Melbourne musician Ari Jacob takes us on a deep dive into each song on his profound and transformative new album ‘Son Called Moon’.
Earlier this year, we got swept up in the warm acoustics and powerful storytelling of ‘Son Called Moon’, the latest music project from Melbourne musician Ari Jacob.
Transcendent and insightful, the conceptual album sees Jacob wrestle with identity, freedom and desire, as soundtracked by country-folk instrumentation and the raw intensity of his vocals.
“In the end, the whole story was about being ready to be loved,” Jacob later told us of the vision behind the album.
For an even deeper dive, Jacob swung by Happy for a track-by-track guide through ‘Son Called Moon’, from the song he considers “the most special” to the one that “was definitely a turning point in my life.”
Catch Ari Jacob’s full track breakdown below.
‘Call Me Moon’
Probably the most special to me on the album. This it the voice of my sister, Tali, who has Autism. She has been one of my biggest teachers in life.
She doesn’t really “converse” or use much language in her day-to-day life but she understands a lot and my parents taught her how to read.
This take was her second read of the text ever. This track became a sort of obscure spoken-word thing in which “a new consciousness is born”.
I genuinely believe that Autistic people hold the key to the evolution of human consciousness. The music was recorded in all sorts of separate bits. I recorded Ben Edgar on lap steel and just sort of said “play stuff in F”.
Then I recorded a choir of 8 singers singing 4 chords on repeat. I recorded piano and guitar separately in a small home studio. And then literally cut and paste it all together into some sort of order, once I had Tali’s vocals in.
‘Ceiling Fans’
Wrote this song in 2021 after returning to Tel Aviv from a winter in Melbourne. Everybody was tanned and sexy and free and I had put on 5 kilos and seen no sun.
I felt insecure and scared to be alone in the big city again, but had this fantasy of meeting somebody on the street who would love me and believe in me and help me let go of all the fear and shame.
The song really came to life when my friend Sun Mailich first played it on guitar.
‘Evaporate’
Many beautiful people left their mark on this song. Chen Shtiebel, who walked into my house unannounced when I was writing the first draft and helped me perfect the lyrics.
Sun Mailich, who came up with the “transition” part in a burst of inspiration. Simon Starr, who encouraged me to push the song further, to explore modulations, and who played such an iconic bass line.
‘Everlove’
This was a whopper. I started writing it in December 2021 with Sun and another friend Eilon Freeman, in my living room in Tel Aviv.
I wrote the verses about the man and the girl as I was travelling in the Berlin spring of 2022, through Germany, England and an unusual stop on Magnetic Island in Queensland.
I played it at open mics all over Berlin and it became a very formative song in my journey. When I started preparing for the recording of the album, I knew it was going to need a lot of crafting and attention to detail in order to get the arrangement right.
There were so many different versions of this song and in the end it was a 7 and a half minute journey.
‘Feel it Coming’
This song really was the beginning of the album. I wrote it in early 2023, it was the first song I ever wrote on guitar, and it gave birth to the open D sound that would soon become so iconically Son Called Moon.
I really remember writing the song in my apartment at the time which was this 250 year old cave in the Jerusalem hills, and feeling like I had just discovered a new sound. I entered a rich period of writing after this.
‘For Free’
I wrote this song the day I found out my sister was pregnant.
It started as a very candid sort of processing of how I felt about it, but quickly became a montage of moments with significant people in my life which all forced me to take an honest look at myself and be real about what I want and who I want to become.
It was definitely a turning point in my life, this song.
‘Permission’
I was commissioned to write a song for a gallery exhibition about the Book of Job, a story in the bible of a man who God deems the most righteous on earth, and is dared by the devil to see if he is still righteous when everything is taken away from him.
I decided to write a duet between man and God that tried to demonstrate that both have needs, desires, fears and passion. It became perhaps the most iconic song of Son Called Moon, a very widely loved song that I have played all over the world.
‘Prologue (Daniel)’
Wrote this for a boy I fell in love with for 3 weeks, on the couch in front of him, just after we broke up. As I wrote it, I was trying to tell him everything I saw in him, one last time before we part ways.
What’s uncanny is how much I was seeing myself, 7 years earlier (at his age), in him, and how I felt like I had reached the end of some sort of cycle that he was just beginning.
The recording of this song in the studio was totally live, and we only did 2 takes. It was the last thing we recorded on the last night in the studio, we all sat around the room together, we set up 3 microphones and just played.
There was a palpable almost eery serenity in the air, it felt like in those moments all of our hearts became one, my voice felt possessed by an incredible passion and love that I can still feel in my heart when I hear it. Lucky it was all captured on video too :)
