"It's taken over a year to finish", declared Rusty, vocalist for Melbourne rockers Electric Mary, talking about the upcoming album Mother which will be released on February 22. "There's a lot more depth in this record because we went about it a bit differently. We sat around for a couple of weeks in the studio doing production on every song this time whereas usually what happens is Pete and me and myself write the demos and we take them to the band and they learn them and then we record them. This time we did the demos, gave them to the band to learn, then we all sat around and started again basically and the preference was for the best idea wins".



One of Electric Mary's strongest appeals is you know what you are going to get with each release. Their brand of
uncompromising rock is a feature of their musical output, but Rusty hints that this album sees them explore new territory.

"There are typical Electric Mary songs on there", he surmised, "but probably half of the album is things we haven't done before which we started doing on the last EP The Last Great Hope when we brought in things like the harp. We haven't really done any laid back stuff before - and when I say laid back I'm talking about the speed of songs - but this time we've got a couple on there. We had one on the last one called 'Already Gone', there's one called 'Long Long Day' this time and another one called 'It's Alright' which has a chorus as such. A lot of our songs don't, in the typical songwriting genre, have choruses where you go here's the verse, here's the midsection, and here's the chorus. A lot of our songs have an end tag if that makes sense, so we went about it a bit different this time".



In the full interview Rusty discusses the lyrical content of the album, the bands wealth of talent of current and former guitarists, the early days of Electric Mary, the success of their debut release, why he thinks Electric Mary are more popular with overseas markets than in Australia, what can be done to reverse the growing trend, plus tells some entertaining stories about some of the bands the band has supported over the years.