McNaughty’s husband plays nice
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Example has included five songs for and about wife Erin McNaught on his new album.
Source: News Limited
WHEN British singer/rapper Example met his future wife Erin McNaught when the model was interviewing him on Australian TV she already knew his usual lyrical fare.
“All my biggest hits are sad songs about hangovers and break ups and ex-girlfriends and staying out too late,” Example, or Elliot Gleave, says.
Gleave was putting the finishing touches to his difficult fourth album, The Evolution of Man, when he and McNaught were getting serious.
Wife Erin snuggles up to Example in an image posted on Instagram.
Source: Supplied
Big day: Erin McNaught marries Elliot Gleave
“I still had all these stories about my past I wanted to get out of my system,” Gleave says.
“Erin would say, ‘There’s nothing about me on this album’, and I said, ‘Perfect Replacement is about you, you’re the perfect replacement’.
“But it was a positive negative song, admittedly …”
For fifth album Live Life Living, Gleave faced his biggest lyrical challenge — the love song.
“I’ve never written a happy song in my life,” he says. “I listened to grunge growing up so I put metaphors for dark stories in upbeat dance songs.
“I was trying to find anyone who’s written cool, loved-up songs that weren’t cheesy, so I was listening to David Bowie, Elton John, a lot of Oasis …”
The result is five songs for and about McNaught on the album, with songs Stay With Me, Seen You (“I wake up next to you each day and that’s good enough for me”) and Can’t Face the World Alone documenting their meeting, courtship, long-distance relationship, marriage and the future.
The other love addressed on the album is the ’90s dance in Gleave’s DNA; it’s a musical about-face after The Evolution of Man was the dance star’s rock album.
“The last album was really self indulgent, it was really dark and moody and didn’t connect to that many fans anywhere in the world. The people who loved it really, really loved it.
“It was quite a unique album — a dance album with live guitars and metal grunge running through it. This record is more for the fans than me. It’s a purist dance album, I wanted to give the people what they wanted.”
Example has tried to give fans what they want with his new album, but says record sales generally “are in such a bad place at the moment:”.
Source: Supplied
Gleave found this out through, of course, social media. “I use Twitter and Facebook as market research,” he says.
“People wanted an album they could leave on at a party or at the beach. They couldn’t do that on the last album. So I was listening to Underworld and Faithless and Prodigy and Chemical Brothers and Baby D and Technotronic. I wanted to make every track work in its own right.”
Gleave is also acutely aware of the problems of selling albums not just as a dance act, but in the modern world.
Happy couple Example and McNaught in another shot from Instagram.
Source: Supplied
“The album is pretty much dead now. People just dip in and out and hear one or two songs or cherry pick them for a playlist. Record sales are in such a bad place at the moment.
“Look at Calvin Harris as a model. He had seven top 10 singles from an album and he’s sold a million records in the UK. Which is phenomenal even though the UK has 70 million people — 10 or 20 years ago that album would have sold 15 million copies.
“So if Calvin is the most successful you can be with mainstream dance music it doesn’t really give much hope in terms of what acts on a smaller scale can sell.
“My record label have said they’ll be happy with 100,000 sales of this album in the UK. We’re in a strange place where no one knows how to interpret streaming as far as sales go.
“Most people want to experience dance music at a festival or at a club, so I’ve just got to continue making my music for them and then everyone else can make their own set of rules.”
Gleave says, like the rock bands he grew up loving, he writes music he knows will work in a performance.
“I pretty much just write songs for live shows now. Then I tweak them to work for radio. A lot of artists write songs purely for radio. Which is fine. A lot of artists don’t do 50 festivals a year like me or travel the world playing live.
Gleave and McNaught attend the 2012 ARIA Awards in Sydney.
Source: Getty Images
“Playing festivals and clubs is my bread and butter so that’s who I write music for. In the past I tried to write songs for radio and it hasn’t worked. Some of my least successful songs are the ones I tried to write for radio.
“My most successful have been the bangers and anthems. For me, as long as I’m still on the move on stage the album just serves as a vessel for keeping me on the road.”
■ Live Life Living (Sony) is out now
