Train will soon be back in Australia, performing at Bluesfest in Byron Bay and some special headline shows in Melbourne and Sydney next year. Larry catches up with Jimmy Stafford to chat more about the trip, the band’s new album Bulletproof Picasso and more!
How’s the day been treating you?
The day’s been treating us very well. We’ve been doing a bunch of promo here in Sydney… interviews and stuff. It’s what we’re here for and I actually do enjoy it! I’m in a hotel room here, looking down over the famous Harbour Bridge and the Opera House, where we’ll be playing in April.
Well the weather’s come out for you that’s for sure…
Yeah! I forget that it’s opposite seasons whenever I come down here, so it’s Spring here and now I’ve got springtime allergies I get back at home in Nashville. I wasn’t expecting to feel those allergies here! But we’re heading right back home into Fall weather tomorrow.
And then is it a lot more promo once you get back home?
Yeah, it’s more of the same. We’re travelling around doing a bunch of promo for the new album. So we’ll go home… and there’s a few shows that are sprinkled in. I think Friday we’re doing a huge wine festival in Las Vegas, which should be a good time.
As you do… Wine Amplified I believe it’s called. I like that.
Yeah that’s the one. Our good friends Michael Franti and Spearhead will be playing with us at that show as well. It will be good to see them.
Oh fantastic, they’re much regulars of Bluesfest which you’ll be returning for over Easter to play for the first time!
Yeah, can’t wait for that. I hear it’s a real big thing here. It’s really exciting.
I think you’ll find that quite a lot of bands you’ve played with over the years have graced the stages there… it’s good to see we’re finally getting you amongst it!
It’s going to be fun. And then we’re going to be doing a couple of other shows while we’re here in Melbourne and Sydney.
Do you think you’ll get to spend a little more time in the country than you did this time?
Probably not much more than this… we’ve been here for about a week doing promo and TV shows, and I think when we come back in April, so far we’ve only got the three shows scheduled, but you know we’ve got a lot of things going on around there, with European and UK dates, and the US too. So I don’t think there’ll be time to do much more than that.
Is it at all frustrating to have to leave so quickly after flying so far?
Well, we’ve been here a number of times now and have spent a lot more time here than most Americans ever get to. So i feel lucky to have been back here a dozen times over the last twenty years… even right now, I’m looking down over The Rocks and the Opera House and I feel semi-familiar with it, because I’ve been here enough. It’s not like we get much time to go sightseeing when we’re on tour anywhere, but you visit places enough that you feel like you get to know it after a while.
The best bars to go to if nothing else!
[Laughs] Exactly, but you feel like you know the people, the general vibe of the Australia and the crowds, our fans. That’s what it’s all about.
It’s why life is spent on the road! And of course we’re here not just to talk about your return in April, but also your new record – album number seven no less! I guess first of all, how does it feel having another one out into the world? Does the experience of a release ever get old?
No, it never gets old, it’s always been our goal. ‘Let’s make a record good enough to tour and to get to make another one’. We’ve managed to do that for twenty years, seven albums now, so it’s not old at all. It feels brand new, especially with this album, because I feel like this might be the best work we’ve ever done. I’m more excited doing the promotion and touring the record more than any of the others. Plus, we have an amazing group of musicians playing with us now and an amazing crew. It feels like a family. The vibe is really good. It’s exciting times for us right now.
Can you talk us through the musicians you do have with you now? I believe we saw a few of them on stage with you at the NRL Grand Final…
Yeah, which was a lot of fun to do by the way! Some of the guys like a Hector and Jerry, the bass and keyboard players, they’ve been with us for three albums, six or seven years now. They’ve been down here with us before a few times. We’ve got Nikita and Sakai on background vocals, really lovely ladies and singers who add a lot to the show. Drew Shoals is new on the drums from New York, he’s just an amazing drummer, super nice guy. He just fit right in. It’s a fun group.
And being surrounded by all these musicians must bring out new aspects of your songs that perhaps are only possible in the live environment – keeping it interesting for yourselves and the fans too.
It really is, it makes us better musicians too, because they’re all so talented, it pushes us every night. We push each other. I think the band is better than we’ve ever been. Especially with the songs we’re getting to play live now from the new album, we’re just really digging in and having a great time with it.
When it comes to the making of Bulletproof Picasso, was there anything that was significantly different to how you’d operated in the past?
It was a longer, harder process, mostly for Pat, who’s always been involved in most of the songwriting. We have really great managers who really pushed us on this record, to write and record something that could potentially be our best work. They really wanted us to come into our own and mature as a band and I think that’s really hard to do. You have to balance writing what you think is a really great song or piece of work, 12 of them as a whole, with do you want to be on the radio? Because sometimes they don’t go together. Our management pushed us to try and do both. ‘Let’s make an album that’s credible and mature and maybe still get on the radio’. That’s really tough to do and we’ll see if we’ve accomplished that. But I think the priority was the songs and making what we thought was a great album for our fans and then hopefully, radio would embrace it as well so we could continue to be heard around the world.
The pressure for that ‘song’ or the ‘single’ must have been significantly greater after the success of “Drops of Jupiter”.
Yeah, when “Drops of Jupiter” was such a big success all around the world and radio was suddenly embracing us, of course there was pressure from the record company and people around us to keep doing that. ‘That worked really well for everybody!’ But of course it’s hard to keep doing that, it’s a special song that people still relate to to this day. There aren’t that many songs out there like that and that’s because you can’t just ask someone to do it. How can you keep making songs like “Drops of Jupiter”?
Maybe that was a bit of the problem with the band for years, we were trying to be on the radio, we were trying to make others happy. We finally got to that place where we are now. Where we’ve been a band for twenty years, we’re still around, radio still plays our music and I think they play it because we occasionally come up with a good song that’s catchy. We’ve got more fans than we’ve ever had than before and hopefully that will continue with this new record. I think people realise that this music is the real deal. I think it’s obvious that these songs weren’t just written to be pop hits on the radio. These are just really good songs. We hope radio will play them, sure, but if not, I think our fans will still love the record.
It’s really felt like this for the band for a few records now, starting maybe with Save Me, San Francisco, where it felt like the focus has been on the album rather than the single, despite the fact of course that there have been successful singles along the way too.
I definitely felt that way with Save Me, San Francisco, I felt like it was a really solid record and yeah, it had a really successful song in it with “Hey, Soul Sister”, but we didn’t know it was going to be a bit hit. Who knows that? I think maybe the last album though, California 37?? did have a few songs that were more, leaning towards radio. “Drive By”, “Fifty Ways To Say Goodbye??”, I mean they’re still good songs and “Drive By” did really well around the world. But I’m not sure there are any of those songs on this record.
Well congratulations on the record, I’m excited to see how fans respond in the coming weeks and months. And we briefly mentioned the NRL Grand Final performance earlier – you guys have done a few NFL performances over the years, how did the experience compare?
Well you know, that morning I Googled on Wikipedia the rules of the game because I wanted to understand it. I wanted to enjoy it. I’m a big sports fan. And there are quite a lot of similarities between the two games and so I was able to get my head around it pretty easily, and then I really enjoyed the game. It was an amazing game. An amazing story with those brothers. We a had a really great time performing there, it was definitely an equivalent of a US Super Bowl, it was amazing to be invited.
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Train appears at Byron Bay’s Bluesfest from April 2nd – April 6th. Visit www.bluesfest.com.au for more information. They also play the Hamer Hall in Melbourne and the Sydney Opera House. For information on the Melbourne show, visit www.livenation.com.au and for Sydney, head to www.sydneyoperahouse.com!
