top of page
There’s nothing like taking a bit of time to look back on old times, especially when you’ve got nothing but time on your hands.
That’s the way it is with Time And Place, the second album from beloved Perth alt-country/folk outfit, The Little Lord Street Band. For a decade they’ve won over the hearts and minds of music lovers across the country, supporting the likes of Gomez (UK), Justin Townes Earle (USA), The Whitlams (NSW) Fanny Lumsden (NSW), Ruby Boots (USA), Daniel Champagne (NSW) and The Living End (VIC) and playing hundreds of headline shows in between.
Across a debut album, A Minute of Another Day, and three acclaimed EP releases, The Little Lord Street Band won ‘Album & Group of 2021’ at the Boyup Brook Country Music awards, and have been crowned ‘Best Country Act’ three years straight at the West Australian Music Industry Awards, also winning the WAM Song of the Year (Country) for Maybe I’m Just In Love, which was subsequently added to Double J, RTR-FM and ABC Country radio across Australia.
In early 2020, the group was eyeing off the then forthcoming release of A Minute Of Another Day, but as COVID-19 came to town it sent vocal/guitar partners - Natasha Shanks and James Rogers - and the rhythm section of Michael Savage and Alex Megaw (plus well, the whole bloody lot of us) into isolation.
​
With much in the way of time to fill, songwriting was as ever, the go-to thing to do. For a band that previously had a simple and direct write song/rehearse song/record song method, this period of solitude - even with WA’s more on-and-off restrictions - created a different approach. In the downtime from not being able to go to work, James would write and record every day, laying down the basics from ideas from the road that were becoming songs. The rest of the band would come in and slowly lay their parts when they could, or when they were available, or when they were allowed to.
​
“It was less jam room sort of writing and more kind of, ‘here's the song. This is how long it goes, this is the structure’,” James explains. “And then the rest of the band would eventually say, ‘Okay, here's what I'm thinking’. They'd put their part to it then maybe later they'd say, ‘let's go to the cutting room. Let's cut things down or add things to it’. So for us it was done in a very different way.”
A Minute Of Another Day was released in September 2020 and by the beginning of 2021 the band were primed to get their next album into full gear as Natasha and James contemplated impending parenthood. If they hadn’t already, the themes on the album became strong and apparent, older songs from the road were reevaluated from the prism of changing times where a recent past becomes a strangely distant memory.
The title track sets the theme of the album. “it's a bit of a hark back to yesteryear,” James says. “Remembering how life used to be pre-parenthood or pre-COVID… just through growing up, as opposed to being grown up.”
Songs such as High Beam and Burning All Night recall the challenges of a band’s life on the road, while It’s Just Us was written in the face of another lockdown and the ponderance of parenthood. The Mess reflects on the breakdown of a family in the suburbs. Could Have Been Someone is about Shank’s father who gave up a promising football career to become a truck driver in order to provide for his young family.
Fergus Mitchell Rogers was born in May 2022. Any songs about him won’t be featured until the third Little Lord Street Band LP release, but rest assured he was present in the studio for many of this album’s vocal takes.
Time And Place is lush in melody and memory, wistful yet not too world weary. It’s all things that The Little Lord Street Band have been, and everything they are becoming.
“I guess it's a ‘looking back’ album,” James states. “It's about when you get to that point in your life and you look back on what's happened or what's been going on. It's that sort of longing for something that you can't have back.
“It's quite glass half empty, but at the same time, it’s about enjoying your memories.”
ABOUT US
Listen.
LISTEN
LATEST MUSIC
Listen.
WATCH
LATEST MUSIC VIDEOS
Contact.
bottom of page