August 30, 2025 • 15 mins
Kiwi indie rock band The Beths have released their 4th studio album titled 'Straight Line Was A Lie.'
Lead singer Liz Stokes and guitarist Jonathan Pierce joined Francesca Rudkin to discuss their new release.
Stokes said that she hit a writers block during the making of this album, which makes it's release even more special.
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News Talks edb This is.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
A straight Line was a lie from QWI indie rock
band The Best. It's the title track from their Poor
Studio album, released on Friday, and The Bets are going
from strength to strength a new US label. They've been
playing some pretty big festival gigs and selling shows for
the upcoming US tour. They're back in the country and
I'm excited to have lead sing of the Best Stokes
(00:34):
and guitarist Jonathan Peers in the studio. Good morning to
the two of you.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
Good morning, good morning, good morning.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Loving the album, I was just saying to you, gosh,
it packs an emotional punch that I'm not sure I
was quite ready for. Lots of feelings. I mean, it's
got an upbeat, optimistic field twitter as well, but it
just I feel like you're really vulnerable on this album
and you're just you're sharing in a way that maybe
(01:02):
I wasn't quite expecting. It's fantastic.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Thank you.
Speaker 4 (01:05):
Yeah, I guess I was going to places that I
think I don't normally. I'm normally a bit afraid to
kind of go to I did a lot of writing
because I was struggling to kind of write music, and
I ended up writing a lot on like a typewriter.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
Which also sounds really pretentious. It was just it was
just fun.
Speaker 4 (01:24):
But I would like write ten pages a day and
try and try to just kind of like pull stuff
from memory or from stuff that I don't normal late
to look at.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Have you struggled to write songs before.
Speaker 4 (01:37):
It's always like a bit of a It feels often
like a muscle that needs training to get back into
shape if I haven't done it for a while, because
we've been like touring for a year and a half
or something. But yeah, it was the longest they'd gone
without writing something while actively trying to write something, and
I just kind of it wasn't really working. So I
was like, well, if I can't write songs, maybe I'll
just write and start with that.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
So I imagine that as someone who writes songs for
a living and you find words important, not being able
to find those is all of a sudden quite worrisome
an issue, is it.
Speaker 4 (02:09):
Yeah, Yeah, it's there's something about the combination of words
and music that for me is very it's very instinctual.
It's very kind of gut based, and I was kind
of struggling to be pointing in any particular direction. But words, Yeah,
words are important to me, and there I have a
lot of them. I have trouble, real trouble being succinct.
So I feel like songs are where I can kind
(02:30):
of spew out everything that I want to say and
then try to kind of like condense it into a
particular feeling and try and kind of make myself understood
in a more succinct way than the way that I speak.
But then it's still not very succinct. There's a lot
of words in these songs.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
I don't think you're giving yourself enough credit there. So
when you would sit down and write those teen pages,
are they just is that that's not You're not trying
to write a song. You're just putting your feelings out.
You're getting things on paper, and then do you come
back to it and craft it into.
Speaker 4 (02:58):
Yeah, So it was like stream of consciousness and kind
of sometimes they were lyric like and sometimes they were
just it was just it was just words or just
like exploring a memory or something like that. But then yeah,
I ended up when I did to do a writing
period where it's okay, now it's time to write the songs.
I had a big stack of paper to pull from,
which is very useful, along with like voice notes and
(03:19):
journals and stuff like that. It's instead of pulling from
the absolute void, you kind of like I could look
through this big stack of paper with a highlighter and
be like, oh, this is something that I haven't looked
at before.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
It makes sense, It makes sense, it's yeah, so trust
the process. Yeah exactly, I'm going, well, yea, that's what
do you want to do? So, Jonathan, what is it
like for you in the band when you can see
that Liz is struggling.
Speaker 5 (03:42):
I think Liz and I we try to design a process,
you know, and we try to like work out. We
try to we talk about it and we talk about what, yeah,
what the block might be, but also like what, yeah,
how life is working and how things could be more
conducive and you know that, Yeah, we live like a
weirdly structured life these days, with like these kind of
(04:04):
long two to three year pattern and so you can
start to see the headlines coming, like we need a
period of creativity in about three months, you know, and
how we going to kind of get there and maybe
Liz and I will read a couple of books about
about how other great writers do it and then pinch
some ideas and then yeah, and then hopefully eventually it
(04:28):
starts to flow and you get some positive reinforcement and yeah, so.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
You've got to work at it, right. Do you think
a lot of people sort of think that these songs
just come out of nowhere. Suddenly you have a I
mean sometimes you talk to us a songwriter, and they'll
say that that song just came to me. It came
to me in ten minutes, and I knew I had
a great song, but it needed Most of the time
people will say, actually, as you said that, it's a practice,
(04:52):
you've got to work it at its time.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
Yeah, well, yeah.
