Photo credit: Luke Henery
Tell us about your tour vehicle. Any notable breakdown stories?
To be honest with you all of our touring vehicles are usually hired because in Australia we fly everywhere! In the US last time we went on tour we had an RV style car so that was pretty interesting. We’ve luckily never had a breakdown in our hire cars across all of the driving, which is lucky!
How do you eat cheaply and/or healthy while on tour?
Haha, we try our best to eat healthy. Definitely cheaply though – which can be hard at times, but we found with places like Denny’s and Subway in the US it was a bit more accessible for us!
How many strings do you break in a typical year? How much does it cost to replace them?
For me, I don’t often break strings. My hands mustn’t sweat as much as Tex and Kurt, because I feel like they’re changing their strings every two weeks or so and I’m changing once a month. I usually do a restring and a full clean of my guitar at the same time. A pair of strings is roughly $8-$16 depending what you get, so if you break them/change them all the time that can definitely get expensive.
Where do you rehearse?
At the moment we’ve been rehearsing at this great space on the Gold Coast which we hire out each week. It works well for us because we live kind of far away from each other so it’s a bit harder for us to have a permanent rehearsal space. We’ve definitely had weird experiences in the lead up to finding the space we use now – a lot of difficult people to contact and owners booking 3 bands on for the exact same time in the same room, which was pretty frustrating.
What was the title and a sample lyric from the first song that you wrote?
From my memory, one of the first songs I wrote and released was called ‘Outside’. From memory it was about how I hadn’t really experienced life to the extent that I wanted to. Some of the lyrics were “All the time spent on the inside/all the times I thought I’d leave it all behind”.
Describe your first gig.
Probably really bad and disappointing. There were probably 10 or 12 people there who weren’t interested. I’d love to find someone who actually had a successful and enjoyable first show haha.
What was your last day job? What was your favorite day job?
I worked in retail for a really long time at LUSH (the bathbomb store), honestly besides difficult customers it was a really lovely job and I loved being able to smell amazing all of the time!
What one thing do you know now that you had wished you knew when you started your career in music?
That’s a bit of a big question. There are so many things you learn through trial and error and making mistakes, and that’s kind of the only way you can figure things out. I think if I could tell my younger self starting out anything it would be to stay true to who you are and don’t let anyone tell you that you aren’t good enough.