I want to tell you about how we became a band and then overnight (and totally by accident) we had 7 major labels email us wanting to talk!
Alice and I (Jack) both played in bands previously and enjoyed some moderate success. We'd toured, built fan bases and had amazing fun. But all good things come to an end and both acts petered out.
With our projects over and more free time on our hands we were both going to more and more gigs. We'd never really met before but had a mutual friend who was also a regular gig goer. We kept bumping into each other watching some of our favourite acts like Hot Chip, Purity Ring etc. We talked about how both of us were in bands which are over and how bummed we were not to have a project to work on. For some reason It didn't occur to us to try writing together.
It took our mutual friend (who was fed up of hearing us moan) saying something like "stop being stupid and try collaborating."
We spent about a YEAR writing our first song. It wasn't that we were struggling to make music. We were struggling to make the right music. Our tastes were quite different. I come from a background of punk bands and the heavier end of drum n bass. Alice comes from a more indie and folk background. But slowly we started to find the right balance. Thinks were moving in the right direction. We music have put 50 or more songs on the scrap heap. It was a long tough slog but something was telling us it would be worth it.
One day we decided to really take ourselves out of our comfort zones in order to try and be creative. We set a goal of making an electronic pop song out of a Bon Iver track!
For some reason, that did the trick. We felt the electricity as we started writing this cover version. It felt like, suddenly, we were an actual band!
We spent a few weeks finishing and tweaking it - but we were finally there - after a year! And this is what we came up with:
When we were done we uploaded Perth to bandcamp so we had somewhere online to stream it and show friends. We had no intention of "putting it out there" as we only had 1 song. We wanted to have a bunch of finished music before we went public with the band.
Fate had other ideas
That very night a blogger from Crack In The Road was clicking around bandcamp looking for music. We didn't know there was a "recently uploaded" section to the site. He clicked play, loved what he heard and decided to blog about it.
This whole scenario played out overnight. Totally by accident. At the time Hype Machine was where all of the A&R would go to find new bands to sign! So we woke up the next day with emails from major labels wanting to talk and wanting to hear more music.... which we didn't have!
We decided to leave them waiting. We ignored their emails, got a lawyer, got management and most importantly got writing more and more music!
Fast forward a couple years and we met them all in their NYC offices with a whole album's with of tracks:
