King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard: Queens of Quality & Quantity

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard has been the hardest working band in the music scene since 2012. Hailing from Melbourne, Australia, the group is notorious for their ridiculous output, forays into different genres, and legendary name. Generally, the group can be called a psychedelic rock group, but as you're about to see labeling Gizz is no easy task.

When I learned in class that 'openness to experience' is the only part of personality that significantly increases creativity, I knew Gizz were the band I needed to write on. They have been open to exploring garage rock, jazz fusion, bluegrass music, electronic sound-collages, and more. Since their first official release--12 Bar Bruise in 2012-- the group has released 25 full length albums, with 5 a piece coming in 2017 and 2022. With that kind of output, certain years can feature intense jumping from genre to genre. 

King Gizzard discography from
2012 to 2020

2017 alone featured the group's debut in microtonal music, aptly titled Flying Microtonal Banana, the metal concept album Murder of the Universe, a jazz collaboration with Mild High Club called Sketches of Brunswick East, the polyrhythmic concept album Polygondwanaland, and the grab-bag Gumboot Soup. King Gizzard are adept at understanding a new genre, adapting to the domain requirements, and then producing a product that still reflects their personality. My favorite release (which I will expand upon later in the blog) is Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms, Lava, and was released in 2022, the other year in which the band dropped 5 albums. In fact, this was the first of three releases in the month of October of that year.

That's a lot of music.

How do they do it?

For a band to release so many albums, most of them with a story and similar soundscape, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard must be intentional in their design. In an interview with Songwriters on Process, lead songwriter and producer Stu Mackenzie said:

"We write albums rather than songs. We’re always thinking about what the album is, what the album’s personality is, and what it sounds like-- often three or four songs feel like brothers and sisters and they’re family and they live in the same album” 

Mackenzie even has albums "adopt" old songs because they fit the same personality as a new project that they're working on. This aligns with advice from legendary producer Rick Rubin's book The Creative Act. He advocates for creatives to indulge their inspirations all at once, as it is difficult to reignite the creative flame. In the chapter "Experimentation," Rubin uses the metaphor of seeds to explain that creative ideas won't always grow immediately:

“Not every seed must grow, but it may be that there’s a right time for each one. Consider storing it, rather than discarding it. In nature, some seeds lie dormant in anticipation. There are ideas whose time has not yet comes... other times, developing a different seed might shed light on a dormant one”

The idea of waiting on an idea to sprout and become relevant reminded me of the 'incubation time' creativity experiment. Creative ideas were found to be increased after a break period, which aligns with shelving songs and ideas until they're relevant again. Mackenzie went on to explain his time-off philosophy to Songwriters on Process:

“For me it’s … just getting rid of distractions. If you’re showering you’re thinking about something very basic, if you’re running you’re thinking about something very basic” 

Stu Mackenzie, King Gizzard and the

Lizard Wizard Frontman and Songwriter

The ideas generated during basic cognitive processes occur in the default mode network, which is the mode engaged in the mind's subconscious. Rubin similarly wrote in the chapter "Distraction:" 

“It can be helpful to step away from the project to create space, and allow a solution to appear. We might hold a problem to be solved lightly in the back of our consciousness instead of front of mind. This way we can remain present with it over time while engaging in a simple unrelated task” 

As previously stated, my personal favorite Gizz release is Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms, Lava. This album marked a transition from an 'individual song' approach to a 'jam' style, akin to the Grateful Dead. Lucas Harwood, bassist, described the creative process in an interview with KCRW:

[One of our 2022 albums] Ice, Death [Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms, and Lava] was kind of created in that way. We would go in each day, have groove and tempo, a scale, and kind of a feel. And we would just jam all day, and then swap instruments every half hour or something. That album was kind of written by [frontman] Stu [Mackenzie], filtering through all that material and finding the best bits and editing it down. Because when you jam for six hours, there's definitely stuff in there that you'd never want to hear again. So I guess that was literally jamming for hours on end, but not aimlessly.

Harwood gets at the idea of sifting through the creative river to find some gold, which Rubin says will get us closer to nature.

What Harwood left out were the specific parameters, the domain restrictions, that they placed on themselves. King Gizzard aimed to make an album comprised of seven songs in each of the musical modes. They placed these restrictions on themselves, thereby working within a defined system. Stu Mackenzie would then mix the jams into what sounded good, rerecord the good parts, and organize the songs into their final forms.

King Gizzard and Lizard Wizard are masters at creativity, and I think you should check them out. There's bound to be something for you.

Sources:

Rubin, Rick. The Creative Act: A Way of Being

https://www.songwritersonprocess.com/blog/2020/stugizzard

https://www.kcrw.com/music/shows/music-special/king-gizzard-lizard-wizard-lucas-harwood-interview-hollywood-bowl-tickets