Speaker 4 (04:57):
I saw it in Jeff Tweeny's book. It was quite
from someone else, but it says something like, when inspiration strikes,
it helps to be holding the pan like already, I
don't know if you're just waiting to feel inspired or
for something to kind of like And that still does
happen like occasionally, but I feel like I am comforted
by reading about writers and like hearing about people who
(05:20):
are yeah, just working, like just making a lot of
things and like exercising that muscle of creativity.
Speaker 5 (05:27):
And yeah, and we need to like we need to
acknowledge all of the time on either side of that
ten minutes of inspiration, because if it's just ten minutes,
Liz will always be the first person to say that
song's not very good. It only took me ten minutes
to write, you know. And in order to reinforce Liz,
we need to be able to say, well, it wasn't
ten minutes, was it. It was actually your whole life,
(05:49):
so you know, own it.
Speaker 4 (05:51):
We and the baths are I feel like addicted to toil?
Speaker 3 (05:54):
Yeah, that is true. Maybe value it too highly.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
Can I ask you about a couple of the songs
because they really had an impact on me. I'd love
to talk to you about No Joy. I just love
how straight up.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
This song is. Thanks.
Speaker 4 (06:12):
Yeah, that one was one that came fairly quickly when
when I was writing it, and I was like, I
don't think the song's anything, it's too silly, But yeah,
I think I was.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
I've had this experience.
Speaker 4 (06:25):
It's kind of about anadonia, and which is not being
not finding joy in the things that you normally would enjoy.
And kind of and it's not necessarily being depressed or
like despairing, but it's just kind of like not well,
I suppose it's just kind of a symptom of depression, right,
is not finding joy and the things that you normally like,
not lacking the things normally like.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
So it's something.
Speaker 4 (06:44):
That I experienced both in depression and then also when
I was towards the end of taking an SSRI, which
really helped and was really great, but then, like I said,
towards the end, I was I was struggling with just
kind of feeling a bit two level, and that was
about when I kind of weaned off. But yeah, just
that particular feeling not finding joy in the things that
you like.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
Did that fright you? Yeah?
Speaker 4 (07:08):
Yeah, I feel like I'm quite an emotional person. I
feel like that's part of it's a big part of
my creative process, is a big part of my identity,
and so we're feeling kind of divorced from that or
a bit alienated from it. Was a little jarring, and yeah,
but it's something you have to balance because I mean,
(07:29):
taking it was a central and it kind of it
really got me out of a quite a bad whole
which is I guess the other side of being a
person with a lot of feelings.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
So Jonathan, when lets comes to you and goes, I've
got the song, but I think it's a bit silly. Yeah,
how do think? How does how do you go from there?
Speaker 5 (07:47):
I think I'm probably guilty of considering Liz's position a
little bit too much, like I should really just dismiss
it and be like, no, yes, you're being ridiculous. You know,
this is another work of genius. But I think I'm
probably a little bit too much like, oh, okay, let's
consider why it might be a crappy song, and let's
eliminate all of those you know, let's itemize it and
(08:10):
eliminate it, which I probably shouldn't do.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
You sound like the best therapist to have on hand
at times to work through a lot of this kind.
Speaker 4 (08:19):
I can't say that it's very It is very good,
but it is too much for a man.
Speaker 3 (08:23):
So now also have a therapist, which is for the best.
Speaker 5 (08:27):
Did you say too much for one man or too
much for a man? I think both are true.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
I love you're great with your song and your album titles.
Future me hates me expert in a dying field, and
of course now straight Line is a Lie taught me
through the concept and how that became the album name.
