New Zealand singer-songwriter Kane Strang, who has released albums of Dead Oceans and Ba Da Bing!, now leads Auckland trio Office Dog, whose debut album, Spiel, is out Friday via New West / Flying Nun. The band’s style of spiky, deceptively complex guitar rock fits right in alongside classic Flying Nun groups like The Chills, The Verlaines and the 3-D’s. You can listen to the whole album right now, below.
Kane was also nice enough to walk us through ever song on the album, which gives a window into Office Dog’s creative process. Read that below.
Office Dog will be heading to Austin in March for SXSW.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries
OFFICE DOG – ‘SPIEL’ – TRACK-BY-TRACK
“Shade”
“Shade” was always going to open the album. I think it’s a good representative of us as a band and I love the shift that comes halfway through. Take it any way you want, but lyrically in my eyes it’s a song about giving up on resisting inevitable change, finding beauty in simplicity and putting aside that which doesn’t serve you for a moment.
“Antidote”
“Antidote” is by far our oldest song, surviving many a culling as we slowly worked out the kind of music we wanted to make together. Like “Shade,” I think it actually has a hopeful message overall – but in this case it’s a bit of an ode to our hometown of Dunedin and how finding myself there always seems to lift me up like some kind of cure.
“Gleam”
Throughout Spiel’s lyrics, there are a lot of metaphors that have to do with light and dark spaces, probably because it’s essentially a record about change and time. I love “Gleam” because it’s one of the more hopeful tracks, with the “gleam in the grime” for me representing something/someone that is a positive force and worth chasing down or holding on to.
“Warmer”
Adding the piano to “Warmer” is one of my favourite memories of recording Spiel. Our producer De Stevens learnt it on the spot and it was one of those amazing studio moments where something we were struggling with a little suddenly made complete sense. I also did the vocals at about 3 AM right after screaming “Gleam” for an hour or so. It wasn’t the plan, but De liked that my voice was a bit fragile and wanted me to try anyway since it’s a softer song. That really paid off in the end I think, and being a bit exhausted helped me sink into it a lot more.
“Big Air”
“Big Air” came about during a period where I was living back in Dunedin and going to a lot of friend’s shows. These kind of inspired me to sit down and write something that moved a bit faster and was more intense than the other songs we were sitting on at the time. Lyrically I think it’s about life’s peaks and troughs and how sometimes with a big high there’s a heavy low that follows. With the video though, I like that it just focuses on this first part – the comedown never comes and it’s just these three kids having a day completely to themselves, catching some big air.
“Tightropes”
I remember writing the lyrics to “Tightropes” when I was feeling low and my parents took me for a drive down to the bottom of the South Island. It was definitely one of those ones where I had the title first and just had to figure out how to get there – which can be a nice challenge sometimes. I’ll also always have a soft spot for it because it was on the first double single that we self-released the day of our first ever show.
“In the Red”
Writing Spiel is such a blur now but “In the Red” is a song that I have a vivid memory of writing while staying at my parent’s place – one of those late night things that comes very quickly and where the lyrics just kind of fall out of you. Now I think it’s the most raw and vulnerable track on the album, and one that feels like a real release every time we play it.
“Hand in Hand”
“Hand in Hand” is a song about feeling completely fragmented and trying to put yourself back together again with the help of those around you. Instrumentally it was by far the hardest one for us to work out and we only really finished writing it the day before we started recording Spiel, while De was with us in our practice space. Now I think it’s become one of our favourites on the album.
“Cut the Ribbon”
“Cut the Ribbon” came about due to me stumbling upon a very old voice memo of mine. I finished the lyrics in the studio and it’s another one that only started to make sense to me right at the last minute, in the little hours of the morning when we replaced the original electric guitar with those layered acoustics. It’s actually two live takes stitched together too, which I think helped it in the end as the second half now has us playing a bit faster and with a bit more urgency.
“Teeth”
Teeth was probably written not long after “Antidote,” in the very early days of OD. To be honest I was thinking a lot about the first time I toured overseas in a little van with my old band (e.g “us teeth in the wide smile of the cold plain”) and how that was both freeing and very intense.
“The Crater”
“The Crater” touches on a lot of the themes that run throughout Spiel – particularly our relationship with the past and how certain moments stick with you. Sometimes these “craters” can really stop you seeing what’s right there in the present, and I guess I was trying to capture that feeling over what is definitely one of the more stripped back and simple songs on the record.
“Spiel”
And finally, “Spiel.” We worked on writing this song for a long time and just as with “Shade” I think there was only one spot where it was going to go on the album (the end), mainly because of the “sorry for the spiel” line. I like how this wraps everything up, and in a way it’s a nod to how we often poor our heart out… then apologise for it.
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