New York State Of Mind
After a four hour drive from Washington DC to Brooklyn, The Smith Street Band arrive at the venue around 3pm. It’s another hour and a half until load in and two and a half hours on top of that until doors open. In another hemisphere and 16,700kms from Melbourne, they couldn’t be further away from home; from the ducks swimming in the drains of Footscray’s Dynon Road, the red brick fences in Box Hill or the holes in the walls of their former North Melbourne share house. But touring is what The Smith Street Band do best and they wouldn’t have it any other way.
Tonight is the band’s fifth consecutive show. They have two more to come before they get a well-earned day off, spent nevertheless transiting in a van and swerving the snow covered highways between Boston and Québec. It’s their 13th show of the tour so far and after a tentative start, tonight’s show is looking to be their biggest yet.
The venue is The Knitting Factory in Brooklyn. A 300 capacity all-ages space with a typically New York chic bar attached. It’s a pleasant change from the band’s previous venues in the city that never sleeps, having performed at the multi storied Terminal 5 theatre of 3,000 capacity with Frank Tuner and two shows with The Front Bottoms at the 1,025 capacity ballroom of Irving Plaza.
I meet the band, minus Wil Wagner who is riding in the Hard Girls van, on Havemeyer Street, adjacent to the venue. Much like Melbourne’s Brunswick Street, it’s full of corner bars, coffee shops and eateries. The band’s guitarist Lee Hartney and bass player Michael Fitzgerald have just come from visiting vintage gear shop South Side Guitars and are joined alongside drummer Chris Cowburn and tour manager Chris Bosma. Touring can be isolating, particularly in distant countries, so they are happy to see me, a familiar face in a foreign land.
As we walk down the street in search of a bar or pizza shop or whichever comes first, Cowburn pulls out his phone and shares with me the artwork for their next Australian tour, to be announced in the coming days. “Is this after you get back from the U.K?” I ask, of the 20 dates they’ll do across June and July. “No,” he swiftly replies. “It’s in between overseas tours.”
Wagner later tells me there’s 11 new songs that have been written since Throw Me In The River and three that have crept in to their soundcheck and live set. “We just have to remember them,” he jokes. I ask Cowburn when, if they ever stop touring, they’ll have time to record. “September, we hope. Recording is the easy part,” he grins as we cross the road and find that bar.
As load in time ticks over, Wagner, with support bands in tow, arrive at the venue. The tour is only young, but the sense of comradery among parties is visibly evident, not just from those on stage but behind the scenes as well.
In 2013, The Smith Street Band toured the U.K with three piece Bristol punk band, Caves. Since that time, guitarist and vocalist Lou Hanman has relocated to the States to be with partner Lauren Denitzio, and formed the band Worriers. With their album released on local label Don Giovanni Records and produced by Against Me’s Laura Jane Grace, there’s plenty of hype surrounding the band, and it’s justifiably deserved.
Main support for the tour comes from San Jose, California band Hard Girls who will play each of the 26 dates. “I’ve wanted to play with them for ages,” says an excited Wagner. “We’re just friends with everyone who knows Hard Girls basically. Mike who plays guitar in Hard Girls also plays guitar in Jeff Rosenstock’s band over here, so we toured with them when we toured with AJJ, and Morgan (bass player) was doing merch for that tour.”
I’m first introduced to the band’s singer Mike Huguenor and instantly grill him about Classics Of Love, a band, he and the other two members of Hard Girls were involved with alongside Operation Ivy singer Jesse Michaels. He doesn’t seem to mind and if anything enjoys reliving the project.
If it wasn’t clear just how inherently connected and small the punk rock scene is, looking around the empty room is further proof. Matt Nissley who plays drums in You Blew It does merch for Worriers, while for Hard Girls it’s Cayetana’s drummer Kelly Olsen. On sound desk duties is Shinobu bass player, one time Asian Man Records employee and the man who provided the trombone sound on Throw Me In The River’s title track, Bob Vielma. The Smith Street Band’s entourage is only Ian Laidlaw, a longtime friend of the band and photographer who will be documenting the tour for Rolling Stone Magazine.
All working together, load in is pleasantly pain-free as three vans get emptied and the contents strategically placed on stage.
As the sun begins to set, we walk down to the Brooklyn Bridges Park, with the famous Manhattan skyline as the backdrop. “You can only really see what’s in a two kilometre radius of the venue you’re playing,” says Wagner of sightseeing while on tour. If this is to be the only snapshot of Brooklyn, then it’s perfect.
