Jack Gray’s debut album, Swimming In Jeans, has been a long time coming.
The Mackay-born, LA-based singer-songwriter spent three years writing the 12-track record, producing almost all of it himself along the way. Recorded across Australia and overseas, Swimming In Jeans captures the uncertainty, change and growing pains of your early twenties, while giving Gray room to experiment with his sound.
With Swimming In Jeans finally out in the world, Gray takes Rolling Stone AU/NZ behind the scenes of its creation, sharing nine snapshots from the making of the record – from makeshift home studios and happy accidents to rare sessions in professional studios.
Jack Gray: Moira Dela Torre took this photo on her disposable camera while I was tracking keys for the duet version of “Safe Space” at Forbes Street Studios in Sydney. She had flown in from the Philippines and I had come from Los Angeles specifically for the session. Moira had just been through a difficult time in her personal life, and the song hit incredibly close to home for her. She could barely make it through a take without crying. It was an emotional day in the studio, but that vulnerability brought something deeply honest to the recording and reminded us both exactly why the song needed to exist.
It also felt incredibly good to be in a professional studio environment with an engineer, where, for once, I didn’t have to be the one behind the computer. I could simply be a musician, which is rare for me and made the session feel especially meaningful. I had nearly released a version of the song built around MIDI keys and Keyscape, but in the studio we ended up miking a dusty old upright piano instead. Capturing the room, the creak of the chair, and all the character of that old piano completely transformed the song and made it what it is.
Love Music?
Get your daily dose of everything happening in Australian/New Zealand music and globally.
This was taken in Los Angeles during Covid while I was working on “In the Picture.” The mural behind me was something I painted as a possible cover for an album that was eventually scrapped. Strangely, the words ‘I’ll just pretend, until I am’ wrap around the Red Hot Chili Peppers logo in the painting, and that phrase later became an early tagline for “In the Picture,” although it is no longer used. The mural has followed me ever since and now hangs in my apartment. I still look at it when I am working on new music.
I was recording in a makeshift home studio with an Apollo Twin Duo interface running into my laptop. At this stage, I was trying to write a song every day because I had just scrapped my previous album efforts and was starting again. Most of the songs began as rough demos, with voice, guitar, and a few programmed parts, and I built them up gradually. I liked keeping it simple and open while I was trying to figure out what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it.
I was recording the gang vocals for “Dumb Shit” in my apartment in Studio City, Los Angeles, and wanted them to feel roomy, rough and naturally boxy. Instead of trying to recreate that sound with an effect, I turned the bathroom into a makeshift vocal booth and set up a microphone in there.
The small space and hard surfaces bounced my voice around in a way that felt slightly chaotic and imperfect, which suited the song. I sang and layered the parts from the bathroom until it sounded less like one person recording at home and more like a group of people shouting together in a room.
This was me tracking drums for “Teen Jesus” at a studio in Los Angeles. It was one of those rare professional studio situations for me! We had access to an SSL mixing console, and the drums were mic’d up by one of the cowriters from this session. We only had the room for a couple of hours, and I arrived without having rehearsed or properly mapped out any of the parts (you can probably tell by the intense concentration face in the pic).
I was essentially learning the arrangement at the kit and recording it at the same time, knowing that every minute in the studio mattered. There was no time to overthink anything, so a lot of what ended up on the record came from the little instincts I have as a drummer and the pressure of having to commit in the moment.
This was taken early one morning in my apartment studio in Studio City, Los Angeles, while I was tracking synth parts for “Bluffin.” My routine is simple… Wake up, make a coffee, and start producing before the rest of the day had a chance to get in the way. That morning, I had landed on a group of synth sounds in TAL-U-NO-LX, a budget-friendly Juno-style synth plugin.
The sound suddenly made the song feel alive, and I was excited to keep chasing the idea while it still felt fresh. There is something about working that early, when you are not fully awake and running purely on caffeine, that can lead you somewhere you might have overthought later in the day.
This was taken in Philadelphia on Christmas Eve. I was supposed to be enjoying a family holiday, but I was so deep into finishing the production of “Tattoos” that I turned the living room into a temporary studio. It was freezing and snowing outside, so everyone was stuck indoors while I replayed the same few seconds of the song, adjusted tiny production details and searched through endless sounds.
It was probably not the Christmas soundtrack anyone had imagined, but I had reached that obsessive stage where the song felt close enough to finish that I could not leave it alone.
This was taken in the studio at my apartment in Studio City. I was actually trying to add a piano part to another song when I accidentally stumbled onto a completely different chord progression. It had nothing to do with what I was supposed to be working on, but I kept playing it and slowly it began turning into “Look At You.” I ended up writing the entire first verse right there in that chair.
It was one of those moments where getting distracted turned out to be far more interesting than the original plan.
This was taken on the floor at my grandma’s house. We were heading there for the weekend, and I had only just written “Swimming in Jeans” on guitar. At the last second, I decided to grab my production equipment because I was too excited by the song to leave it alone for a few days.
I set everything up wherever I could find space and started working through ideas, trying to understand what kind of world should exist around the guitar and vocal. I also tucked my sock between the strings and the wood of the guitar near the bridge, giving it a rubber bridge guitar feel. That ended up becoming a key feature of the song’s sound and production.
This was taken at my manager’s studio in Sherman Oaks, California, while I was working on the production for “In the Picture.” I had just finished tracking guitar and was going through different amp sounds, trying to find the one that gave the part the right amount of character without overwhelming the song. Someone had left a cowboy hat sitting in the studio, so naturally I put it on while I worked.
The hat had absolutely nothing to do with the record, but it brought some much-needed style to the process of listening to the same guitar part through endless combinations of Guitar Rig 5 presets.
Jack Gray’s Swimming In Jeans is out now.
