Meet Jack Ladder and the Dreamlanders. In his songwriting Jack Ladder elevates the banal and brings our attention to the depth and drama of the everyday. He celebrates the awkward in a disarming and devastatingly honest way, dealing with ideas which hover on the edge of acceptable. When describing his process he talks about ‘wrestling with conflicting sounds to create an uneasy balance’. Acclaimed singer songwriter Alex Cameron touches on this writing style in his love letter to the much cherished 2011 album Hurtsville where he speaks of the way it inspired his own songwriting citing lines like ‘Love is a bone that I chew, when I’m alone and I’m thinkin of you.’

 

This album, Hurtsville, and the band The Dreamlanders were fashioned simultaneously. After two solo albums Jack Ladder met drummer and electronic musician Laurence Pike in late 2005 with Donny Benét, on bass, completing the trio. Kirin J. Callinan joined as part of the touring band for Jack Ladder’s solo album Love Is Gone in 2009. New demos recorded by Jack Ladder inspired the group to decamp in the middle of winter to the freezing cold 19th Century rural Blackburn estate to record their first album together. Pike writes of the recording process ‘I always feel something good is being made when there’s an edge of uncertainty about what you’re doing, and this was the case with Hurtsville; an act of faith that we were participating in something bigger than the sum of its parts… Listening now, it sounds like a combination of the personnel and the circumstances; I hear the murk and the cold, the vibration of the building itself, all of our shared history as people.’