Naturally, Laidlaw carriers his camera everywhere he goes and takes photos of the band whether they are aware of it or not. Alert to the moment, he uses the opportunity to take a press shot of the band. He mentions how challenging it is to get a picture that doesn’t come across as either pretentious or kooky, as he lines the four members up across a steel fence not to obscure the panoramic skyline and the New York Harbor behind them.
He takes several shots, but it’s when the band loosen up and chat amongst themselves that their guard is down and he captures the perfect photo, unbeknownst to them.
With the sky darkening we return to the venue. The rest of the band get their gear sorted as Wagner and I sit in the dressing room backstage. He restrings his guitar while I fire questions at him scribbled from a notebook.
This is Wagner’s eighth time in the United States and sixth time touring here with The Smith Street Band. He is only 25 years old.
“When I was 15 I went and lived in Mesa in Arizona, near Phoenix, for a few months as part of a high school exchange,” he recalls. “It was really fun. I lived with a Mormon family in Arizona which is about as far away from Box Hill South as you can possibly get, but it was really cool.”
Coming from a creative family, Wagner has inherited his penchant for words from his parents who are well published authors and channeled his love of literacy and travel into his typically verbose songs. “There’s that saying, ‘travel broadens the mind.’ So much of writing, especially for me, is recycling experiences, looking at the way other people would see the world, looking at the world other people exist in and then trying to relate to that myself or put myself in that situation.”
“I think travel would make you a better songwriter. It gives you more characters and more settings to play with. Anything that’s seeing how other people live their lives is always really interesting, even if you’re not writing about that it puts a different perspective on the way you live your life in Melbourne. Travelling always makes me feel so much better about myself, just happier.”
The band’s 2015 album Throw Me In The River was largely written while on the road and references places like East London, Calgary and New York. While The Smith Street Band are heavily ingrained in the punk scene, Wagner’s initial influences stem from the greats: Billy Bragg, Paul Kelly, and, of course, Bruce Springsteen, from whom the band borrowed their name. Songwriters whose style of writing is poetic, colloquial and referential. “I like people singing about places, it adds this level of authenticity and realism to music,” he says. “Jamie T is someone who pops in to my head because he just names so many places; he sings about train stations. It’s like Courtney Barnett’s song Depreston, you just get such a perfect idea of where that is and I feel like someone living over here in the States would be like, ‘ok Preston is this neighborhood, or Footscray is like Bushwick,’ and there’s these comparisons that can be made. Even if it’s not somewhere that you’ve been or even somewhere that you’ve heard of, you can put yourself in that situation and revert that suburb back in to something that you do know.”
“Setting and places for storytelling lyrics are very important. They give you the opposite of a blank canvas. It gives you all of this background and all this information that can be summed up in two lines; ‘this is where we are and this is what’s happening,’ and all of a sudden you can place that, you can see the people involved and you can imagine the club or the street. It’s a lot easier to transport yourself to places when people sing about it.”
After all the formalities are done, Bosma sets up the merch desk and Wagner finds some quite time. The rest of us head next door to St. Anselm Bar. Without converting currency, it’s already an overpriced bar of foreign craft beers and paying no attention to names on the chalkboard menu, we settle for whatever is the cheapest.
We avoid the after work crowd and sit outside in the beer garden. Cowburn uses the opportunity to FaceTime his family from his phone, while Hartney and Fitzgerald sit with beer in hard, discussing seeing Fugazi bass player Joe Lally at last night’s show and missed opportunities for conversation.
Word filters through that tonight’s show has sold out. While in Australia that’s an all too common occurrence for the band, being overseas and being the headline act is something completely different and Wagner couldn’t be prouder.
“It makes it all so exciting just to be here. Playing music here feels so much more than just playing a show, something bigger, like you’re part of this long history. Obviously this time tomorrow no one’s going to remember we even played here, but it’s very hard not to get swept up in the fact that we’re playing in New York,” he says. “I know it’s embarrassing to say, but we should embrace this kind of stuff because we are very lucky to be doing this. We’re in a very privileged position and this is something we’ve worked really hard for fuckin-ever, so to be here now, and this is our show, it’s crazy. There’s nothing like it. Being anywhere far away from home and having people come and see your band is cool. But being in New York it’s like, ‘how fucking good is this?’”
A short walk from the venue, Weezer do an instore at Rough Trade Records, while a cab ride away Slingshot Dakota launch their new record, supported by Katie Ellen, the new project for Chumped’s Anika Pyle. “People from this city have so many cool things they could be doing. ‘I might go to the best restaurant in the world, or go and do any number of completely world class activities,’ but people are coming to see our band and that’s a really cool feeling.”
