Aussie rock legend Daniel Johns is back with his second solo album FutureNever. It’s every bit as ambitious and diverse as you’d expect following his 2015 album Talk, jumping effortlessly between smooth soul grooves, catchy melodies and heavy guitar riffs. And of course, it’s brimming with synths. We’re apparently not the only ones loving FutureNever, it went #1 on the ARIA charts since its release in April 2022 and remains in the top ten!
One of the co-writers and the keys/synth player contributing to the success of FutureNever is Sydney based producer and songwriter Beau Golden. He’s worked with a huge number of artists over his career including music director and touring with RCA artist Ruel, sessions with Lily Allen, Claptone and Barry Manilow among others. He’s toured with artists such as Odette, Vera Blue and Jessica Mauboy to name a few.
Beau Golden was kind enough to speak to us, giving us some great insight into the tracks he worked on, discussing the writing and production process on FutureNever and the gear used.
Mansions
I started this track at home with soft synths, the majority of them the Arturia V Collection. I think I used the Matrix 12 as the main vibe as I was writing/messing around with it before I sent it to Dan. He immediately called me and asked me to his house to work on it and my brother and I ended up there a few days later. For me as a producer, this track is all about space. Having the instruments react to his vocal and find their moments in-between his melody was the key. The hard side-chained synth in the verses is actually a tremolo guitar pedal on my brother’s Korg Poly 800 that was doing the main verse part. My Roland Jupiter 6 leads the chorus with those big juicy chords. Very subtle synth interjections throughout on various bits and pieces and so many many versions of this song until we settled on where it ended up. This was featured heavily in Spotify’s Who is Daniel Johns? 2021 podcast and was the only music from there to make it onto this album.
Where Do We Go?
If you’re heard the record, the chorus of this song is super heavy. A ton of thick guitars and the chorus drop is really big. I wrote and produced this with Dan, Dave Jenkins Jr and Jake Meadows (also part of the DJs Talk shows live band) and I love how each of us made our mark on the production individually. This song actually started on Dan’s piano as the 2 of us sat there playing for hours one night. The chord progression and melody formed but the track was lost for about 2 years in the midst of so many ideas over many days on many different hard drives. As the record was coming together after Dan’s podcast, I knew there was something there that I remembered, and we dug out the session and put together the track. Dan was in peak form bringing out those Silverchair guitars for those big chorus parts and the solo on the outro. I tracked most of the keys on Dan’s piano, his Moog Voyager and my Kronos. The outro was originally a big synth solo but ended up being switched out for guitars (unfortunately for me). Dave’s drums were tracked at Oceanic Studios in Brookvale and Dan’s guitars were done at BMG Studios in Sydney.
Freaknever
This was the final track to be recorded for the FutureNever album in late 2021. Dave Jenkins Jr (co-producer) and I were at Dan’s house and we put it together with Dan over 2 days. Again, the majority of it was demoed on my Korg Kronos and then recorded on Dan’s baby grand piano. There are a lot of atmospheric textures and layers that were tracked on my weird 70s Yamaha SK15 string machine as well as Dan’s Fender Rhodes. The pads and a whole bunch of the textural weirdness were done again on the Kronos. Purplegirl sings the lead in this but the vocals are done by Dan. They were all sung through my KORG Microkorg vocoder, which Dan has loved since we played live with it at his Opera House shows in 2015. The end of the track where it finally drops into the iconic Freak riff was done on the piano and a patch I created for those 2015 shows – a polyphonic MS20 on my Kronos which has just the right amount of portamento to push and pull into that last drop.
Emergency Calls Only
This was rare as we didn’t record this at Dan’s house. Oceanic Studios in Brookvale (Jim Mogine from Midnight Oils studio) is an amazing place and has a beautiful 100-year-old refurbished Steinway. The tack piano was done on a busted up old upright. Pump organ, Hammond organ, Mellotron and Moog bass were done on the real things and all pads and atmospheric textural stuff, again on my Kronos. Dan did all the guitars and the iconic Van Dyke Parks put the finishing touches on it with his orchestral magic as the final piece of the puzzle.
D4ngrsboy feat. This Week in the Universe
This track features my project This Week in the Universe. This actually eventuated when I was giving Daniel a ride back to the city after the Emergency Calls Only sessions and I had demos of This Week in the Universe playing in my car. He was super vibed on it and suggested we start working on something together. This was our project, so my brother and I treated this with essentially an unlimited amount of time. It’s insane how many hours and revisions we put into this. Writing this with Dan at my house is a story of its own but recording it from start to finish was a solid 9 months, working on it every week, over and over, recording and re-recording parts. Dan, myself and my brother Casey just wanted to make the coolest thing ever, not even knowing at the time where the track would end up. A lot of those LFO moments throughout the track are all tracked live, on the Korg Minilogue and Monologue, Roland Jupiter 6 and Kawaii 100F. Our friends Sean Carey and Mitch Kenny mixed this one and had to suffer through all 3 of us tweaking it incessantly to get it where it landed.
Check out Beau Golden including his synth outfit This Week in the Universe.
Instagram (This Week in the Universe )
Spotify (This Week in the Universe)
Photographs by Ben Dilger
