While at the Aussie BBQ at CMJ last month, Larry Heath caught up with Sydney outfit The Trip to talk about the ups and downs of their CMJ experience, the long recording process for the debut record, their “infamous frisbee skills”, plans for 2017 and much more…
How has New York been treating you?
My first time. I haven’t slept probably more than an hour a night… as you’re supposed to do in New York I suppose. We’ve been trying to see as much as we can. Take in as much music as we can. It’s been unreal.
Who have you had a chance to see other than yourselves?
Little Red, Boy and Bear… The Kin just really blew me away. Basically, we’ve caught all the bands we never have the chance to see back in Australia because we’re always touring. We see them all in 3 days in New York. It’s awesome.
These sorts of events are interesting as an Australian artist, because you do get the opportunity to be placed at the same level as bands who are well established, successful – dareisay “triple j darlings” – back in Australia. Here, you’re all starting from square one just about… what is that experience like?
It’s pretty amazing. New York as well, at CMJ, you’ve got like ten minutes to set up, and you’ve got to rush in, get your stuff on. At our first show the other night, the computer stuffed up the sequencing and all that… and we had new players who were joining us live for the first time. You’ve just got to go with it. The energy of that moment will get you through it. Like Chad and myself were singing, and getting electric shocks off the mics, not shitting you. And we’re usually pretty sexual with our mics. You couldn’t even touch it. It’s all fast, people don’t want to wait ten minutes for your band to change over. It’s an amazing experience to be a part of, that’s for sure.
Then at the end of the show when you finish, you find out that you’ve had your merch bag stolen by a crack head. “Thanks for playing your first show in New York, and now it’s going to cost you hundreds or thousands of dollars…” But that could be good for promo. There are now 60 Trip t-shirts rolling around the projects right now. There is now a gang of Frisbee throwing homeless guys on the lower East Side.
The Crips and The Trips!
*laughs* Yes, but their weapons are Frisbees! Like Tron, man. That will make sense if you’ve seen the music video.
We saw you throwing the Frisbee around at the College Day festivities as well. How did the Frisbee theme come about?
Well, there’s nothing like spending your first day in New York dressed like a jackass. Our parents said we had to wear something warm in New York, so we got a nice sweater and pulled our socks up to our knees.
But yeah, it’s all from our first video, which is all about freestyle street Frisbee, almost like a mockumentary, where we took over the streets of Bondi and surrounding suburbs in Sydney and did as many tricks as we could… given that we’re, you know, a band.
Obviously we love Frisbee anyway. So it’s got to come from the love of that. But a music video is a music video, and you’ve got a come up with a new idea for something and there it is!
A lot of people also said we had to come up as a backup plan a professional Frisbee players, so we thought music would be a good one to fall back on.
Now let’s talk about the album, it seems like it has been quite a while in the making.
Yeah it started out in America, in California, when we first recorded it. Finished it, came back (to Australia). And then we took another trip to LA and worked with another six producers. Came back. Then we ended up finding our boy in our own backyard, Adelaide, who gave us the exact sound we were looking for. So we re-recorded the whole thing again. That took us another year, and here we are a year later.
We just love spending money. We’re just like “let’s make a record that costs as much as a house!” and “what’s another year!? We’ve all got hundreds of years…”
It is a weird evolution though. I don’t know how it is for other bands, but we set out to make a record, and then we kind of went through these kind of different flavours until we finally re-recording with Mike, and got to where we wanted to be. It took a little longer than we would have liked, but the journey is always going to be the most important part of any situation. And here we are in New York. We got pretty luck to get to showcase here at the Aussie BBQ. And we’re stoked. We’ve made a record that we’re really proud of and that we really love playing.
We’re working out our long lead release strategy now. In 2017 we should have our next single… that’s definitely going to be our year *laughs*. We’re just hoping our label will stick around that long! Until then, we’ll just be playing some ultimate Frisbee.
For so many bands, they come here to try and make something happen for them in America, but for you guys you’re here because something already has. How do you think that this changes the perception for you back in Australia?
I was just going to say, we worked really hard overseas to bring back a record that we thought we had a real shot with. And to be honest, we never found a home in Australia. On the live front, it’s great, but on the label front… I mean we run our own label in Australia… it kind of happened over here first. We’re now relocating to California to support our release and tour as much as possible. Our hope is that we can land back in Australia and get the record our there one day. In 2017 maybe…
But I don’t think it’s changed any perceptions in Australia. I might be wrong, but as far as we’re aware, most people in Australia know what they know, and they have their reasons for it. And in their eyes, maybe they think we don’t have what it takes to release a record in Australia or whatever. But we just have to keep moving forward. So hopefully it does change perceptions. We’ll see what happens.
Either you’re a triple j or a commercial artist. We tend to be categorized more as a Commercial artist, but we’re not Bruno Mars, or whoever else. So we’ve been in a bit of a Catch 22 for seven years now.
In such a small market, I imagine many are stuck in the same position. So it definitely makes more sense to be over here – larger markets equal more opportunities.
It’s that game. There are people who decide who gets on the radio, and at the end of the day we just want people to come to our shows and decide what they think of our music. And we’ll be back in Australia eventually to do just that. We just want people to respond to the music, and that’s it – the live shows and the album. This album has been the soundtrack of our lives for the last five years, and we love it all.
And that’s a testament to not giving up… whatever your art is. There’s so many people and so little room for success. But you’ve just got to enjoy the road.