I press Wagner if the sold-out sign makes him nervous and if he will approach tonight’s show any differently to the countless sold out shows he has performed in Australia.
“Both are equally as nerve racking,” he confesses. “Playing in Australia and doing those shows is completely mind blowing, but it’s ten times more mind blowing because we’ll do like 30 of those massive Australian shows in a year, and then 150 shows throughout the year which aren’t those massive shows. So then when we do come back and do something like Weekender or our own headline tour, it’s just incredible, because it’s not what we’re used to and we’re not complacent. I don’t think we’ll ever get sick of that.”
“You see with so many bands, especially with bands from Australia, they’ll just tour Australia twice in a year and sell out a million shows and just go to work for the rest of the year or sit around. If they did show up to a venue, like some of the venues we have played on this tour, or like a record store or an art gallery, there’s no foldback, there’s no backstage and they have to load in their own shit and set it up, they probably wouldn’t know how to do that. So I think having the best of both worlds makes us really lucky, because we get to appreciate when the shows are good but then when the shows are small or not as good, it’s not a completely crushing blow, or a complete ego destruction, it’s like, ‘this is what most of our shows are like.’ It’s cool we get to do both those things.”
As show time grows inevitably closer, Wagner heads back to the band room to do his pre-show warm up routine. With touring such a large part of the band, and essentially Wagner’s full time job, it is important he takes care of himself and his voice.
“I quit smoking 105 days ago now,” he says with a sense of pride. “Really, there aren’t that many good reasons to smoke cigarettes, so it’s not really giving up that much,” he clarifies with a laugh. “It’s definitely made touring and singing a lot easier. There’s also definitely been times where we’ve all been sitting back and drinking after a show and I’ve really fucking wanted to smoke a cigarette but I haven’t.”
Having toured both locally and abroad with many of his musical idols, I ask Wagner what advice he has taken most on board from his contemporaries.
“Jeff Rosenstock has taught me so much about life in general,” he says, of The Bomb The Music Industry frontman, a band they have toured with several times, including a show at the now defunct Brooklyn venue Death By Audio in October 2012. “He gave me the advice to drink a lot of water and showed me these vocal warm ups which have really made a huge difference. As far as one thing that really stuck in my head, it was Frank Turner,” he says, of touring with the U.K singer/songwriter for an extensive two month journey across the United States in 2013.
“He would do 300–350 shows a year and would never lose his voice. He was always drinking and partying, so I asked him one day, ‘how do you keep your voice?’ He just said, ‘I don’t lose it.’ I was like, ‘what do you mean?’ And he said, ‘well I used to lose my voice all the time and when I did it was because I was paranoid about losing my voice. So a few years ago I decided that I’m not someone who loses their voice.’ And since then he hasn’t lost his voice. I don’t think I have quite the confidence to stick with something like that but I thought that was really interesting. That’s a really good metaphor for a lot of touring. So much of it is the attitude you’re going in to it with and if you’re in a positive mood. I find that I lose my voice when I’m stressed and tired and not having a good time.”
“We’ve played the last five nights in a row and my voice feels about the same as it did five nights ago, because I’m having a really good time and getting enough sleep and taking care of myself. It is so important. That’s the secret to touring, picking your battles. Like tonight, playing in New York, it’s sold out and is going to be an incredible night. Obviously tonight is going to be a party night and we’re all going to have fun, plus it’s a Friday night. But for the last five shows, it’s been like, ‘I’m not going to get drunk tonight,’ because you can blow yourself up so easily and then you have so much time to sit in the van and just stew over shit. Just sit and think and drive yourself crazy.”
Between the down time, driving long stretches and loading in, it’s clear that tour life isn’t as glamorous as a Cameron Crowe film or a Credence Clear Water Revival song, but The Smith Street Band have their trade down pat.
“Since we first started touring until now, nothings really changed. We still stay in the cheapest motels or at friends’ houses. The only thing that has changed is equipment, but even then the amp I’m using this whole tour cost like $150 and I’m still using the same old beat up guitar I’ve used for ages. But that’s the one thing we’ve stopped skimping on. You want shit that will work. You want a nice guitar, a nice kit. It’s well and good to save money and we always have cheap shitty vans and all that kind of stuff, but we want good gear. It makes things so much easier not stressing that all your shit is going to break the whole time. I feel that makes touring a lot more enjoyable.”
