Your This Crazy Life tour
– how did it go?
It was so good. For all intents and purposes it was a
complete success. The boys and I were so happy with that. We were really
nervous about going out on such a big tour and it was all on us, money wise and
profile wise and advertising. All this big, proper adult stuff – it was all on
us, there was no one else to blame if no one showed up. If it didn’t work we
were up the creek. It was a great success. All the other artists brought
something that none of the others could bring to that kind of show. It was fast
paced. The punters loved it. It was constantly changing. People didn’t want to
leave to go to the bar and get a drink because they weren’t sure what they were
going to miss. It was awesome. Could not be happier.
And maybe the only
thing you could have done differently was have more dates.
At the end of it we all felt a bit sad, like, ‘Why are we
stopping again?’ But it definitely feels like we could have toured for another
six months with that show. I know it was only a fairly short tour. But, as I
said, the whole thing was a bit of a gamble and we didn’t actually know it
would go that well. Maybe we can do it again [in 2017].
As it was sort of a
test of concept and it’s worked, you could roll it out – the only thing is
whether you have enough time to do a longer tour given all your commitments.
Yes. It’s just a case of ‘do you want to be on two tours at
once?’ because we’re going to be touring with Lee Kernaghan and can you do both
at the same time? I reckon we could. Another feather in the cap.
Well, if any band
can, you guys can.
[Laughs] Bring it on – bring it on, I say.
Isn’t that your band
motto?
Something like that, yes. I think the official motto is ‘you
gotta do gigs’. So if we’ve gotta do gigs, we’ve gotta do it.
I think the
experience shows in the way you play because your shows are always
entertaining. And speaking of entertainment, I’m here to talk to you about your
25th of January show with Shannon Noll at the Tamworth Country Music
Festival. So this seems like a marriage made in musical heaven – how did it
come about?
It really is. It’s surprising that it’s taken us this long
to do a gig with Shannon, because we love him. We’re all country boys; we all
grew up in a similar way, on a farm. We all love our old Aussie rock and
Shannon is now taking a more country approach to how it does things, and that’s
really cool. The universe just brought us together one night after a gig that
we’d both headlined at, and it’s taken us this long to find some spare time to
actually be able to put on a gig with him – and where better to do it than
Tamworth on Australia Day Eve.
How are you going to
divvy up your time – are you guys playing first? Is he? Are you sharing some
songs? How’s it going to work?
I don’t know yet! Being that it’s not a tour, it’s just a
one-off gig, I think we’ll just go with the flow. We’ll just have some fun.
We’re going to obviously share some time on stage – towards the end will
probably be everyone on board, get everyone out on the stage and just really
rock it out.
I was just thinking
about what you said about the mini-tour and maybe trying something in 2017 …
I’m foreseeing perhaps Shannon joining your line-up next time.
Maybe. There might have already been some talk. Nothing confirmed
but it’s a cool idea and we’ll wait and see what happens.
As you said, that
tour was all on you and organising it was moving into entrepreneurial
behaviour, in a way – not that you guys haven’t always been business focused
and that comes across in how professional you are, but taking those sorts of
risks is a way to move your career forward and it’s exciting when it works but
it is always nerve wracking. It looks like the impetus is there to keep going,
though.
Yes – and people see the success more than they see the
failure, because we had to fail so many times to get that success. We tried
quite a few things in the past that hadn’t worked and we were due for some good
luck, you know. We were due for a taste of success and we got it, and we’re so grateful.
There’s a lot of
clichés about learning from failure but I would think in the case of your band,
you might have learned from the failures but it seems like they give you a
whole lot of motivation to keep working. What I find interesting about the Wolfe
Brothers is that success seems to be a by-product of your willingness to work
really hard.
Well, this way of life is all we’ve ever wanted to know.
When we first got together in high school, in the very early days, this was all
we ever talked about doing. We dreamed about putting arena shows on and how we
would open them and the big curtain would drop and we would have lights going
on over our heads, all this sort of stuff. So we just keep our eye on the
prize, enjoy the success when it comes and when the failure comes it’s just
gigs – that’s how life is, you just have to do it.
I think that is a
very good motto for any kind of work. But back to Tamworth: apart from that
show with Shannon I would think you aren’t doing another show at the festival,
but is there anything else you’re looking forward to?
Just looking forward to enjoying the festival because we
missed it last year – we were in Nashville writing and recording. Really
looking forward to getting back. We do a lot of media stuff – radio interviews
all day every day, they’re always cool fun. I wouldn’t mind getting out and
seeing a few gigs, actually. Our festivals are usually so busy we don’t get the
chance to enjoy them but I’ve decided to put my foot down and I’m going to see
a gig. It’s going to happen.
What a revolutionary
idea – seeing music at a music festival!
[Laughs] It’s usually the last thing we get to do.
And it’s not just
seeing the music – it’s seeing the people you know. You can catch up with them
fleetingly at a radio station but if you get to go to the gigs you can probably
spend a bit more time.
Exactly. And it would just be nice to be out there
supporting some other artists.
As we come towards
the end of 2016 – and leaving the This Crazy Life tour aside – what have been
your other highlights?
Our trip to Nashville was pretty great. We did some
low-level touring over there. We did county fairs and we travelled all up the
way up the Midwest. We did ten-hour drives a day in our old Chev that we
bought. That’s probably a trip I’ll never forget. We worked really hard there;
we met some great people. We sort of tested the waters to see if what we do
would translate over there. It does, and people really enjoyed the shows and
they love our accent. All they wanted to do was keep asking us about Keith
Urban, for some reason.
