The Soul Movers Made A Homegrown Album In 2020

Pre-Covid The Soul Movers had the luxury of making music wherever they wanted in the world. Covid kept them limited to Sydney in 2020 and the end result, ‘Evolution’, worked out just fine.

For 2019’s ‘Bona Fide’, The Soul Movers recorded at the historic Muscle Shoals studio in Alabama. It was where The Stones recorded ‘Brown Sugar’, and artists through the doors include Bob Dylan, Bob Seger, Elton John, Rod Stewart and Willie Nelson. For ‘Evolution’, The Soul Movers recorded at Rancom Street Studios in Sydney, owned by former Sherbet keyboard player Garth Porter. “After the last album where we went to the US and recorded in some amazing studios such as Muscle Shoals we went for the really exotic place of Botany, New South Wales. But it was a great studio. We knew when we dropped in there it was the right place for us. It had a bit of a feel of the older studios that we recorded in in the US. It had some Mojo as they say,” Murray Cool tells Noise11.com.

The studio caters for both digital and analog recordings. “A lot of the pre-amps are old analog amps and that’s what gives it the warmth,” Murray says. “We did record to ProTools but we did have a 24 track tape machine. We didn’t go that retro”.

Lizzie Mack says the studio is just a museum of equipment. “Garth has been on the circuit for such a long time that whenever anything cool comes around they know to speak to Garth first. The old 301, the EMI Studios, that all collects to have a feeling of a lot of the studios like FAME we have recorded in. It does feel a bit like FAME Studios in Alabama”.

Garth Porter was also hands on with the songwriting with Lizzie and Murray. Murray says, “There is lots of different ways we write. Sometimes I will be noodling on the guitar and she’ll say ‘hey what’s that’. She might sing something into the phone and we’ll get together and flesh it out. And this time we had Garth as well, which is great. There are some things that he ran with like ‘Evolution’. Other things like ‘Superman’ we had worked out but then he changed it into something different, which is great as well. I think it’s important for songwriters and musicians to work with different people and get different influences in there was well”.