As the house music fades, Run The Jewels come over the P.A and the band walk on stage to rousing applause. They open their set with Something I Can Hold In My Hands, the opening track to Throw Me In The River. Wagner sings, ‘Every inch of me is always itching unless I’m on a stage,’ and it’s true, as minutes early he paces around backstage trying to convince his band mates to go on stage early.
There’s no barrier or security in sight. Instead the crowd self-police themselves. Not that it matters. Their eyes are transfixed on the stage as they mouth every word. Any other movements, violent or otherwise would be a distraction.
Wagner rarely draws for breath between songs, but his body language is enough to express his gratitude towards the audience. “This is our first headline sold out show outside of Australia and this means the fucking world to me,” he tells them.
They race through all their hits including Surrender, Surrey Dive, Sigourney Weaver and I Can’t Feel My Face. “What song’s next?” Wagner turns to Cowburn and asks. “My set list is so drenched, I can’t read it.”
The band momentarily leave the stage and Wagner is left with just his voice and guitar to perform My Little Sinking Ship. A song written for his younger sister and only sibling Lizzie. “We’re supposed to be these cool rock and rollers with no feelings, but I can’t stop beaming,” he says to the crowd.
Earlier I ask him if singing about home makes him homesick. “I never really get homesick, but I really miss people back at home,” he says. “I tend to not get homesick, more the opposite. When I’m at home I get really antsy and agitated and really excited to go back on tour. It’s like whatever I’m doing I want to be doing the opposite thing. When we’re travelling and moving constantly I want to be sitting at home on the couch, but the second I’m on the couch, I’m like, ‘this fuckin sucks, get me back in the van.’”
Wagner is passionate about everything he puts his mind to. When he’s not performing he is writing and when he’s not writing, well he’s performing. “It’s quite hard to not write a million songs about being in transit, which is something I’m very conscious of, because then I could just write a whole album that’s like, ‘here we are in the van again, we just loaded out…’ which is probably pretty boring.”
“It’s hard to think about anything else but the tour you’re on, I find. You get stuck in this crazy routine where all you can talk about is gear and equipment and guitar tones. All you can think about is load in and load out times. I find that reading and listening to music and then trying to write from the perspective of other things that aren’t touring helps me. But sitting around so much means you’ll always have a lot of times to write music.”
As Wagner finishes the song, Cowburn drums on a guitar case in the stairwell side of stage. “Are all the shows like this?” I ask him. He grins, “this is definitely the best so far,” as he walks back on stage.
Wagner is well aware of his influence and uses it to good, particularly addressing issues of mental health . He prefaces I Love Life by saying, “this song is about struggling with mental health. The one good thing about dealing with these kinds of issues is the wonderful experiences like this are amplified.” Looking out in to the audience, there are numerous glassy eyes looking back at him.
Earlier, he tells me of his involvement in a songwriting mentoring program where he works with a group of young musicians on their craft. “The number one thing young girls were coming up to me and were saying was their voices weren’t sounding good,” he says, likening it to his own unconventional style of talking and shouting. So that night he went home and sent an email to one particular participant with a link to Hop Along’s album Painted Shut. “I feel like I unlocked punk rock for her,” he says.
Former Bomb The Music Industry drummer Mike Costa stands side of stage. As the band break in to Don’t Fuck With Our Dreams and the audience scream back the refrain, ‘I know what happened I was there,’ he leans over to me and whispers, “I was there. I saw everything that happened,” speaking of a show in Byron Bay in 2013 where a member of the support band was stabbed with a glass bottle and Costa helped nurse him before an ambulance arrived.
It’s not important that the 300 people in the audience don’t know the specific origins of the song. That’s the thing about The Smith Street Band, whether you were present at an event, know the suburb cited or have experienced any kind of feeling alluded to, you can share the experience and relate to it via Wagner’s vivid imagery and raw emotion. For Costa, this song hits home hardest.
They power through 13 songs in just under an hour and the show is wrapped up by 11 pm. Shortly the venue will turn in to a nightclub, hosting Dutch DJ and producer Sander Kleinenberg for a midnight set, so load out is immediate. No sooner does the band walk off the stage from performing, they are back on it to pack up their own gear.
The venue reward the band for their sold out show with a bottle of Jameson. A trophy of sorts, Wagner sips on it intermittently before hiding it in his backpack and grabbing a box of merch to take to the van.
The band discuss going to a bar to have a celebratory drink before heading back to the motel for some sleep and preparing for the trip to Philadelphia, where they’ll do it all again tomorrow night.
Brendan Hitchens
