Thievery Corporation
Get excited Australia! Thievery Corporation are bringing their full live show down under playing songs off their latest record Saudade and Culture Of Fear. Rob Garza from the band stated his intentions when talking to Across The Ocean about the Australian tour by saying this show is high intensity, live and full on experience and it’s anything but chill out.
Are you excited about the Australian tour this February?
Yeah, we’re super excited to be coming down as it has been a few years. We love playing in Australia. We love hanging out and the culture of the people and we’ve had some of our best times travelling around the country.
Touring with the full band will be a huge buzz for Australian fans?
It is great to coming down with the full live experience and it is like a travelling circus. We have great musicians and singers. We’ve done some DJ stuff there in the past and we always love bringing the full live show to places.
Do you think you might tour more extensively next time and include little ‘ole Adelaide?
We would love to and we do want to come back more often. A lot of the time it is about balancing whether we are in the studio and we do have a large group of people so it is a bigger obstacle to get that many people over when it is a full tour.
What can fans expect on this tour?
Well, they’ hear songs off our latest record Saudade and Culture Of Fear. There are new performers and I would say it is pretty explosive with energy and for people who have never been this show might thinking it will be down tempo and chill out will be very surprised when they see the show. There’s this high intensity, live and full on experience and it’s anything but chill out.
Rumour has it that you’ve started working on new material, is that the sort of thing you will be testing out on tour?
We wait until we get a song to a place that we feel that it is finished and complete. At that point we will introduce it to new audiences and have them be part of the show. We’re normally, but, because we’re producers first and foremost we like to get it right in the studio rather than go out and test things on the road.
Being a producer is it harder to let a song go when it is just about finished?
Not so much because that’s what we enjoy doing. Sometimes some songs might be bigger challenges than others. The challenge we like is how to tweak the songs and really get in to things to get them to a point where we feel proud and ready to release them.
The Grateful Dead cover Fire On The Mountain seems to be a regular staple in the set list, will Aussie fans get to hear that one?
Yeah, I think it will be. Lately, we’ve been playing that a lot in our set so I think that will most probably likely that we will play that in our sets down there.
Is there anything special planned to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of Thievery Corporation?
Um, the only thing special that we’re doing is counting our blessings that we’re still a band that has been able to last twenty years. We have done the majority of it independently and we have our own record label not being part of major labels. The fact we still have big audiences around the world and that last year was our biggest year ever because of touring. People still respond to what we do and we celebrated the fact that we can still have a career doing music after all these years.
The fact is that we’re not really a household name and still able to have this very unique career where people are familiar with the music even though in places like America where there has been no radio play anywhere, America is our biggest audience, we managed to sell out a lot of shows and gaining new fans and playing major festivals.
Is there any secret to longevity?
I like the way a friend of mine puts it, it isn’t about becoming successful the secret is about surviving your success. When we started I remember being touted as tomorrow’s next big thing and that’s the trick for any band going from the next big thing to yesterday’s news. How do you transcend that space and have a career that is meaningful and people respond to and respect and keep going beyond being the flavour of the day? The way that you can do that is to concentrate on your craft and making music that you really love and enjoy.
Do you find the power of the internet frustrating particularly with where the music industry is heading?
It is what it is and you have to work with whatever it is. If you look back at the history of music like when the phonograph was created or any other monumental change in the whole paradigm of recorded music people didn’t know how things were going to survive. So when you look at the internet there are great things about it allowing so many different artists to create without having a major studio to create music and then at the same time when you look at streaming services and how they affect the way musicians earn an income from recorded music has been a real negative thing. I think whatever it is you have to take it and do whatever it is you’re doing in terms of making music and staying true to your own vision as a band.
Is 2016 focused solely on making a new album?
Yes, that’s right! That’s what we’re doing and hoping to finish it soon. We started recording in Jamaica and we’re hoping to wrap it up in the next month or so and hoping to be able to have something out before the end of the year.
Have the ideas for the album been fairly well establishing before the recording process has started?
We started off with the intention of making this a more Jamaican dub oriented record and when we went in to the studio to start working on the tracks we allow for that space for exploration and things to be able to move beyond our original intentions. I think when we look at records we try to do what we love and not really get too far ahead of ourselves. We definitely had that spirit to evolve and expand but at the same time to be true what we love musically and what we were inspired by. In this case it comes down to Jamaican music and I love the bass, the low end and those records really captivated us when we started.
Whether it is rummaging through vinyl at record stores such as Clarity and Title finding hidden gems to scouring the internet to find that album by the next big thing or chasing bands to get that elusive autograph and photo his passion is music all the way.
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