Speaker 4 (08:49):
So straight Line was a Lie is the name of
the albums. There's a title track, which was the last
song to be written, like all the rest of the
songs who were written, and we were in the process
of arranging them, and the album was kind of starting
to take shape in terms of us figuring out which
songs we were going to record, and I was kind
of looking at the songs and seeing if there was
a through line, which is the kind of weird thing
(09:10):
of looking at your life for the last couple years
and trying to figure out if there was a theme,
like it's a book report. Yeah, and it felt like
there was a through line of kind of maintenance and
progression not really being linear and how you just kind
of have to keep working. And so Straight Line was
riding it on the bus on the way home, and
so that one did just come out of nowhere, but
(09:31):
it's the exception.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
And then the song you kind of sing about this
that linear progression is an illusion and it feels like
there's I might be wrong here, but I kind of
felt like when I listened to this song that there
was kind of some acceptance that life is what it is,
and when sometimes you just accept that, there's a freedom
that comes with it.
Speaker 3 (09:50):
Totally.
Speaker 4 (09:50):
I feel like that's true. I feel like acceptance is
too strong a word for me personally, just because I
feel a real feeling with this album that it's it's
not a clean narrative.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
I think that's almost what the song is about.
Speaker 4 (09:59):
There's not always in your life a clean narrative of like,
you go through a difficult thing and then there is
a an end, and then you get closure, and then
you've moved past it and it's done, and I'm still
whatever the stuff that I'm going through, I'm still kind
of going through it. And I think a lot of
life is you just kind of keep going through it,
and you have to find meaning in the work.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
I guess you get better at managing it.
Speaker 4 (10:20):
Yea.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
The things don't get wrapped up in a nice little bow,
do they, you know?
Speaker 3 (10:25):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (10:26):
As much as like, especially when you're a writer, you
want to apply a narrative to everything. You want it
to be a story, and stories have endings that you
can kind of tie in a bow and be like, well,
this is what the story was about, and it feels
like the story is kind of ongoing.
Speaker 5 (10:38):
And like if there's anyone listening who is feeling like
frustrated that things aren't getting better and that maybe your
completely valid response was to Liz's point, you know, you
get better at managing it or whatever. You know, sometimes
you don't and it's just hard.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
Jonathan, how do you compare this album to your previous ones?
Speaker 3 (11:00):
I think this is a.
Speaker 5 (11:01):
Great Liz album. Yeah, Like obviously Lizards dug really deep,
and she's like done things that you don't expect a
songwriter and an indie rock band to do. I think
she's always done that, but I think she's done it
in such a clear way on this album that you know,
it's just not obviously a rock band record anymore. I
(11:23):
think that's a big that's a big step for Liz,
and it's like a real, you know, real achievement for Liz.
And then I think also it's a really great Tristan album.
I think this album has virtuosic drums at every turn,
and yeah, he plays just the right thing with feeling.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
But it's also a Jonathan album because you're the recording
engineer and the producer and the guitarists and things. So
there's a lot of you in here as well.
Speaker 5 (11:48):
Yes, they're always necessarily is.
Speaker 3 (11:53):
For better or worse?
Speaker 5 (11:55):
Yeah, I can. I can make it happen, and most
days I can listen to it and not hate it.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Yeah, I'm glad to hear that I'm just too hard.
I'm glad to hear that. Can I ask about mother?
Pray for me? This was another song that really struck
a chord with me, and I think it will with
a lot of people, whether they're thinking about their own
mothers or whether they're thinking about their children, their daughters,
you know what I mean. Can you tell me a
little bit about that song?
Speaker 3 (12:19):
Sure?
Speaker 4 (12:20):
Yeah, this is it was a really hard one to write,
hard one for me to even think about.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
For a while. I kind of couldn't play it without crying.
Speaker 4 (12:26):
It's yeah, I guess my relationship with my mother's complicated.
I suppose everybody has kind of a complicated relationship, but
it's it's a very loving one. My mum's Dnesian and
we I was born in Chikaga and we moved when
I was four to New Zealand, and I'm kind of
like there's a kind of golf of understanding between us
that's both cultural and then generational, and you know there's
a language barrier there, and it's just something that Yeah,
(12:51):
I feel like the kind of distance between us, it
kind of feels like impossible to span sometimes and there's
a desire to cross it. But then there's also I
feel like you do you have to kind of accept
your relationships sometimes you just have to accept them for
where they are.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
You are about to embark on a very large tour
to the US and the UK and European things. Will
you be able to get through that song?
Speaker 3 (13:14):
I have to desensitize myself. Please? How do you do that?
