Spain offers a new lease of life for Kiwi musician Scott Mannion

It was like coming out of a long dark tunnel, into the light.

For four long years, New Zealand songwriter Scott Mannion lived under bleak grey skies and endless pouring rain in Wales.

And then, damp and blinking, he emerged into a new life entirely, on an arid rocky hillside in Spain.

"Moving here was inspirational," says Mannion from his current home in the Spanish mountains.

READ MORE:
* Princess Chelsea: Sweet like sugar, sharp as a knife
* Lawrence Arabia: song-writing dare pays off
* Lord Echo: Searching for those golden frequencies

"And it couldn't have come at a better time. I think it rained every single day during my last year in Wales."

Cold rain. Oppressive dark clouds. How richly symbolic.

During his final months in Swansea, Mannion was going through a painful break-up as a nine-year relationship fell apart.

Anxious and depressed, he had to get away, to a place where he could repair himself.

Mannion settled on Chelva, high in the hills outside Valencia, where artist/musician friends offered him a residency.

"It's that typical dramatic Mediterranean landscape very dry, but with a river flowing along the bottom of the valley and natural springs everywhere."

He moved there permanently five years ago and now lives his new life under a bold blue sky, amid almond trees and olives, figs, pomegranates.

"There are old stone ruins everywhere. It's lovely. And there's a different way of thinking about time here. People go out and eat really late. In summer, you'll see five-year-old kids on the street with their families at one in the morning."

In this seemingly timeless environment, Mannion finally found the time to finish an album.

And I say "finally" because this really is a big deal.

Mannion's new record Loving Echoes has been 15 years in the making, which is an eternity in the rapid-cycling world of popular music.

I mean, a baby conceived while its parents were listening to one of the wispy, romantic little pop epics on Mannion's last record would now be a sullen teenager, quite possibly shouting "You don't understand me!" and slamming doors around the house.

Fifteen years seems like procrastination of the highest order, but anyone who knows Mannion will be less-surprised, because he suffers from that most-debilitating of creative conditions: perfectionism.

Throughout the entirety of the 15 years in question, in Auckland and London and Wales and then Spain, he has been writing and recording music; it just never got to the stage where he considered it, you know… finished.

Every song just needed one more tiny xylophone part, or a smidge more echo on the snare drum, or some gently parping flugelhorn on the middle-eight, or a revised chorus arrangement.

"Yeah, it's madness, right?" he admits with a gusty sigh. "But I have this problem of not being able to stop.

"I just keep adding layers and taking them off and changing things in tiny subtle ways, sometimes for years. It drives the people around me crazy. In the end, with this record, after listening to every song hundreds of times on repeat, my partner was literally begging me to stop."

But once Mannion starts on something, he gets endlessly fascinated by the possibilities.

The months turn into years, as he keeps on piecing together vocal harmonies and counterpoint and different sonic treatments, like some sort of never-ending jigsaw.

"For me, that's the fun bit, I guess, when I'm in the middle of a song and on a roll. A lot of these songs were almost done three years ago, but I just couldn't let them go."

The good news? When Mannion finally does loosen his grip and lets them teeter out into the wider world, his songs are well worth the wait.

Indeed, some of his past recordings border on the miraculous.

He first caught my attention in 2003, when Mannion and his musical partner, the artist and former Shortland Street actress Li-Ming Hu, released two superb albums on the same day under band name The Tokey Tones.

Full of delicate alt-pop ballads, these conceptually linked albums were named Caterpillar and Butterfly and the music seemed almost unprecedented in our cultural history – simultaneously lo-fi and meticulous, fragile and potent, sweet and sad.

Mannion delivered his lyrics in a bashful croon over Hawaiian guitars, tinkling xylophones, ancient analogue synths, strings, piano, brass and righteously twangy electric guitars, the whole shebang rendered even more glorious by Hu's free-floating harmonies.

Those Tokey Tones records had a fragile complexity at a time when a lot of the music coming out in New Zealand was reasonably blunt.

Their melancholy romanticism felt emblematic of some sort of warm and agreeably wimpy pop renaissance.

Around the same time, Mannion also collaborated on the first Brunettes album Holding Hands, Feeding Ducks and co-founded Auckland indie label 'Lil Chief with Brunettes' singer Jonathan Bree.

"When Jonathan and I started 'Lil Chief records in 2002, we felt we were doing something really different, that's true. Amongst us and our musician friends, it seemed like something new was going on that no existing label would have supported, so we set up our own."

'Lil Chief has since released a steady stream of fine albums by Bree, The Ruby Suns, Princess Chelsea, Lawrence Arabia and many more, with many of the key protagonists showing up on one another's records and live tours.

In between making music and supporting himself doing web development work, Mannion does much of the day-to-day record label work from Chelva. His basement is rammed with shelves of vinyl LP stock.

It's wonderful to think that this bumper cache of eccentric New Zealand pop sits high in the hills overlooking Valencia, then gets posted all over Europe when orders roll in.

"Those last Princess Chelsea and Jonathan Bree records both did really well over here, so it's gotten a bit too much, to be honest. There's even more vinyl stored up the road in a friend's house."

