[Interview] SOMETHING FOR KATE

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Something For Kate are back with a new album Leave Your Soul to Science, and their first extensive Australian tour in six years. Louisa Bulley spoke with frontman Paul Dempsey about gigging in New York, faith verses science, and the great new sound that the band is generating.

So, Something For Kate have been together for 14 years now but this is your first album in a number of years. Why such a long break?
Ahh, well, we made Desert Lights, that came out in 2006 and we did a whole lot of touring for a year or two, and then we did the best of album and did some touring for that, and I guess then it was 2008, and then in 2009, I did the solo record and I toured that for ages and moved to New York for a couple years, so yeah we didn’t mean for that much time to go by. But it was just, you know, we were busy and playing and playing, and then suddenly we were like, ‘shit, we haven’t made an album for like five years.’

You and Steph Ashworth (bass) did some touring of Everything is True around New York, did you enjoy performing in a place where you’re slightly less well-known?
Yes, absolutely. We lived there for nearly two years and it was great, I was playing pretty constantly, like at least a couple of times a week around the States and I really enjoyed, you know, getting up in front of a room full of people who don’t necessarily know who you are, and you’ve gotta make a first impression. It’s basically like every show that you play is your first show, so it’s really exciting and really energising, and for someone who’s been doing this for a long time now it’s really good to always sort of feel like you’re doing it for the first time.

How did audiences over there respond to you guys?
I think it was great, we had a great time and the crowds were really good. I learnt a lot as well, because when you’re, like I said, making a first impression, you need to sort of get the audiences attention and hold their attention. There’s so many incredible musicians over there playing every night of the week, so you have to sort of stand out somehow. So my shows ended up being like 80% music and 20% me just being a dickhead, doing almost like stand-up comedy and talking to the audience. And they’re automatically interested in the fact that you come from somewhere else. It was kind of funny. I got in the habit of getting sort of half drunk before I went on stage and then just seeing what happened.

So how do you feel now being back in Australia and starting a tour?
Really excited! I can’t wait, I love touring, it’s like my favourite thing to do. That was half the reason we moved to the States as well because, you know, we love Australia, but unfortunately the opportunities to go on the road are pretty small over here, there aren’t that many places you can play. A normal sort of Australian tour for a band might be like 10 shows, and you can only really do that once or twice a year before it’s like oversaturation.

So you’ve spoken about the album title being about the line between mysticism and reality, those who want miracle cures and those who want relief from that kind of magical thinking, would you put yourself in the second of those categories?
Relief from magical thinking? Yes, definitely.

That seems to be reflected in the title and in some of the lyrics in ‘Begin’ and ‘Miracle Cure’, they seem to be advocating a particular position on that line. Would you say that you’re hoping to convince people of your views on the nature of reality or maybe just get them to think about it in a different way?
Yeah, I mean, I think the most important thing is just that people think for themselves. I’m not really interested in, you know, convincing people to agree with me, but they’re my songs, so obviously I sing the way that I feel and people can take it or leave it. But you know, I definitely would hope to encourage people to, just to think, to think differently or just to think critically. I just think that the most important thing is to think critically, to actually look really hard at the things that you do believe or don’t believe and the reasons that you do or don’t believe them and just to analyse those sorts of things, because I think a lot of what I describe as ‘magical thinking’ or like, ‘mystical thinking’ only exists because it doesn’t get analysed by the person in question. I just find that a lot of people who hold those sorts of beliefs don’t tend to look particularly hard at the evidence for them, or what basis they have for them. It’s more like a sort of a gut feeling, or an article of faith. So I’m just interested in analysing things, I’m just a really curious person and I’m just always fascinated by why people believe some of the things that they believe. And I’m not interested in saying what’s right and what’s wrong, or judging anybody, but I think that I’m just really curious about where some of these things comes from and what the sort of basis for them is.

Surely even in a belief in science though there’s still some level of faith in operation?
No, absolutely not. That’s completely against the definition of what science is. Science is a self-correcting process and there is no ‘belief’ in science, because there are no facts in science, there’s just the best information available at the time. So science is constantly correcting itself and saying ‘we used to think this but now we think this based on the evidence, and next year we might actually change that again because better evidence might become available.’ That’s the way that science moves forward, by actually always correcting itself and proving it’s own errors and then moving forward by asking better questions. So there is no ‘faith’ in science, there’s no ‘belief’ in science.

So, this album seems to have a different sound altogether to albums that you’ve had in the past. Was that an active kind of a move, or did it just come organically from different factors, like recording overseas in the US, and having had such a long break between albums?
Yeah, I think it was just a combination of both those things. Like, obviously it was good to have a really big long break, so by the time we did get back together we all sort of, our tastes in music had changed and our instincts about music had changed, so the stuff we wrote came pretty naturally but at the same time it did feel different and we were sort of excited by that. And then after that, when we did go to Dallas to work with John Congleton, he encouraged that even further. So while we were recording we were just doing all of these kind of spur of the moment things and they just all felt really different so we just really ran with it. We just tried to avoid anything that sounded too familiar or too much like us.

I can’t stop listening to ‘The Fireball At The End Of Everything,’ it’s such a good one. Was there a song on the album that you particularly enjoyed recording, or that came together differently than how you had envisioned it?
Umm, I mean pretty much all of them, in a sense. It was a really fun record to make and you know, we actually went in with like six or eight weeks to make it, but we were finished in less than four, because we were just doing everything so spur of the moment and so quickly and just having so much fun. So before we knew it the album was finished and we were like, ‘wow, I guess we’re done’. But yeah, all of the songs were a lot of fun to do. You know, with like ‘The Kids Will Get The Money’, we had that song written and then we pulled out all of these really strange sounds and we were like, ‘wow, that sounds really bizarre, let’s just run with it.’ So yeah, everything took on a pretty different character while we were in the studio.

My brother’s a massive fan of yours and he was wanting me to ask this for his benefit. He’s been loving ‘Private Rain’ from the new album, and he wanted me to ask you, ‘now that you’ve written a song with a harmonised guitar solo can we expect some more glam-tracks from SFK, and will you be growing your hair out and start wearing sequins onstage?’
Haha, yeah right, yeah I don’t know about the sequins. Anything’s possible though, so who knows what the future holds. I was definitely happy with the duelling guitar solos. That was exactly like one of those things I’ve been talking about. You know, I played the one guitar part and then John was playing it back and we were listening and I just started, sort of as a joke, playing this guitar harmony and then we all sort of looked at each other like, ‘this is either the greatest idea ever or the stupidest idea ever,’ but we were kind of excited about it, so we just did it and then after a while everyone was just like, ‘yeah, we gotta keep that, it’s funny, it sound like we’re having fun because we ARE having fun, so let’s leave it.’

Something For Kate perform at the Bar on the Hill, Newcastle Uni, on Thursday May 30.