Speaker 4 (13:17):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (13:18):
I suppose in live environment it's quite different, right, you
focus on different things.
Speaker 4 (13:21):
Or yeah, yeah, this happens with songs, right the You know,
by the time you record it, you've played the song
maybe like a hundred times, and then by the time
you finished touring it, you've played it so many more
times than that and given it a new context, and
so there's new memories attached to it. But when I've
practiced it a lot, it kind of you get into
the feeling of doing it versus the feeling of what
(13:42):
you were when you wrote it.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
Okay, guys, so where are you at career wise? I
don't know if you would think about this, but I
mean it's been eleven years together, six albums, full studio albums,
You've played massive festivals like Coachala, you're touring, you've got
your biggest tour. Do you set goals as a bad
We do.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
We're very goaldi.
Speaker 4 (14:04):
Back in ten years ago first started this band, you know,
we had these like pipe dreams, which is like we're
going to play the Whermi Bar in fifty countries, which
is like fifty cities, fifty cities, sorry, fifty cities. And
that was you know the way bus like one hundred
and fifty cap what used to be. And yeah, so
and we surpassed that, I guess like a few years back,
sooner than we thought that we would. And yeah, a
(14:26):
lot of these kind of like wild kind of things
that we had imagined when we first started, we've kind
of achieved and so we've had to sit start singing
some nuance, but they are very pipe now.
Speaker 3 (14:38):
So it's hard because when you set.
Speaker 4 (14:41):
A goal and it's like kind of like pie in
the sky and then it happens, it feels like then
all the goals that you see it should be achievable
or something, and it's like that.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
I don't know if that's the point. I'm not sure.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Sometimes it's beast just to you know, make your goal,
just to get up in the morning, that's big. Oh look, well,
I can't wait to see what happens next. Have a
really good time on tour. And I am presuming you'll
get back to touring and New Zealand.
Speaker 4 (15:07):
Well yes please, yes it's a we'rever announced anything here, but.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
We'll work in progress.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
Okay, all right then, brilliant Jonathan list, thank you so
much for coming in. Appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
Thanks having us.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
It was Liz Stugs and Jonathan Piers, their lead singer
and guitarist from The Beats. The band's new album, Straight
Line Was a Lie, is out now in record stores
and online.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudkin, listen
live to news Talks It'd be from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News Talks edb This is.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
A straight Line was a lie from QWI indie rock
band The Best. It's the title track from their Poor
Studio album, released on Friday, and The Bets are going
from strength to strength a new US label. They've been
playing some pretty big festival gigs and selling shows for
the upcoming US tour. They're back in the country and
I'm excited to have lead sing of the Best Stokes
(00:34):
and guitarist Jonathan Peers in the studio. Good morning to
the two of you.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
Good morning, good morning, good morning.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Loving the album, I was just saying to you, gosh,
it packs an emotional punch that I'm not sure I
was quite ready for. Lots of feelings. I mean, it's
got an upbeat, optimistic field twitter as well, but it
just I feel like you're really vulnerable on this album
and you're just you're sharing in a way that maybe
(01:02):
I wasn't quite expecting. It's fantastic.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Thank you.
Speaker 4 (01:05):
Yeah, I guess I was going to places that I
think I don't normally. I'm normally a bit afraid to
kind of go to I did a lot of writing
because I was struggling to kind of write music, and
I ended up writing a lot on like a typewriter.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
Which also sounds really pretentious. It was just it was
just fun.
Speaker 4 (01:24):
But I would like write ten pages a day and
try and try to just kind of like pull stuff
from memory or from stuff that I don't normal late
to look at.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Have you struggled to write songs before.
Speaker 4 (01:37):
It's always like a bit of a It feels often
like a muscle that needs training to get back into
shape if I haven't done it for a while, because
we've been like touring for a year and a half
or something. But yeah, it was the longest they'd gone
without writing something while actively trying to write something, and
I just kind of it wasn't really working. So I
was like, well, if I can't write songs, maybe I'll
just write and start with that.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
So I imagine that as someone who writes songs for
a living and you find words important, not being able
to find those is all of a sudden quite worrisome
an issue, is it.
Speaker 4 (02:09):
Yeah, Yeah, it's there's something about the combination of words
and music that for me is very it's very instinctual.
