For those who haven’t heard of Royal Chant could you tell us a bit about the band?
Royal Chant started off as just another guitar band at the tail end of one of the many indie band waves here in Australia in 2009, and our trajectory was the same as so many others, in that we got some buzz, got a manager and booking agency, worked with a name producer, and had our first singles added to rotation on the big national youth broadcaster, Triple-J. We rode that wave hard for a good 2-3 years, already undergoing line-up changes almost from the get-go, and then basically the scene changes and people move on to other things and you are left with what you are actually worth, which is: not much.
We were an OK band, honestly, getting by on some decent songs, a lot of passion, some great hair, and a live show that had hints of chaotic intrigue, but ultimately we were fundamentally unstable, unbalanced, and unhealthy and definitely not built to go the distance. It was a lot of fun, especially for what was essentially a bunch of kids from regional Australia (I was the oldest by far, and a recent immigrant from America, so there was always a bit of disconnect built-in to our DNA), but luckily everyone remains on good speaking terms, which is nice. Most band stories in Australia end there, with everyone going their separate ways and having some cool stories to tell.
The biggest difference is that when it should have been over I just didn’t stop and just kept going with patchwork line-ups. But, I always kept the focus on writing and releasing and trying to create the perfect song that would capture some sort of essence. Of course, I never got there, with far more misses than hits, but that perseverance started to create its own momentum and narrative and that’s when you can feel a shift from within and you realize ohhhhhhh…..this is what it means to truly create for yourself. In retrospect, I can see that a lot of that self-propulsion was really a form of panic and self-preservation, but it still yielded some results that I don’t hate.
We were lucky to find James Carthew, who we originally recruited on bass back in 2011 or so, and he remains a member of the band despite living and working in America. He was the first one that I connected with on an artistic level, who didn’t think about being in a band as merely a vehicle for musical success, but of being capable of reaching the deeper parts of human existence. He helped me rediscover what my true roots were and helped guide us in what would become our current trajectory. He remains involved in the songwriting and recording process in a variety of roles, but most importantly he is a voice I can turn to who has ideas and opinions I connect with and relate to. Losing him as a presence on stage back in 2015 when he moved was a real loss, because he had the same attitude towards performing live that I did, but I’m definitely glad he’s still in the Royal Chant orbit.
Wade Mobbs joined on drums back in 2017, and that was another game-changer. Besides bringing rock-solid time-keeping, he has a curiosity and humility that helps us connect through these songs and the same blue-collar work ethic that I try to bring to this whole endeavour to hopefully keep us grounded. He has seen me through some of the roughest of patches, both in the music biz as well as whatever turmoil I had going on in life, and his calming presence on stage and in my life has been one I do not take for granted. Bands are such curious little machines, with so much needing to go right in order to succeed for an extended period of time. It was a circuitous route but I consider myself very lucky to have just simply kept going long enough for it to work itself out, and that’s why we’ve been around for so long but remain basically an underground band that occasionally punches above our weight.
Who inspired you to get on stage and perform?
Just the idea that I could. It’s probably ego and narcissism, honestly, but hopefully, we’ve been able to harness that initial impulse and put it to good use. We think about this a lot, and we haven’t come up with an easy nor satisfactory answer, but maybe the closest we’ve come is to realize that sometimes you just have to open your mouth and shout for joy, or love, or despair, or anything and everything in between. Sometimes one looks at the world and wants to add to it, or rearrange it, or make sense of it.
Also, growing up with the golden age of MTV (if it can be said to have such a thing) probably had a lot to do with it. From the hair metal 80s to that beautiful moment when alternative music exploded onto the scene, when no one actually knew what was going to happen so lots of great and underground bands had a little moment in the sun before the corporate music machine settled on Nirvana as being the de facto look and sound, that definitely was inspiring to see such a broad mix of outcasts and artists and smart kids, dumb kids, & damaged kids taking the stage and creating such diverse interpretations of what music could even be. At some point, we said, “Hey, I can do that”.
What are some of the artists/albums that have stuck with you and inspired your sound?
Although we always had a massive interest in and ear for music, it wasn’t really until age 16 or 17 when we started to take our first steps towards songwriting, and we discovered our Mount Rushmore of Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Michael Stipe (R.E.M.), & Robert Pollard (Guided By Voices), and then just stumbling onward from there. Any beautiful or captivating lyric or melodic line will catch our ear, and we will veer between both fox and hedgehog tendencies for various amounts of time in our music consumption. The Pogues, Elliot Smith, Beck, Idlewilld, Tom Petty, Dusty Springfield, anything Motown, plus random one-hit wonders through the years, it all just adds up and jumbles around in our head, heart, & memory.
Where do you write your music, are you someone always coming up with song ideas?
The writing and composing is probably my favourite part of all of this, so of course we keep a notebook with us at all times to jot down lines or song titles or anything else that comes to mind. I will occasionally use voice memos to get a melodic or harmonic idea down quickly, especially if I have a guitar handy but sometimes it’s just a matter of haphazardly singing the melody and hoping for the best. Probably the worst is when you have a harmonic progression in your head but don’t have immediate access to an instrument, so you have to try and convey the chords you are hearing but without the means to immediately capture them.
