The Winnie Coopers play Bar Soma Sunday 16 March 2008.
Gold Coast geek-hoppers The Winnie Coopers titled their second album Worth The Weight as a pun on its pizza-box digipack design and a couple of its food-related tracks. The title reached a whole new level of relevance, however, when it took them two years to get it on shelves.
“Trying to write songs, have a day job, go on tour – and a couple of us have got families – you have a standard you need to keep up of how often you’re going and doing shows in cities to keep your fans happy,” MC and guitarist Joe ‘Eloquence’ Mackay says. “A lot of the songs on the album have been written for a long time, but just getting in and recording them to a solid quality… we mixed it all on an analogue desk rather than digital and that takes a lot longer.”
More events hampered the release, Eloquence says – their engineer’s health hiccup, and their lawyer’s impromptu holiday and impending retirement are among the “bunch of balls-ups” that held the album back.
“We weren’t gonna go with that title until it started getting a bit ridiculous,” Eloquence chuckles.
The album was thus written and formed in the quiet moments between all the other things going on in the Coopers’ lives. Eloquence, who’s a youth worker by day, penned a lot of lyrics along with fellow MC The Educator while carpooling.
“Charlie [The Educator] and myself worked at two youth centres together – one was in Browns Plains and the other was right up on the northern end of the Gold Coast – and we were living in Palm Beach. It was at least 40 minutes’ drive to get to work. We’d always have a notepad in the car and come up with lines and write them down.“There’s a song on Worth The Weight called ‘Lost Rhymes’ – a reggae tune about not writing down lyrics and forgetting them. We wrote that in the car as a joke. So it’s not like you sit in some kind of fantasy place where you write down all your tracks when you’re in the zone – they come to you in the shower, driving to work… I spend a lot of time in the ocean as a surfer and I reckon I’ve written about a third of my verses while in the water, and I’ve got to try and remember them. I’m running up the beach trying to get dry and find a pen and pad, or record it into my phone!”
And the fun doesn’t stop when they actually get to work, he says. The MCs use hip-hop to surreptitiously help disadvantaged kids study Maths and English.
“The lyrics are the English – you can talk all about the similes and metaphors, and alliteration, and a whole bunch of other poetic devices, sentence structure… all the good lyricists, if you deconstruct Eminem or Common or Talib Kweli, if you pull apart their verses they’re grammatically really well put together. With the beats, that’s all very Mathematical – you can pull up the sequence of a really full-on beat and look at the patterns inside of it.
“Right down to the core, we’re definitely as nerdy as they come. Even just this conversation right now, about what I do at work – it’s all very nerdy.”
One wonders what the band’s namesake would make of all this, the studious geek-girl from The Wonder Years, played by bona fide UCLA graduate mathematician-cum-actress Danica McKellar.
“We’re dreading the day she finds out about us,” Eloquence says. “It might go all wrong. But I’m hoping she’ll be able to see the connection between our personality as a band and Winnie’s personality on the show. It’s like clearing a sample – is whoever owns The Wonder Years gonna come and hunt us down one day and make us change our name?”
Worth the Weight out on Illusive/Liberation.