It's very kind of gut based, and I was kind
of struggling to be pointing in any particular direction. But words, Yeah,
words are important to me, and there I have a
lot of them. I have trouble, real trouble being succinct.
So I feel like songs are where I can kind
(02:30):
of spew out everything that I want to say and
then try to kind of like condense it into a
particular feeling and try and kind of make myself understood
in a more succinct way than the way that I speak.
But then it's still not very succinct. There's a lot
of words in these songs.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
I don't think you're giving yourself enough credit there. So
when you would sit down and write those teen pages,
are they just is that that's not You're not trying
to write a song. You're just putting your feelings out.
You're getting things on paper, and then do you come
back to it and craft it into.
Speaker 4 (02:58):
Yeah, So it was like stream of consciousness and kind
of sometimes they were lyric like and sometimes they were
just it was just it was just words or just
like exploring a memory or something like that. But then yeah,
I ended up when I did to do a writing
period where it's okay, now it's time to write the songs.
I had a big stack of paper to pull from,
which is very useful, along with like voice notes and
(03:19):
journals and stuff like that. It's instead of pulling from
the absolute void, you kind of like I could look
through this big stack of paper with a highlighter and
be like, oh, this is something that I haven't looked
at before.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
It makes sense, It makes sense, it's yeah, so trust
the process. Yeah exactly, I'm going, well, yea, that's what
do you want to do? So, Jonathan, what is it
like for you in the band when you can see
that Liz is struggling.
Speaker 5 (03:42):
I think Liz and I we try to design a process,
you know, and we try to like work out. We
try to we talk about it and we talk about what, yeah,
what the block might be, but also like what, yeah,
how life is working and how things could be more
conducive and you know that, Yeah, we live like a
weirdly structured life these days, with like these kind of
(04:04):
long two to three year pattern and so you can
start to see the headlines coming, like we need a
period of creativity in about three months, you know, and
how we going to kind of get there and maybe
Liz and I will read a couple of books about
about how other great writers do it and then pinch
some ideas and then yeah, and then hopefully eventually it
(04:28):
starts to flow and you get some positive reinforcement and yeah, so.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
You've got to work at it, right. Do you think
a lot of people sort of think that these songs
just come out of nowhere. Suddenly you have a I
mean sometimes you talk to us a songwriter, and they'll
say that that song just came to me. It came
to me in ten minutes, and I knew I had
a great song, but it needed Most of the time
people will say, actually, as you said that, it's a practice,
(04:52):
you've got to work it at its time.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
Yeah, well, yeah.
Speaker 4 (04:57):
I saw it in Jeff Tweeny's book. It was quite
from someone else, but it says something like, when inspiration strikes,
it helps to be holding the pan like already, I
don't know if you're just waiting to feel inspired or
for something to kind of like And that still does
happen like occasionally, but I feel like I am comforted
by reading about writers and like hearing about people who
(05:20):
are yeah, just working, like just making a lot of
things and like exercising that muscle of creativity.
Speaker 5 (05:27):
And yeah, and we need to like we need to
acknowledge all of the time on either side of that
ten minutes of inspiration, because if it's just ten minutes,
Liz will always be the first person to say that
song's not very good. It only took me ten minutes
to write, you know. And in order to reinforce Liz,
we need to be able to say, well, it wasn't
ten minutes, was it. It was actually your whole life,
(05:49):
so you know, own it.
Speaker 4 (05:51):
We and the baths are I feel like addicted to toil?
Speaker 3 (05:54):
Yeah, that is true. Maybe value it too highly.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
Can I ask you about a couple of the songs
because they really had an impact on me. I'd love
to talk to you about No Joy. I just love
how straight up.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
This song is. Thanks.
Speaker 4 (06:12):
Yeah, that one was one that came fairly quickly when
when I was writing it, and I was like, I
don't think the song's anything, it's too silly, But yeah,
I think I was.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
I've had this experience.
Speaker 4 (06:25):
It's kind of about anadonia, and which is not being
not finding joy in the things that you normally would enjoy.
And kind of and it's not necessarily being depressed or
like despairing, but it's just kind of like not well,
I suppose it's just kind of a symptom of depression, right,
is not finding joy and the things that you normally like,
not lacking the things normally like.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
So it's something.