Lots of songs have been lost for some stupid reason or another, so over the years we’ve really taken to the notion that if you have an idea you must treat it with respect and do anything and everything to somehow capture it, even if it means pulling over on the side of the road or getting out of your snuggly bed in the middle of the night. Just go and capture it and maybe you can immediately return to what you were doing or maybe you will get stuck into it right away, but above all, you’ve got to get that thought or idea down.
Please tell us about the ReverbNation winning track “Tripwires”?
I think I probably had the opening lines jotted down somewhere, but I don’t think it had a melody to go with them just yet, and I seem to remember thinking about how a lot of somewhat recently successful guitar bands always wind up pivoting to doing something “dance” or “funky” around album 3 or 4 or 5, and we often wondered if that was an artistic choice or if it’s the record label pushing them to appeal to a broader, more pop-oriented audience. Anyways, we are not funky on any level and the only dancing people do to our songs is of the awkward variety, but I realized we didn’t have many songs with that slinky, thumping-yet staccato vibe at this lumbering tempo, so it all started with just capturing a vibe and trying to create a feeling.
Thinking about it now, one could view it as a resigned death march. A death of exactly what I’m not sure, but the speaker is definitely a bit wounded and weary. I leaned into the melody on this one, and the whole album really, and tried to let a line that felt good do more of the heavy lifting instead of necessarily needing to overly explain or flesh ideas out to the point of strangulation, to keep it slightly unsaid, slightly ambiguous. If you think it sounds good, it probably does.
That’s my best guess anyways.
What has been your favourite experience as a band?
I thought about this for a long, long time, and the only true answer is “the next one.” All these moments, both big and small, are ultimately fleeting, so my favourite experience is whatever comes next, whether it’s a rehearsal, a gig, a chat with a fan, or even just the ride home in the van. There is a certain illogic to all of this, a masochistic element to the business of music and the artistic marketplace of ideas, and we’ve noticed a tendency towards anger, bitterness, depression, & insanity that comes with focusing on things out of our control. So now I just enjoy the moment, and they’re all pretty awesome.
Do you have any plans to release an EP or an album?
Yes! Studio album #10, titled Be Your Own Boss, goes out to the wide world on Friday, March 7th. We’ve got a pretty decent (by our standards anyways), national tour of Australia lined up as well, which will see us visiting some old familiar places as well as some new venues, and we’re excited to get plugged back into the scene with a little more deliberate planning and effort. Obviously, the COVID years upended every facet of existence, and in retrospect I realize that we were just coasting in our little creative bubble, still playing shows at a reasonable rate but not actively growing our audience. It was only when I first started looking at this next run of shows that I realized that I was now reaping what I had sown through neglect, so over the past 6 months I tried to do a much better job of taking care of the equally important parts of being in a band, like planning and growth and marketing and all the boring stuff that used to give us the ick. You ignore that at your own peril, and it’s obvious that my artistically idealistic youthful notions were wildly naive and ultimately harmful, so a lot of the past 15 years has been unlearning and uncoupling our business instincts from a lot of the mythology that we bought into.
What is the most memorable place you have performed?
Before there was Royal Chant, I had a band called Sickboy. It actually formed in the USA and when I moved to Australia I took the name with me. Once we were touring from Melbourne to Sydney, (or maybe it was the other way around?) with a band from the states called The Press, and we stopped at a tiny little place called the Tumblong Tavern, in the town of Tumblong in rural NSW. We walk in and order some beers, and a few locals there ask where we’re from and what we’re doing, and when we say we’re musicians they insist we play so we got a guitar and started singing and had the little place jumping and it all had a bit of magic to it. Just that instant connection through music, and that’s what it’s all about.
Here at Artistic Echoes, we are always on the lookout for new artists do you have any to recommend?
Most of the new music I interact with has some kind of personal connection to either me or my memories, as in I likely literally know the person or persons making the music, so with that in mind I have been listening to and enjoying Big League, Korderoy, Fetes, Goon Gremlins, Loons, Hey Lenny, Downgirl, plus whatever Guided By Voices in putting out (I don’t know Guided By Voices, they are one of the few big international artists we keep up with.)
What plans do you have for the rest of the year?
After this next tour is wrapped and the album is exhausted we might take stock of where we are at, and what we have accomplished (if anything), and then have a think about what comes next. More importantly, we can catch our breath and just feel for a moment, just kind of enjoy the quiet and see if there’s any little voices in our heads or anything pulling at our hearts that might be giving us some clues as to what we should or shouldn’t do next. I love the write/record/release/tour schedule probably way more than is healthy (there is a lovely certainty and purpose to it), but I also have an affinity for anything that changes things up. We have already started incorporating a few other people into the live shows when we are able, and that might be the best of both worlds, in that the core band remains the same but we include friends and guests into our live shows when we are able. Other than that…. I have no idea. Onwards and upwards xoxo
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