One of the most prominent Australasian bands of the past decade, Evermore, are back. After taking a hiatus from music they released a new album Follow The Sun last August and are currently in the middle of an enormous national tour. I recently spoke to band member Peter, ahead of their Adelaide show, about their tour, their album, their unique instagram campaign for their new song, and that one time they came disconcertingly close to a bomb scare in Jerusalem.
So where am I speaking to you from right now?
I actually have a couple of days off right now! I’m at home in Melbourne.
How’s your tour been so far?
It’s been big! We’re 8 shows in and we’re not even a third of the way through the tour. It’s been really good, there’s nothing like a real proper tour. We’ve rehearsed this a whole lot and put a really good show together.
Is it gruelling at all? Or are you loving it?
It’s been awesome! We had a tough couple of days though, where we played a show on the border of NSW and Victoria. We finished at midnight, left by 1am, then we drove straight to Sydney ﹣ which is 7 hours ﹣ and went straight to the Today Show and played there.
I want to talk to you about the #heymylove campaign. Describe to me what that’s all about.
So, the video clip [for the song “Hey My Love”] is based entirely around instagram photos of moments and people you love, which you can hashtag with #heymylove. You can become a part of the whole video.
We’re doing a Mother’s Day one: if you hashtag a photo of your mum with #heymylovetoday, you’ll be a part of the Mother’s Day video which will be shown on Sunday on the Today Show. It’s really sweet!
We weren’t sure how many people would put photos up and how good they’d be, but as soon as we started making it we were like, “this is awesome”. There’s something really powerful about putting together all these photos of people’s favourite moments, and it has a beautiful kind of feel to it. There’s a genuine emotion to it.
I hear you used a ‘mobile studio’ to help record your latest album, Follow The Sun. Tell me what that was all about.
So we have our own studio outside of Melbourne, in some horse stables, which we turned into a full-blown pro recording studio. But after we were recording there for a while, we started getting itchy feet. So we had the great idea of putting together a mobile studio, going around the world and staying at all these places we always wanted to go to. We went to Morocco, Marrakesh, Buenos Aires, Paris, Jerusalem…
Favourite place?
Tie up between Morocco and Jerusalem. Jerusalem was pretty intense.
How so?
Literally as we landed the plane, a bomb had just gone off around the corner from where we were staying, and people were calling us up going ‘oh, I don’t think you should go to Jerusalem, it sounds really intense right now,’ but we decided to go anyway. And as we were driving, we were really tense, but the taxi driver was like ‘oh, no worries, it’s normal’. He drove us past the place where the bomb had blown up not 24 hours before, and they had swept the bus stop clean, and another bus was waiting! And people were just standing there waiting for the next bus. So we grabbed beer and had a wander of the old city and just met somebody and he invited us to go to a rabbi’s house! Just so many intense, awesome things happened. It was full on.
What does this record, Follow The Sun, mean to you? What do you hope people will take from it?
Because we had this time off before we started making it, we had time to enjoy ourselves and have a normal life, so we would get excited about making music again. The record is very positive. Very hopeful. To me, it feels almost like a summer’s morning. It sort of just came from where we were at the time.
What can we expect from your show?
…That’s a good question! You can expect to come along, sing along and get into it, and have a great time. And dance. I’ll dance! There’s actually a section where I breakdance during ‘Hey Boys And Girls’.
It’s probably half old songs, half new. We’ve put a lot of work into the whole show. Everything merges into each other, everything takes you on a journey. The first song is actually a brand new song, which we’ve never done before! The song’s very good, it will be on the next album. We’ll be highly practiced by the time we get to Adelaide! We’ll literally be a well-oiled machine.
Evermore will perform at The Gov on Wednesday May 15. Purchase tickets here. Follow The Sun is out in stores now. You can be a part of the ‘Hey My Love’ Mother’s Day video by uploading pictures of your mother to instagram with the hashtag #heymylovemums.
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