Hey we're Polaris and we covered Eskimo Joe's 'Black Fingernails, Red Wine' for Like A Version.
We obviously had a list and none of them really worked and then you put together four and everyone
was just like, that's the one. Everyone loved that song growing up. I remember 'Black Fingernails'
and 'Sarah' just rotating on the radio and I loved those songs. They're the types of melodies
and lyrics that we would want to write. It's like something we could see ourselves singing
and I think that was that was really crucial for us. Something that made sense for our band.
There doesn't seem to be anything on the internet confirming
what the actual meaning of the song is. All there is is a little story that we all read about
him, the vocalist, having gone to the bathroom holding a cup of wine and put it down on top of
the toilet or something and then looked at his hand wearing his black fingernails and thought
this is a fun little song title. You'd know, you write the lyrics. Sometimes you're just
writing lyrics because they sound cool and then you work out what they mean afterwards. I don't
know if we'll ever know what the actual angle was. It's just a dark little song.
I sat down and programmed out some some rough guitar ideas and made kind of a skeleton structure
for it and then I think I put down some whispery vocals, the scream parts scratch vocal parts
and went over to Rick's and shaped up the riff to be a bit more exciting and made it a bit heavier.
I think one of the challenging things was it's a really detailed song. Yeah
you don't realise that necessarily the first few times you listen to but Jake went through
all of the layers. He went meticulously through. To the point though that I was kind of like saying
to the guys actually we didn't hear this part let's make sure that we find a way to reflect that
in the music and Rick's like, we just don't need them. The difference I was like, come on let's
put this in there. There's so much orchestration. There's a lot. We had some grand ambitions when we
first started planning this we're like, we're gonna go into Like A Version with a string quartet
and a keyboard and all this stuff and then because of you know the restrictions and everything going
on at the moment we had to kind of change our plan and stuff. But I think we managed to maintain
what we wanted. We did what we wanted to do. We just didn't have as many people in the
room. Maybe one day. Probably for the better in the end. With the year and the way things are,
our guitarist having flu conditions meant that he couldn't be here so we had to
get a friend who very graciously filled in for us who's an amazing guitarist Plini.
Having someone that talented to be able to step in was just an absolute godsend so shout out's Plini.
I was quite anxious I think coming up to this, as the days started to tick down this week and
they kind of went from five to four to three, the anxiety really started to hit me. To know
that you're proud of what we put together but just that anxiety of being like I would like it to go
well you want to nail it you want to nail it it felt like it feels like when we're at practice,
like we're playing really tightly together. It wasn't that different. No it really wasn't. Just
something about when you play a stage and you face a crowd, it's about them and when we turn around
and face a circle it's really about, it's really suddenly playing with each other a lot more than
it ever feels. You ideally want them to be able to recognise the song based off of you playing it
or are you really doing a cover? That's not true all the time but I think that's kind of how we
approach it at least is that we wanted people to recognise it by hearing it but for it to
sound like Polaris. If we'd taken a song that was already quite heavy and just tried to translate
it, I feel like honestly we probably wouldn't have been really able to get as creative with
it. Yeah but it does come with its own challenges because you know just just taking what someone
has sung softly and deciding to scream it in some parts and stuff, I know some people
won't like it. I know that kind of stuff is not for everybody but it's what we do. If
they enjoy this I hope they go back and listen to that whole album because I started bumping it
when we got into this cover and I remembered how good the entire record is. It's a great record.
So yeah. Shout out to Eskimo Joe. Yeah great writers.
Cheers triple j.