Tropical Itch

Jarrah McCleary is a brave man. The centrepiece of Sydney band Panama knows what it is to take a risk with his art and his career. Previously hailing from nu-rock band The Dirty Secrets, McCleary and co. were doing alright; they played festivals around the country, including Big Day Out and Southbound, as well as touring Japan, America, and Europe, and had a handful of successful releases to their name, but it was a move to Sydney which saw McCleary pulled in new directions as he began work on the next record It's Not Over. “I was writing it on the laptop in Sydney in this tiny one bedroom apartment,” he says. “I wrote it for a couple of years just getting songs down and then it came time to record it, and I had the opportunity to record it with producer Eric (Broucek), a friend of mine in LA”

It was in LA that McCleary found himself soaking up his surrounds, and the synth lines and ideas on his laptop starting to take shape. Just as Snoop Lion was born of Jamaica, Panama's new-found sound channeled the beaches, tropical heat and bikinis of LA while taking a much more dance-orientated list of influences on board than your typical Dirty Secrets record. “Working with Eric, he is very experienced with Detroit/Chicago sort of house music,” McCleary enthuses. “We'd probably been rehearsing for about three or four months before and he recommended a few books and I went and read them. I guess when you're doing that style of music you wanna be educated enough to know what you're trying to do, not just kind of write a song.”

McCleary's writing habits echo that of a musician more steeped in a dance background then the front man of a rock'n'roll band, writing on a laptop and making the trip to LA alone would seem somewhat unconventional for most. “I'm constantly looking for new music,” he confesses. “That record that I did in LA was actually inspired a lot by Italo-disco. It's funny because that music is so cheesy but there's a lot of stuff that I sampled. Like, I'd listen to it, then I'd press record and I put it into a track that I was working on and then I'd write a similar part and then pull it out. It's a way that maybe a hip hop person would work, except they'd maybe keep the sample in. Just those different elements you can use to keep things fresh and keep yourself going in new directions.”

Completely rebranding the band was not without challenges for McCleary, taking a completely different tack with the new record meant letting go of everything The Dirty Secrets had built up, and starting again. “Cam (Edwards, The Dirty Secrets' bass player) heard the record and said, 'Yeah, yeah, this is good man' but the other guys heard and were like, 'Well it's not really what we wanna do', so some of the guys landed other projects” McCleary concedes. Losing the line up wasn't the only problem though; management and the band's label went with them, understandably causing McCleary some early nerves.

“I was pretty freaked out, it was a pretty stressful couple of months coming back,” he confides, but when the first single went to radio, triple j picked it up and played it on high rotation, bringing with it new interest. “There were a lot of emails coming through and labels were interested and from that we were able to sort of jump onto the next level I suppose and work with that.”

When pressed about what drives a musician to take big risks with their career in an industry that's so hard to crack once, let alone twice, McCleary gets brutally honest. “I've got nothing to lose now man, I'm already 31,” he laughs. “I'm just enjoying myself and writing music that I enjoy. So yeah, I'm not too worried about that anymore, it's good, it's definitely pressure off.”