Because Australia’s
so small you must all know each other.
Yeah, yeah, exactly – we must have grown up next to him,
right? He plays music. You talk the same. You must be the same person … But
it’s funny – you tell people over there that you’re from this place called
Tasmania and they’ve got no idea where that is. It sounds exotic – ‘oh my god,
your accents’. So that was really cool; it was a great trip. We did a bunch of
writing as well so we’re demoing up some songs for maybe the next album. That
was a huge thing. The tour – god, what else happened this year? So much stuff.
The ARIAs were a huge thing to be a part of [the Wolfe Brothers were nominated
for best country album]. I don’t think you can go to an ARIA award ceremony
without witnessing Australian music history, which we got to with Crowded House
being inducted, so that was awesome. Met Roy and HG – that was really nice. They’re
a good pair of guys. It’s been such a big year. We brought the album out. Hopefully
we do some new singles soon from that, but we brought out the best album we’ve
ever written and recorded, and hopefully the next one I can say the same thing
as well. But it’s been a massive year – I hadn’t realised until I sat down and
talked to you, how big it’s been.
And if you think
about the fact that there are only fifty-two weeks in a year – the amount of
stuff you guys have fit in, if you look at it like that …
Only fifty-two – yeah, that’s crazy. And we haven’t been
home. This is the longest we’ve been home all year.
After such a busy
year, are there any lowlights?
One low point, which was [when we were] over in Nashville –
we got halfway through Kentucky and our car broke down on the side of the road.
That was bad. That was really bad. The alternator broke. We had no electricity
in the car. Couldn’t even push-start it because the battery was dead flat. And
it was freezing cold outside and there were trucks rushing past the freeway. We
had no lights. They didn’t even know we were there. So it was kind of scary.
But we got through that – we managed to get a tow truck out. But that’s the
only one that comes to mind, it’s just all been hard work and good times.
Hopefully you didn’t
miss a gig because your car broke down?
No, we didn’t miss a gig, that was the thing. We managed to
get there at about five a.m. We got to the hotel, checked in, went to bed, got
up a couple of hours later and went to do the gig. That was an adventure. If I
think of all the hours we spent on the road in the last few years, that’s the
only time that’s ever happened – and it had to happen in a foreign country.
That’s rock ’n’ roll,
I guess.
That’s rock ’n’ roll. That’s gigs. That’s life. That’s how
it is – wouldn’t have it any other way.
Having that kind of
experience in the United States, does that change your music in a way – you
seeing that there’s a completely different sector to your audience now than the
one you’ve had in Australia, so do you start to think differently about how you
communicate to the audience and what sort of music you might play for them?
Absolutely. Stuff like that, it’s hard not to be influenced
by it. Every corner we take, we learn something, and being in the US was a big
learning curve too. Some things had to be approached a little differently – we
had to learn to talk a bit slower because the accent, they think we’re from
England and they find us a bit hard to understand. Australians are very lazy in
the way we talk and the boys and I are probably the worst in the world at it [ed. note – Brodie actually speaks very
clearly!]. So we had to learn to fit in a bit better. We watched a few
Keith Urban interviews and realised that that’s what he was doing as well. He
spoke very slowly and clearly so that people would understand what he was
saying. Just little things like that you pick up along the way. We changed the
way we did the gigs and played some different songs we probably wouldn’t
normally get to play in Australia because we don’t have the big radio airplay
for country in Australia. But over there one of the biggest things is country
radio – it’s all over the [US].
As you head into
2017, you’re obviously kicking it off with a bang in Tamworth. Lee, of course,
has you on the road again. And you mentioned that you wrote some new songs,
possibly for a new album, so that’s on the cards for 2017?
Definitely on the cards. I think we will go back to
Nashville to write and record again because it went so well last time. We know
it works and we know when we put the pressure on we can really write some cool
stuff and get it done. And we’ve just a week in the studio with Lee, cutting
his new album too.
[Laughs] Again, I
remind you, Brodie: fifty-two weeks in this year.
[Laughs] Well, that was one of them in Sydney with Lee. And
that was so cool – it was something we never, ever thought we’d get to do.
Well, we never thought we’d be Lee Kernaghan’s band but we didn’t think we
would get a studio guernsey and then he said, ‘I want to change things up a
bit, I want to get you guys in the studio and I want your sound on my record’,
and we went, ‘Yes, you can have that.’
He would be really
unlikely to find anyone more experienced – you’ve been playing with him so
consistently – so it makes sense.
Yes, and Kerno’s always had a formula that’s always worked
for him, and to step outside that formula and take a risk on us again, because
he’s obviously already done it [with touring], was such an honour. We had Garth
Porter in there, who’s produced almost every single Kernaghan album and it was
a bit of a thing for him, too. I think he realised after the first day that
this was not going to be your typical album. We did things completely
differently. Everyone was sitting there getting a feel for it and how it was
going to work, and it was awesome, there were no hassles at all. Everyone was
really enjoying the change in the studio, the different mindset. It was really
cool.
The Wolfe Brothers' latest album is This Crazy Life.
Catch them during TCMF 2017 at Blazes on 25 January - buy tickets here: www.wtlc.com.au
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