Boston Calling was the first stop on an international tour for Australian indie rockers Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever. We spoke with vocalist/guitarist Tom Russo and drummer Marcel Tussie about the writing process for a forthcoming album, and the differences between touring in the U.S. and Australia.
This interview was conducted on May 26, 2019 by Tori Bedford for WGBH, at the Boston Calling Music Festival.
How are you liking the festival so far?
Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever: Good. We got in yesterday afternoon so we got to see Anderson .Paak and Tame Impala. It's a nice festival.
Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever: I like hanging out in the Harvard athletics complex — it's quite amazing. It's huge.
So you guys have a pretty huge following in the U.S. Is it comparable to the following that you have back home?
Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever: It's pretty hard to compare back home to the U.S. It's 300 million people here and there are only 25 million at home. It feels like everywhere I go is a little Australia... We do have some really fun shows here. They're probably not as big but we do a lot more of them. So it's always a good time.
Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever: There just aren't that many cities. We did an Australian tour a few weeks ago and we did it in a few weekends, but here in the U.S. there are just so many towns to explore. And for so many towns their reputation precedes them even if they're not even that big — if they're less than a million people, you've heard of these places.
Like where?
Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever: Chattanooga. You know you've heard of that. I don't know how many people are there — in Australia, we have equivalent places that nobody would have heard of, like Bendigo, Wangaratta, Wollongong, Newcastle.
We don't have that many songs that have been exported around the world, but you know songs like "Stuck Inside of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again." The Americans export their culture very well.
Do you feel like the crowds are different here than back home?
Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever: Sometimes. The Australian crowd can get kind of rowdy at times. I think the American crowd is quite respectful to each other and to the band. It's actually really a hospitable kind of attitude that the Americans have.
You guys came out with your album in 2018. What have you been doing since then?
Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever: We've been writing again and we toured for months on end last year. And then we got home in December and had a month or two off, and then started into writing the next batch of songs. Keeping busy.
What's next for you after this?
Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever: More touring. This is the start of a tour… So it's the rest of the States and then we'll go over to Europe.
Are you coming out with an album? You said you're writing more.
Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever: Yeah. We're still writing it at the moment. We'll get home in August and we'll start to do pre-production and then get a record out in the latter part of the year.
Tell me about that process.
Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever: We're thinking about it a lot more this time. We're trying to not write the hell out of the songs… So it's a longer process because sometimes you can write a song on the end of your bed in 10 minutes or so but we're trying not to do that for this album.
So it's taking a little bit more time but it's really fun when something coalesces after having chipped away at it for four weeks, five weeks, six weeks, ten weeks.
Is that process frustrating at all?
Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever: Not really. But it's not necessarily satisfying for a little while.
How do you think that differentiates this album?
Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever: I don't think it's that different. The last album was quite a tight neat package and we didn’t really leave any air in between anything. It was very full. So maybe this time we're just going to let things breathe a little bit more… maybe there's some slightly slower tempos and a bit more time to explore a groove or something. But we don't really know yet either. We haven't finished it.
And you're writing while you're on tour, so you're always together all the time?
Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever: Pretty much yeah… It's hard to write on tour. But we've got a plan to try and make it work. There is a lot of sitting around on tour so we may as well utilize it.
The problem is, personally, that in order to write lyrics and think of ideas, you really need to have a few blank days and you don't have that on tour — you're in a different part of your brain. You don't just have an open mind. You are more task-oriented but I think there are ways to try and trick yourself into coming up with ideas. We're going to try that.
When you write, do you pull from your own life experiences or things that have happened to you?
Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever: Not deliberately. It's better when you subconsciously come up with a lyric that then starts to guide the song and you find something that you might have been thinking about but you haven't realized it. And then you have to chase down the song… And it takes a while to chase down all of the rest of the lyrics for it.
Do you have any idea of when your album is coming out?
Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever: I mean at this stage it's not even an album — it's just a bunch of songs.
Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever: We're just waiting for it to hatch.
Thanks so much for talking.
Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever: Thank you.
(Transcribed and condensed for clarity by Meghan Smith)
