Big Scary are Tom Iansek and Jo Syme, a Melbourne duo who had been playing together since 2006 and spent 2010 putting out four EPs named after the seasons. Their debut album, Vacation, came out in Australia on 7 October 2011 on their own label, Pieater, and was nominated for triple j’s J Award for Australian Album of the Year. In June 2012, ahead of the album’s US release that September, they made “Falling Away” the single to lead it there, with free downloads and a new video.
The song was older than the album. It first appeared on the 2010 EP At the Mercy of the Elements, which the band described as a stripped-back, piano-driven ballad. The Vacation version is a separate recording, track 8 of 10 at 4:06, produced by Sean Cook and recorded and mixed by Gareth Parton. Iansek said the song is about growing up, about being handed life’s lessons instead of learning them yourself. Its verses run through things “they say” about something never named, and the chorus is a list of images that ends on the title. Beat named it the album’s highlight in 2011, for its simple piano over steady percussion, and Purple Sneakers called it anthemic.
The video went up on the band’s channel on 20 June 2012. Daniel Cummings and Chris Hadland of Picture Machine Productions co-directed it, with Hadland shooting and Joshua Carlon editing. Iansek described it as a journey into the mind of an older man with dementia, trying to reach a younger version of himself, and liked the way it turned the song’s subject around. Cummings said he heard a melancholy feeling of loss in the song. It was the second video for “Falling Away”: the first, made for the EP version in 2010, is no longer online.
It came at the start of their American run. Big Scary toured North America on their own money in 2012, playing SXSW and CMJ, and their next album, Not Art (2013), won the Australian Music Prize and came out in North America on Barsuk. “Falling Away” sits between the two, a song they had already released once, given a second recording and a second video for the record that took them abroad.
