Marlon Williams My Boy - A track by track

After his highly acclaimed 2018 album Make Way For Love, Marlon Williams "gets in the sandpit" to have some fun on his new record My Boy.

"There's a bit of mischief in it. It's my playful record, I'd say … I was just following my nose and that's where I ended up,'' he tells Charlotte Ryan.

Marlon recommends people don't take My Boy too seriously on the first listen and maybe relax their expectations of his sound.

"Just put it on and go for a walk or do something else … 'Don't be like 'is he going to do the country bit or what's happening here?"

To "escape the version of himself the world reflected", he decided to not use his usual band on this album.

Instead, Marlon is joined by drummer Paul Taylor, Cass Basil, Hollie Fullbrook, Tom Healy, Dave Kahn and Elroy Finn.

"[Working with new musicians] made it a lot harder in some ways but it made for some really nice ground-up building."

My Boy includes his first use of synthesisers - "sitting in my room just bleepy-blooping" was sort of a lockdown thing - and occasional lines in te reo Māori.

"I'm trying to softly integrate Māori into music that doesn't make everyone stand up straight and say 'oh I'm listening to Māori now. I better be respectful.'

"I just really want it to be soft and as a matter of course, you know?"

Acting [most recently in the Netflix series Sweet Tooth] has also brought a "spatial dimension" to the music, he says.

"It has a little more colour and imagery in the way I'm conjuring it up now."

While Make Way for Love was unmistakably a break-up album, Marlon says he wanted to "leave a lot of questions" on My Boy.

"There's no plea for order or understanding, which allows a lot more breathing room."

This kind of unapologetic opacity is something he admires about the music of former partner Aldous Harding.

"She writes these incredibly hard-to-penetrate songs. All of the fundaments of what makes good music are in them but they're completely impenetrable. I love that about her songs because you can never master them, you can never have them beneath you. And I think it's such a clever way of approaching music."

Marlon doesn't get to hide when he's performing, though, and says he's feeling apprehensive about the intensity of his upcoming world tour as he "burns out easily".

"I swallow [attention] up when it's there… and it's an anxious swallowing. I have to consume it to get through it and then I end up alone and feeling a bit sick. It's almost like overeating. I binge attention."

He's determined to be more mindful about looking after himself than he was on a recent European tour with Lorde.

"Am I manically happy… or is this just before the fall?

"I'm in my 30s now - still relatively young, but there's a difference between 31 and 21 for sure… I guess I've had a few years of touring and I'm like 'ooh, that's different. That's different than it was.'"

What hasn't changed is the state of his bedroom.

"I'm extremely manic in my interests and my attention span and I like to be busy. I like my brain to be occupied all the time and I'm always looking for things I've lost.

"You'd think I'm 15 if you looked in my bedroom. Max."

Marlon Williams talks us through My Boy track by track:
 

'My Boy'

There's no one 'boy' in this song - it's more about an abstract idea of a big brother or father figure, Marlon says.

"It's a song that's seeking to celebrate subjugating oneself to someone else and just being a follower. The relief of abdicating decision-making… loosely speaking, that's what the song's about."

 

'Easy Does It'

Marlon says he had this chorus going around his head for a long time.

He liked the word 'easy' used as name, as Lee Hazlewood does in the song 'Easy and Me'.

"It's a little bit of a dig at some hypothetical person who's able to have an easy life cause they make other people's lives harder … it's about me in some ways, too. It's a playful dig, that song."

'River Rival'

In Old Latin, the word 'rival' originally meant a person with which you were competing for the same source of water, Marlon says.

"It put me in a mind of thinking about how that's still the case. Conflict comes from resource scarcity - whether it's prestige, attention… that is the universal truth. So yeah, that song suddenly became a sort of grand statement about the primacy of the human condition, I guess."

 

 

'My Heart the Wormhole'

The lyrics of this song are intended to be "a little ungainly", Marlon says.

"Some of it's real and some of it's made-up. It's very scattershot. Kind of manic… the meta effect is this manic scrolling through the past.

"It's got a sleaze to it but it's sort of a funhouse sleaze. Sort of like chaos reigns, let's have fun."

 

'Princess Walk'

This is the most "imagistic" song on My Boy, Marlon says, and it's inspired by a watercolour painting his mother did of a man in a tophat coming home with a fistful of money.

"He's a slippery jester of a man and he's very dainty, he's very proper and demure... He's a bit scary. He's got some Slenderman vibes going on.

"It's a song about wanting to know what it is to behave in the world… and trying to be a man of standing in some sense. It's about observation and trying to learn tricks of the trade."

 

'Don't Go Back'

This song is sort of part two of 'Party Boy' - a track about a "party tragic" on Make Way For Love.

"It's also a warning from an older male figure to a younger male figure… don't go back to the party. It's the maxim of 'nothing good happens after 2am'."

 

'Soft Boys Make the Grade'

This is a send-up of internet culture and astrology by a man who admits to his own "soft boy tendencies".

"I guess a soft boy is someone who's not a traditionally mature alpha but is just another dude… hides behind poetry and sensitivity but is just another dude."

 

'Thinking of Nina'

Marlon was compelled to write this song about Nina Sergeevna - a Russian spy character in the TV drama series The Americans that he loves.

"It's a song condemning the male gaze but I'm also using my own male gaze on her. So I had to take another step back and laugh at myself, which is where that Duran Duran pathos comes in."

 

'Morning Crystals'

One of the last songs was written when he was in a 'somewhat twisty place.'

'The song jumps around so much. It's that mania… what's going on? Let's have a dance.'

It references Gene Clark, The Byrds, the Paul Simon song 'Graceland' and the "Velvet Underground at their most folk-country".

 

'Trips'

Like 'River Rival', this is another song about the human condition but in relation to travel.

Marlon wrote it after reading about the deathly ocean voyages conducted by the Dutch East India Company and also reflected on early Pasifika voyagers and colonial New Zealanders.

"No one leaves their home 'cause they're 'killing it' at that time. They leave out of need and looking for something better for themselves.

"It's also a song about being on tour and being so sick of… just people and everyone around you."

 

'Tour'

"Six weeks in and the tool sharpens itself… You leave each other alone and if someone doesn't pick up on that, they don't come on the next trip."

 

'Promises'

"Every period you go to of the Bee Gees - probably more specifically Barry [Gibb] - the quality and the inventiveness of the songwriting [is impressive.] … I just love singing those songs.

"This is just an out-and-out love song. I needed a song on the album that was in the trenches with the listener. I'm being a bit high and mighty talking about the human condition over there and I wanted to be like 'this is a song about love and to write it for you, Mr Barry Gibb, 'cause he's great."

 

Marlon Williams on RNZ:

Looking for My Boy with Marlon Williams

Marlon Williams takes RNZ on a one-hour musical journey.

Marlon Williams: 'It's time to pause and reflect on the way things work'

Marlon Williams talks with Charlotte Ryan about life in Lyttelton, singing and touring with Lorde