Speaker 4 (06:44):
That I experienced both in depression and then also when
I was towards the end of taking an SSRI, which
really helped and was really great, but then, like I said,
towards the end, I was I was struggling with just
kind of feeling a bit two level, and that was
about when I kind of weaned off. But yeah, just
that particular feeling not finding joy in the things that
you like.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
Did that fright you? Yeah?
Speaker 4 (07:08):
Yeah, I feel like I'm quite an emotional person. I
feel like that's part of it's a big part of
my creative process, is a big part of my identity,
and so we're feeling kind of divorced from that or
a bit alienated from it. Was a little jarring, and yeah,
but it's something you have to balance because I mean,
(07:29):
taking it was a central and it kind of it
really got me out of a quite a bad whole
which is I guess the other side of being a
person with a lot of feelings.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
So Jonathan, when lets comes to you and goes, I've
got the song, but I think it's a bit silly. Yeah,
how do think? How does how do you go from there?
Speaker 5 (07:47):
I think I'm probably guilty of considering Liz's position a
little bit too much, like I should really just dismiss
it and be like, no, yes, you're being ridiculous. You know,
this is another work of genius. But I think I'm
probably a little bit too much like, oh, okay, let's
consider why it might be a crappy song, and let's
eliminate all of those you know, let's itemize it and
(08:10):
eliminate it, which I probably shouldn't do.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
You sound like the best therapist to have on hand
at times to work through a lot of this kind.
Speaker 4 (08:19):
I can't say that it's very It is very good,
but it is too much for a man.
Speaker 3 (08:23):
So now also have a therapist, which is for the best.
Speaker 5 (08:27):
Did you say too much for one man or too
much for a man? I think both are true.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
I love you're great with your song and your album titles.
Future me hates me expert in a dying field, and
of course now straight Line is a Lie taught me
through the concept and how that became the album name.
Speaker 4 (08:49):
So straight Line was a Lie is the name of
the albums. There's a title track, which was the last
song to be written, like all the rest of the
songs who were written, and we were in the process
of arranging them, and the album was kind of starting
to take shape in terms of us figuring out which
songs we were going to record, and I was kind
of looking at the songs and seeing if there was
a through line, which is the kind of weird thing
(09:10):
of looking at your life for the last couple years
and trying to figure out if there was a theme,
like it's a book report. Yeah, and it felt like
there was a through line of kind of maintenance and
progression not really being linear and how you just kind
of have to keep working. And so Straight Line was
riding it on the bus on the way home, and
so that one did just come out of nowhere, but
(09:31):
it's the exception.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
And then the song you kind of sing about this
that linear progression is an illusion and it feels like
there's I might be wrong here, but I kind of
felt like when I listened to this song that there
was kind of some acceptance that life is what it is,
and when sometimes you just accept that, there's a freedom
that comes with it.
Speaker 3 (09:50):
Totally.
Speaker 4 (09:50):
I feel like that's true. I feel like acceptance is
too strong a word for me personally, just because I
feel a real feeling with this album that it's it's
not a clean narrative.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
I think that's almost what the song is about.
Speaker 4 (09:59):
There's not always in your life a clean narrative of like,
you go through a difficult thing and then there is
a an end, and then you get closure, and then
you've moved past it and it's done, and I'm still
whatever the stuff that I'm going through, I'm still kind
of going through it. And I think a lot of
life is you just kind of keep going through it,
and you have to find meaning in the work.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
I guess you get better at managing it.
Speaker 4 (10:20):
Yea.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
The things don't get wrapped up in a nice little bow,
do they, you know?
Speaker 3 (10:25):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (10:26):
As much as like, especially when you're a writer, you
want to apply a narrative to everything. You want it
to be a story, and stories have endings that you
can kind of tie in a bow and be like, well,
this is what the story was about, and it feels
like the story is kind of ongoing.
Speaker 5 (10:38):
And like if there's anyone listening who is feeling like
frustrated that things aren't getting better and that maybe your
completely valid response was to Liz's point, you know, you
get better at managing it or whatever. You know, sometimes
you don't and it's just hard.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
Jonathan, how do you compare this album to your previous ones?
Speaker 3 (11:00):
I think this is a.
Speaker 5 (11:01):
Great Liz album. Yeah, Like obviously Lizards dug really deep,
and she's like done things that you don't expect a
songwriter and an indie rock band to do. I think
she's always done that, but I think she's done it
in such a clear way on this album that you know,
it's just not obviously a rock band record anymore. I
(11:23):
think that's a big that's a big step for Liz,
and it's like a real, you know, real achievement for Liz.
