stuck with it. You can go back, and you can tinker over it for months.

FMM: I love that! Who would you say were the musical influences for the EP?

Renee: Definitely The Strokes and Arctic Monkeys. They’re just two of the best indie-rock bands. We absolutely love Royal Otis too, who we've toured with before. They're a big influence. We also have other influences like Beach House, The Beach Boys, The Beatles, you know. We have some older influences, but we have some really modern influences as well. We love Arcade Fire, and the new tracks from Clairo. Is that how you say it, Clairo?

FMM: Yes, that’s how you say it! Wow! That's such a broad range of musical influence. Do you have a personal favourite song out of all the ones you’ve written so far?

Renee: I like them all for different reasons, but I really like our song called Rerun. That was the kind of slightly psych one that I was talking about. That was written in lockdown about missing Japan and wanting to go back to Japan on holidays.

FMM: You got to play a gig in Japan a while ago too, right?

Renee: We did! We toured in Japan and that was after we wrote that song. So, it's beautiful to have that come full circle. We played that song in Japan, and we told everyone what it was about, so that was a really nice moment to connect with the audience as well.

FMM: I remember seeing that tour poster of you both with Mount Fuji next to you. It’s so adorable.

Renee: Yeah, we got the best tour poster ever designed! Normally, it's just me designing it and I have really limited skills, so we were like, not this time! We're getting a proper poster done. So, we said to the designer, can you make us like, I don't know, like we're in an anime or something, and it was just like the best poster ever.

FMM: My last question is, do you have a dream venue you’d like to play one day?

Renee: I think playing at Enmore would be pretty special. I mean playing something like Hordern Pavilion would be like whoa.

I think a bird just almost crapped right next to me.

FMM: Byron birds are like feral.

Renee: I know, right? Anyway, back to your question. Yeah, so Enmore or Hordern Pavilion would be really special. Everyone who grew up in Sydney has gone to some of the best gigs of their lives there. You know you're doing pretty damn good if you're playing on those stages.

FMM: Enmore is probably my favourite venue ever! I’m sure you will get there.

Renee: I hope so. Fingers crossed!

FMM: Yes, fingers crossed. Do you have anything to add?

Renee: I think just the fact that one of the biggest ways you can just support artists that you like is going to see them play. It's a weird climate to sell tickets in at the moment. It's like money's tight for everybody, but money's really tight for musicians who are trying to not lose money while making their art. So, I think one of the best ways you can support them is go and see them when they play live and I don't know, buy their merch, stream their music. I know that's kind of obvious but yeah, go and see them play, because live music is in a bit of a pickle at the moment, and we need that kind of community support to make sure that we still have great places to play and go and see live music.