A Chat With… Amarillo’s Jac Tonks

Earlier this month Melbourne based Americana duo Amarillo released their new album Eyes Still Fixed. Amarillo was formed as a vehicle for Jac Tonks and Nick O’Mara’s songwriting, while Nick is also a founding member of the alt country outfit Raised By Eagles. Eyes Still Fixed was produced by Nick’s cousin Shane O’Mara, whose impressive credits include working with the likes of Stephen Cummings, Paul Kelly and Chris Wilson. Jac Tonks took time out in between gigs to chat to Sound Distractions about the new album.  

Eyes Still Fixed was written on the road from the vast emptiness of the Australian outback to the French and Spanish countryside. How much did those surroundings influence the types of songs you and Nick were writing?

Well definitely the outback had a huge impact on the single All I Can See. It was the first time Nick and I had been up to the Top End. It’s the classic case of spending time travelling the world while missing out on so much in your own back yard. The outback is incredible, there’s so much space, it’s just the vastness of it all. The song’s not only about the physicality of that place, but also the real and metaphorical distance between people too. It’s a song about isolation on a few levels and because Nick is my boyfriend it’s a feeling that is implicitly understood between us.

All I Can See is such a gorgeous song, it seems to encapsulate the vastness of the Never Never so poetically, was there a particular experience that led to the formation of that song? 

We drove up to Kakadu and we stayed in this cheap little hotel and we were just struck about how isolated we were. Arnhem Land is just another world, it had such an impact on us both. It was amazing how foreign you can feel in your own country. We really tried to attempt to tap into the feeling of that experience of being there.

It’s the only song on the album that you wrote together, the rest were written individually with those responsibilities divided between you. Even though you’re a couple do you find it more difficult to write together as a working partnership? 

Yeah definitely (laughs).

Causes a few arguments?

Yes (laughs). It’s great because Nick is an amazing guitarist and when we’re on the road we’re always playing music because Nick rarely has a guitar out of his hand. So he’ll have all of these musical ideas and I’ll be chasing him with a net saying: “What was that? That’s a song I think.” “Nah, it’s nothing.” Then I’ll pick up on it and hum something to try and make it into a song, but it’s not easy. If you can get through that without bickering then you’ve got a good chance of creating a song.

Ah, so the true test of the relationship is to see if you can write a song together without an argument!

Something like that, yes (laughs). Even though we only wrote that one song together for the album we always know what each other is working on. That’s because these songs were written on the road, so even though they were written separately we were well aware of what each other was working on.

Obviously you both share a love of the same types of music, but do you find that you’ve both been listening to very different things when you get together to work on a record? 

Yes we do have different listening preferences – I like to listen to a lot of female vocalists for instance. But when you’re on the road you do listen to the same music because you’re in that shared space and it can be very inspiring because you’ll both get excited about a particular song or certain aspects of a song and then that feeds into your own creativity, so you start talking about ideas for songs. It’s funny, even though we both play Americana we’re both into jangly Brit Pop guitars from the 80’s. Nick loves Johnny Marr’s guitar work while I love The Sundays so we listen to a lot of that kind of stuff.

When you take the name of your band from a city in Texas the obvious assumption is that you play a style of Americana, so it’s interesting to me that you both like to listen to 80’s Brit pop guitar bands…

Well obviously we have all of those classic Neil Young or Bob Dylan type influences to our sound, but we’re both massive Stones fans and you can certainly hear those influences in Nick’s style of guitar playing, particularly in his other band Raised By Eagles. But there’s a definite shift in the influences when we get together, it’s more folk/pop really, with maybe jus a hint of jangly guitars (laughs).

When Nick writes a song that you have to sing do you sometimes find it a little challenging to interpret or understand exactly where he’s coming from?  

It’s fairly intuitive really, but certainly we discuss the songs and we do like to change things up a little bit.

For instance I notice that one of his songs “Look At You Baby” explores the idea of an ex lover falling from grace – something that might not be as much fun as you think. Could you relate to that? Was it for instance based on something from Nick’s past? 

Yeah, well we both have songs from our past that can raise some eyebrows, but the sorts of experiences you’ve had with past lovers are fairly universal so I think most people could relate to them. I think Look At You Baby is a really interesting idea for the concept of a lyric, although it is coming from a fairly dark place. I’m not sure exactly who that song’s about and I think it’s best if you don’t ask (laughs).

And working with Nick’s cousin Shane O’Mara as producer, he has such a phenomenal history of working with some of the best artists in this country. What did he bring to your record? 

Shane is so amazing to work with. It was really interesting watching Nick and Shane work together, they often had very similar ideas about what they wanted to create. Shane is very big on restraint, he’s very much from the less is more school and that kind of discipline is what you need from a producer.