SHOUSE is Ed Service and Jack Madin, though on this beautiful song, Love Tonight, there’s a much bigger chorus of voices. It’s a track the pair have been sitting on for a long while, and we’re very happy to be sharing it with you today. You’ll see familiar faces like The Harpoons’ Bec Rigby, Martin King, Oscar Key Sung, and HABITS’ Mohini and Maia; but you’ll also hear a tonne of new voices — and, of course, sax from Tony Barnao. When we asked Jack to tell us a little bit about the song, he put together a very sweet letter, which you can read in full below. Press play on the James Robinson-directed clip, and love tonight.
“This song is, to me, all about the love of your friends. Singing with your friends. Making music with your friends. Hanging out and doing bizarre projects with all your deeply confused but generous and open-hearted friends.
The song is for all the people in Melbourne that make us want to make music. It’s a show of strength. Showing how we can all come together to help each other out, to sing each others songs and pull each other up when we’re down. Even though I wrote these lyrics, it means so much to me to hear all these incredible people singing those messages back to me.
Love Tonight is actually the first song Ed and I made together. It literally soundtracked the beginning of a really beautiful friendship. That was in early 2016, and from there it just grew into a monster of a project.
Around that time I was really obsessed with those insane 80s celebrity Bandaid/We are the World spectaculars. Half as parody, half as homage, we assembled a choir of all the people that we loved and admired in our local scene. Because we’ve referencing a type of track that was invented to raise money for charities, it felt important that we donate a amount to charity too. So, we’ve donated a portion of the budget to the Domestic Violence Resource Centre Victoria as a way of thanking the performers for their contribution to the track. We’ll also be donating all proceeds from the track to the same incredibly important charity.
Because these things take forever, this song is now like a time-capsule of a time and place that I’ll always remember. Some of these people have moved overseas, some are big stars, but all of them I still think of as very close friends and really believe that we always will be.”
Singers
Bec Rigby, Oscar Slorach-Thorne, Christobel Elliott, Tony Barna, Maia, Daisy Catterall, Monte Morgan, and Mohini.
Choir
Henry Madin, Rachel Raggart, Indra Haas, Reuben Schmidt, Martin King, Phoebe Stretton-Smith, Jennifer Loveless, Jude, Sophia Charles, Hayley Bracken, Jack Madin, Ed Service, and Alice McIntosh.