Wolfmother’s Andrew Stockdale on Success, Future Albums and Being Bigger Than Hall & Oats

Do you remember Wolfmother? Do you remember their first album, how it blew up in 2006? Do you remember how the original line-up of the band did too not that long after?

Well, now that your memory has been refreshed know this. Wolfmother are still going strong. Fronted by Andrew Stockdale they’ve made another three albums and, even though none have rivaled the colossal strides of their first, the numbers Stockdale assures us are on his side.

Take a glance at Spotify or YouTube and you’ll see that he may just have a point. Millions of fans are still listening to this band. And, as Stockdale notes, if you compare Wolfmother’s Bandsintown followers to those Hall & Oats it becomes quite evident that Wolfmother is ahead. Looking at the matter strictly in this sense he is, again, correct. Wolfmother are bigger than Hall & Oates.

Bearing things like these in mind Andrew is convinced. Convinced it’s not over, not yet. There’s more of Wolfmother to come. Critics be damned, the band is still drawing people to their concerts in the thousands. So if someone like, say, a major record label doesn’t want to play ball when it comes to helping Wolfmother to get their next record out there and into the world, to hell with them. Wolfmother will put it out themselves. There’s more than a little kick left in this band yet.

[The following conversation picks up from Andrew Stockdale discussing Wolfmother’s rapid rise to fame and the difficulties of gauging the current level of his band’s success.]

ANDREW STOCKDALE: We just showed up to Antwerp and Belgium and sold out an outdoor arena for 3,000 people. We went to another place in Holland about an hour’s drive outside of Amsterdam and played a sold-out show to 5,000 people. So I think it’s when you see the stats.

I saw that on Bandsintown Hall & Oates have 80,000 trackers. And [then] I looked at Wolfmother and we’ve got 400,000 or 500,000 trackers. And it makes me go, “Are we big!?”

COSMIC: Bigger than Hall & Oates…

AS: Yeah, you know! And Hall & Oates are playing friggin’ arenas and stadiums. So whether we’re ‘big’ or like you say, how do you gauge it, how does it feel and when do you know that it’s happening? It takes a long time to be like, “Hey, uh, I think we’re big.”

Everyone [tells you,] “One step at a time. You’ve got to have a new record.” On the second record Cosmic Egg, the booking agent was like, “You gotta play a hundred capacity venue, the Lexington in London and a hundred capacity in Amsterdam and a hundred capacity in New York.” The next time we came back we were playing to five thousand people at [New York’s] Terminal 5 and 2,000 people in Brooklyn.

We actually had the promoter for Madison Square Garden approach my manager and say he wanted to book Wolfmother. And my ‘manager’ at the time said, “I don’t think you should do it.” And I’m like, “!”.

To answer your question, mangers don’t know, booking agents don’t know. This is a high-risk industry and how you gauge it, it’s like a numbers game. You never know, it just keeps pushing itself along. I think [you have to] keep an open mind, be flexible and just go with it.

C: On the musical side, what is it do you think is it about your songs that has spoken through to so many people? Millions of people have connected with it, is it just rock ’n’ roll or something more?

AS: Is it just rock ’n’ roll? I’ve always subconsciously avoided 4/4 meter, is that rock ’n’ roll? Our perception of rock ’n’ roll is — there’s a groove you know? There’s a groove.

Look at a band like Aerosmith, they’ve got big choruses, but they don’t really have a groove. Then you see a band like Black Sabbath. They don’t really have big choruses, but they have a groove and they’re playing venues that are bigger than Aerosmith. Then you look at AC/DC and that’s very 4/4 time, and they have big choruses, and they’re playing stadiums.

To analyse it and say, “What is it?” I think it’s a combination of the groove and riffs that have a groove that has a backbeat that people on a primitive level or instinctive level relate to. [People] always respond to groove-based music with a backbeat. And having that with a vocal in my register sonically makes sense. A higher register [vocal] with a low-end frequency for the riffs is like this kind of magical formula that speaks to people.

C: A term people sometimes use to describe your music is ‘psychedelic’. Do you think that is a term people can or should apply to it?

AS: Well I think if you look at ‘White Unicorn’, the breakdown in ‘White Unicorn’ is probably as close to psychedelic as we get. Think back to 2003 and imagine hearing Crowded House, Hunters & Collectors, Midnight Oil, Eskimo Joe. [All of these bands are] examples of Australian mainstream radio. If you heard ‘White Unicorn’ you’d be like, “Holy cow! What the hell is going on here, this is?” Then you hear ‘Joker and The Thief’ and ‘Woman’.

Fast forward to now you’ve got all these bands, stoner movements, stoner festivals, and all these boutique festivals. Spotify and iTunes have more of these dynamics. Diversified genres have been allowed to come through.

I think maybe back at that time we could have been viewed as psychedelic in parts of some of our songs. But now you can have a band that is completely psychedelic and pushes it to the realms which would make us sound like a friggin’ meat-and-potatoes hard rock band! It’s all relative I guess.

C: Your last album Victorious came out in 2016. What’s happening on the recording front?

AS: I’ve got two songs that I recorded at the Foo Fighters’ studio. One’s called ‘Higher’, one’s called ‘Spanish Rose’. And I actually spent the last two weeks recording new songs. I’ve got another eight songs so I’m ready to go and I’m just talking to a bunch of different labels.

I’m sort of thinking, “Should I just put it out myself?” We’ve got 2.2 million monthly subscribers on Spotify. We effectively have our own audience. Or should I give it to a record label who has five thousand subscribers that is wanting to give me ‘X’ amount of money? I’m trading off. Where are we at these days in the music world you know?

C: Any closing thoughts you want to throw out to Wolfmother fans?

AS: The parting message at this point would be [that] at the moment, whether it’s through a label or whether it’s a self-release thing, what I’m looking at doing now is making more mini-documentaries and putting them on YouTube, using social media and just putting out more demos, more documentaries and treating all that sort of stuff as a media outlet to engage with our fanbase. That’s the next step.

Like this interview?

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