And now, at last, comes a 'Lil Chief solo album from Mannion – his very first, he says, as the Tokey Tones was a duo project.

"This album is much more personal, too. In the Tokey Tones, we mostly made up whimsical stories and set them to music. But Loving Echoes is about me."

A rich patchwork of sonic elements from different times and places, with the occasional dusty drum beat or chord sequence dating way back to the Tokey Tones days, the album considers the trajectory of love.

Half the songs were inspired by that painful break-up back in Wales and the other half by his new love: Greek-American painter Julie Karpodines, who arrived from New York for an artist's residency in the same Spanish village when Mannion moved there.

"Loving Echoes wasn't intended to be a concept album, but it ended up being about the different stages of a relationship, so yeah… maybe it is."

The first single Your Kinda Love is a duet with Catalan singer Clara Vinals of Spanish band Renaldo & Clara.

Offsetting Mannion's reedy tenor, her voice perfectly suits the song – sweet and airy, a cross between Brazilian singer Astrud Gilberto and the female French pop stars of the 1960s.

Shot in Spain on old-school Super-8 film, the video clip finds Mannion and his mates indulging in all manner of highly symbolic palaver as they destroy various heart-shaped objects: cakes, cards, sandcastles, candy.

There's a dude with a giant broken heart painted on his chest. At one point, Mannion beats the bejesus out of a heart-shaped pinata with a baseball bat and great puffs of glitter fly out.

The old film stock turns this visual representation of love gone sour into something rather beautiful, rendered in dusty oranges and browns and watery greens, the colours washed out by strong sun, against stone walls and worn cobblestones.

It's idyllic. You want to move to Spain tomorrow and start a new life of your own in a village that smells of hot granite, almond blossom and juniper.

"Our history, you could read it and weep," sings Mannion on Do It For You. "Tell me what you like… I'll do it for you…".

Poignant and lovely, the song suggests a submissive partner who'll do anything for a damaged relationship to continue, while in the background you can hear field recordings Mannion made during a local fiesta where the residents of Chelva walk through the streets ringing cow-bells.

The film clip for the album's second single, Not Exactly Deep, is also shot on Super-8, but this time there's a slightly sinister vibe.

"What you mean to me, it's not exactly deep…" sings Mannion as people in peculiar papier-mache masks traipse through caves and into the woods carrying pumpkins and kewpie dolls.

"I started that song in Wales, just recording it on an iPad," he tells me.

"It started out as an electro-pop thing, almost disco, and some of those very early sounds are still there in the mix. Then I went to Oslo and we did more work on it with Ryan (McPhun, The Ruby Suns) and added in some other parts from a totally different song. It's one of those conflicted songs where the verses are trying to play it cool and the other parts are all about denying how strongly you feel for someone…"

Indeed. When it comes to love and music, nothing is ever quite as simple as it seems.

As with some of his musical heroes – Burt Bacharach, Velvet Underground, the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson – Scott Mannion makes emotive ballads of unusual complexity and depth, masquerading as very simple pop songs.

Glockenspiels tinkle. Bells chime. Strings shiver and swell.

The gentle smack of live drums rides up and over programmed drum machines.

Acoustic and electric guitars weave together in unexpected patterns, the warp and weft of a mildly hallucinogenic sound top-stitched with fine detail.

Every passing emotional current in the lyrics is picked up and enhanced in the instrumental arrangements.

"Brian Wilson was a massive influence, obviously. For this record also, I was listening to a lot of Neil Young and Fleetwood Mac. But Brian Wilson will always be very central for me."

He admits he also had a bit of help along the way from gifted mates.

Mannion and his partner Karpodines have bought and slowly renovated a "massive" 300-year-old stone house that is, he says, "more attractive for friends to visit than Wales ever was".

Jonathan Bree came over and played bass and James Milne/ Lawrence Arabia visited multiple times to add backing harmonies.

Ryan McPhun emailed drum tracks and flew over from his current home in Norway to assist with the production. Jonathan Pearce from The Beths spent seven weeks working on the mixes.

But mostly, what we have here is an obsessive, long-term labour of love for Mannion.

Even now, with the release date looming, his perfectionist tendencies won't leave him alone.

"To be honest, there are still things I'd like to change. There are certain sections of these songs I'm more happy with than others. I'll notice something that really worked with the strings, or a collection of strange chords that sound good, or a way we solved some sort of problem in the arrangement and get pleasure from that."

Now 41, Mannion still has ongoing issues with anxiety. Is this what has him always second-guessing himself, agonising over the quality of his songs, withholding them from public attention for years until they're been endlessly tickled and tweaked and sculpted?

"Definitely. I worry far too much about certain things and my music is high on that list. There's always this cycle – 'Oh, this is OK', then a while later – 'Oh, no, this is s..'. But my anxiety had gotten a whole lot better since I moved to Spain, and also, Julie gave me back a lot of confidence that I had lost. She reminded me this stuff was good so I should get serious and finish it."

Mannion is hopeful that it won't be another 15 years until his next record.

"Going forward, I would like to be a little less precious. But in the meantime, it feels great that Loving Echoes is coming out at last. After 15 years, I'll finally be able to move on."

Scott Mannion's Loving Echoes is released on June 7 via 'Lil Chief Records.