If you’ve been thinking that you haven’t seen The Griswolds play in capital city in a little while, you’d probably be right. The Sydney group are enjoying international success and traversing the USA as alternative and college radio has been all over our latest export. But that didn’t stop them from catching up with the AU to bring us up to date on their successes and their debut album Be Impressive, which is out this Friday. Read on:
Talk us through how the US tour is going – what have been some of the highlights to now? How have audiences been treating you?
Well we are bout 9 weeks into this tour, it started out with Bonnaroo and Firefly festivals which were huge! then we hit the road around States and Canada and we’ve been doing it ever since, we actually have our last show on this tour tomorrow. it’s been pretty insane to be on the road this long, you rarely sleep, sometimes not enough time or money to eat, your body aches from spending 70% of your life in a van. Our van has actually broken down 4 times, so we ditched it on the side of the road in San Francisco, we’re gonna blow it up for insurance fraud haha. This has been so much fun though, we couldn’t ask for a better experience. It’s not everyday you get to travel around 40 US states doing something you love doing. The audiences have been great, they seem to get bigger and bigger every show we do, we’re starting to notice groups of kids singing our songs back to us and it’s the best feeling.
You’ve been doing some shows with Miniature Tigers – tell us a bit about those guys and what it’s been like on the road with them?
They are great dudes, we all kinda have similar personalities so we all get along great, It’ll actually suck when this tour is over, will genuinely miss those dudes.
We’re finally getting your debut album out in Australia on August 22nd. You pretty much haven’t stopped since we saw each other at Bigsound… onto CMJ… onto SXSW… When did you get time to record the album? Talk us through were you recorded it, when, and what that experience was like!
Yeah it feels like we’ve been touring endlessly, can’t believe Bigsound was almost a year ago! We found sometime in early 2014, right before sxsw to fly to LA to record the album. It took about 6 weeks to record. It was one the best experiences we’ve had as a band. When the label asked us who we wanted to work with on the album, we all chose Tony Hoffer, he has produced/mixed albums for Phoenix, Beck, The Kooks, M83, Foster The people etc etc the list goes on. We actually thought he was such a long shot but the label sent him the Heart of a Lion EP and we we had a Skype date with him, a week later it was locked in. He became so much more than producer to us, he challenged all our songs, broke them down and we re-created them together as if he was a 5th member of the band. I guess thats exactly why so many people rave about his producing. He also is now a life long friend, best fucken guy in the world and one of the only Americans we’ve met that gets our sick Aussie humour.
How did you decide on the final name for the release, Be Impressive?
There was all this pressure involved in writing the album, we have a label that are throwing all this money into the album, and we’d locked in our favourite producer, the one thing we didn’t have were the songs yet. Considering that you only get one chance to release a great debut record, we were really feeling the pressure of writing the perfect songs for this album. While we were writing in middle of the bush in Australia, we just decided to shake off all that pressure and go back our roots and just write music we loved. We wrote a song called Be Impressive which is about that process and ended up becoming the entire theme and title track for the album.
Who is expected to be impressive? Are you? Am I? If I don’t succeed at being impressive, what will happen? Is there a scale for this?
It’s kinda a tongue in cheek message, for us personally we were struggling to be impressive whilst we were trying to impress everyone around us, as soon as we just went back to doing what we loved and doing it our way, we felt like that was the most impressive we could be. Its fairly open to interpretation.
You’ve had some great videos so far… do you have anything else in store in that department?
haha i hope so. I hope we can keep delivering weird and crazy videos. We hate videos that have been done over and over again, so we always try to come up with videos that make people go “what the fuck did i just see?”. We’re working on a new video at the moment which might involve our shitty tour van that kept breaking down on this tour.
You’re celebrating the release of the album while you’re in the USA, what do you expect to be doing to celebrate?
We’re having a release party in New York City on the day of the release, we’ve got a bunch of sponsors on board including a lot of drink sponsors so its shaping up to be one of those nights where someone wakes up in paddy wagon wondering where their clothes are. Its gonna be one of the hugest nights of our lives, we literally can’t believe how quickly this album release has creeped up. Very exciting time for us.
Has the traction in the US surprised you at all?
yeah totally, we have no idea how this happened, we are being played on their biggest radio stations out here and charting in the top 20 on Alternative radio at the moment. It still blows us away to see our name in the charts along side our favourite bands.
You’re on the road over there quite a bit now… how do you kill time other than answer terrible Q&As like this?
We play frisbee, listen to music, watch loads of movies and television, everyone watches documentaries to keep our selves from getting stupider. We also sleep as much as we can in the van only because you often have no idea when the next time your gonna see a bed is.
When do we see you back in Australia?
…it’s a secret, but lets just say, it’s a good secret involving much good news
What are you missing most about home?
We’re all missing our dogs back home more than anything, and of course our friends and families. We miss Aussie beaches, we have the best beaches in world!! The food back home! Honestly our food back home is tonnes better than here, everything here is artificial and covered in sugar, not to mention very unreasonable portion sizes, we’re gonna be The Fatwolds. Aussie Women, there just ain’t nothing quite like our women back home.
What are you enjoying most about being on the road?
It’s all about the shows for us, the gigs make all the hard work worth it!! You could having a bad day, missing home, under slept but that all goes out the window when you hit the stage. In a band, there’s nothing quite like that feeling of the hour that you play, and having a face to face connection with all your fans. It’s really rewarding.
What are you looking forward to in the months ahead?
I guess album release is first on this list but post album release, we’re most looking forward to coming home and smashing out an Aussie tour!! We’re all really looking forward to getting back into more song writing too, being on the road this long and seeing all the shit we’ve seen is quite inspiring. Can’t wait to drop our 2nd single in Australia as well, thats just around the corner!
Your thoughts on this video?
I thoroughly enjoyed this. weird and wonderful.
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Be Impressive is out in Australia this Friday, August 22nd.