And then I think also it's a really great Tristan album.
I think this album has virtuosic drums at every turn,
and yeah, he plays just the right thing with feeling.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
But it's also a Jonathan album because you're the recording
engineer and the producer and the guitarists and things. So
there's a lot of you in here as well.
Speaker 5 (11:48):
Yes, they're always necessarily is.
Speaker 3 (11:53):
For better or worse?
Speaker 5 (11:55):
Yeah, I can. I can make it happen, and most
days I can listen to it and not hate it.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Yeah, I'm glad to hear that I'm just too hard.
I'm glad to hear that. Can I ask about mother?
Pray for me? This was another song that really struck
a chord with me, and I think it will with
a lot of people, whether they're thinking about their own
mothers or whether they're thinking about their children, their daughters,
you know what I mean. Can you tell me a
little bit about that song?
Speaker 3 (12:19):
Sure?
Speaker 4 (12:20):
Yeah, this is it was a really hard one to write,
hard one for me to even think about.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
For a while. I kind of couldn't play it without crying.
Speaker 4 (12:26):
It's yeah, I guess my relationship with my mother's complicated.
I suppose everybody has kind of a complicated relationship, but
it's it's a very loving one. My mum's Dnesian and
we I was born in Chikaga and we moved when
I was four to New Zealand, and I'm kind of
like there's a kind of golf of understanding between us
that's both cultural and then generational, and you know there's
a language barrier there, and it's just something that Yeah,
(12:51):
I feel like the kind of distance between us, it
kind of feels like impossible to span sometimes and there's
a desire to cross it. But then there's also I
feel like you do you have to kind of accept
your relationships sometimes you just have to accept them for
where they are.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
You are about to embark on a very large tour
to the US and the UK and European things. Will
you be able to get through that song?
Speaker 3 (13:14):
I have to desensitize myself. Please? How do you do that?
Speaker 4 (13:17):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (13:18):
I suppose in live environment it's quite different, right, you
focus on different things.
Speaker 4 (13:21):
Or yeah, yeah, this happens with songs, right the You know,
by the time you record it, you've played the song
maybe like a hundred times, and then by the time
you finished touring it, you've played it so many more
times than that and given it a new context, and
so there's new memories attached to it. But when I've
practiced it a lot, it kind of you get into
the feeling of doing it versus the feeling of what
(13:42):
you were when you wrote it.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
Okay, guys, so where are you at career wise? I
don't know if you would think about this, but I
mean it's been eleven years together, six albums, full studio albums,
You've played massive festivals like Coachala, you're touring, you've got
your biggest tour. Do you set goals as a bad
We do.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
We're very goaldi.
Speaker 4 (14:04):
Back in ten years ago first started this band, you know,
we had these like pipe dreams, which is like we're
going to play the Whermi Bar in fifty countries, which
is like fifty cities, fifty cities, sorry, fifty cities. And
that was you know the way bus like one hundred
and fifty cap what used to be. And yeah, so
and we surpassed that, I guess like a few years back,
sooner than we thought that we would. And yeah, a
(14:26):
lot of these kind of like wild kind of things
that we had imagined when we first started, we've kind
of achieved and so we've had to sit start singing
some nuance, but they are very pipe now.
Speaker 3 (14:38):
So it's hard because when you set.
Speaker 4 (14:41):
A goal and it's like kind of like pie in
the sky and then it happens, it feels like then
all the goals that you see it should be achievable
or something, and it's like that.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
I don't know if that's the point. I'm not sure.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Sometimes it's beast just to you know, make your goal,
just to get up in the morning, that's big. Oh look, well,
I can't wait to see what happens next. Have a
really good time on tour. And I am presuming you'll
get back to touring and New Zealand.
Speaker 4 (15:07):
Well yes please, yes it's a we'rever announced anything here, but.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
We'll work in progress.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
Okay, all right then, brilliant Jonathan list, thank you so
much for coming in. Appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
Thanks having us.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
It was Liz Stugs and Jonathan Piers, their lead singer
and guitarist from The Beats. The band's new album, Straight
Line Was a Lie, is out now in record stores
and online.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudkin, listen
live to news Talks It'd be from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.
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