While on the Vans Warped tour in the USA, Larry Heath caught up with Trenton Woodley from Canberra band Hands Like Houses to talk about their upcoming record, their successes overseas, life on the road and much more…
You’re currently on the ‘Vans Warped’ tour in the USA. How has it been going?
It’s been great. I’m hard at work and they’re long days, but it’s worth it because we’ve had such a great responses and we’ve been hanging out with other bands, so it’s fantastic.
We’re going to be getting the ‘Warped’ tour in Australia later this year. Will you be on the lineup?
Oh well I don’t think we’re actually on it at the moment. I don’t think we’ve ruled out that it’s a possibility, but we’re not going to be on the first announcement. But we’d love too.
Well, can you tell us a bit about the festival for those in Australia based on your experiences so far?
Yeah, sure. I think it’s still stayed true to its punk roots. All the crew have been with the festival a very long time, so I’m stoked to just be around the bands and around the general festival experience. There’s always whole of stuff going on at any given time.
You had a lot of attention overseas pretty early on in your career. What does you think it means that a band from Canberra is getting attention from the US market?
Truthfully, I don’t really know what it means but we’re loving it all the same. It’s been a hell of an experience. As soon as we got the album out we seemed to have a pretty good response, but truth be told we’d love to be doing a bit more touring in Australia now. We’ve spent a lot of time overseas and we’re definitely looking forward to doing some home shows soon.
You’ve got your second album coming at the end of next week. Can you tell us a little bit about the making of the record and how it compared to your debut?
We were under a lot stress to get this one out on time – mainly from ourselves because of our full time touring schedules and actually write the record and have it out on the kind of time timeframe that we wanted. We recorded the first album in two halves over 13 months and then prior to that we had a month and a half of writing and preparing songs. This time round we obviously didn’t have that luxury of time, so we had to be a lot more confident in ourselves to actually get the songs into a position where we were really happy with them. All in all it actually worked out fantastically – that pressure made us focus on what we’re good at and where our strengths are and that helped us to define the album.
You worked with James Wiesner on the record who has a big reputation. What was it like bringing someone like James in?
It was a great experience. He certainly gave us challenges because he was quite direct. We would try and get a good take and he would say ‘no, that’s not it. Do it again!’ The first couple of days everyone was like ‘oh good what am I doing with the tracking!’ But that actually helped us with making sure the songs worked and really making sure we were really digging into the performance of every part of every song to make sure it was up to standard. That just made the album fantastic.
Have you been road testing any of the new songs?
We’re doing two songs at the moment. I guess at this point we don’t really have much time to road test them anymore because the album is already in print. But a lot of what we tried to do with this album is inject everything we’ve experienced and learned over the last 12 months of touring, so we knew what parts would translate best live and what people were enjoying the most in a live setting. And we tried to take those things into account even with things as simple as pace and things like to make sure it works live. So, we’ve kind of taken a leap of faith with a few songs and we’re just hoping that they’ll work live but the ones we’ve done so far have gone down great. We’ve introduced a third or fourth song into our show for later in the year.
When are we going to be seeing you back in Australia?
We haven’t locked it in entirely yet but we’re just getting a few details out but we should be hitting Australia during September maybe early October depending on how it works out. We’re looking forward to it.
What is it like having six guys on the road for such a long tour?
You definitely learn each other’s strengths, weaknesses and how to piss off five other people very, very quickly. But we’ve all be friends before we started making music together, so I guess that kind of bond helps a little bit. We weren’t just assembled out of necessity, it was out of just wanting to play music together and we evolved naturally from there. So, I think that prepared us a bit better. It’s certainly easy to see though why bands do break up while they’re on the road, because you are constantly around them quite often and it is a very full on thing.
Are you all crammed into a tour van or do you have a couple?
On the ‘Warped’ tour we’ve actually had a band wagon which is a fixed body truck. It’s a little bit shy of the size of a bus but we’ve got 8 bunks in here and plenty of space. It’s certainly been necessary for ‘Warped’ because you are doing such long days and often in such intense heat to be able to come back and be comfortable in a bit of air conditioning. It’s such a nice change.
How do you kill the time on those long drives between shows?
Truthfully, most of our drives are at night so we’re trying to sleep. The bandwagon we’re in is very comfortable but it’s a little bit rough at night, because they’re on air bag suspension. So, you do get kind of tossed around a little bit on a rough road. But we’ve got TV in here, and computers and I’m reading some pretty good books at the moment. I guess in a lot of ways it’s nice to relax without having to think ‘3:00 is show time and 4:30 is signing’ etc. It’s nice to not have to go anywhere where I do anything specifically.
Have you had any strange requests on this tour?
Not so much at signings – it’s more when you’re out and about and people will tweet you saying ‘I’m sitting right behind you in the food court, which has happened once or twice, and you think ‘well do I look over my shoulder or not?’ There’s just a look of terror on my face looking around and thinking ‘who is it?’
Have you had any highlights when it comes to other performances that you’ve seen?
Yeah for sure. The Chariot… Steve was displaying his penchant for climbing things. He was up on the railing across the top of the stage, and playing guitar. Seeing The Chariot everyday – they are just such a massive powerhouse performance band and then on top of that all the production stuff that goes with a band like Sleeping with Sirens. So, it’s such a cool tour to be on and those bands are doing a fantastic job and are performing fantastically every day, so I’m enjoying it thoroughly.
And how do you get the voice working every night? Because, as you said, the heat can get pretty demanding on the vocal chords.
Yeah, for sure. Well we have a routine that we do every day and try and control my diet, so I try not eat food or drink anything that’s not good for the vocal chords. By and large, I just try and get enough rest and if your voice is starting to come down a bit just go on vocal rest, so you get to use pretend sign language with everyone everyday which is great fun. I find being on tour is better than doing one show because your voice does condition itself somewhat.
I hope it keeps going well for you. Looking forward to seeing you back in Australia later this year.
Looking forward to coming back.
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Unimagine is released in Australia this Friday.
Transcription by Jemma Nott
