Waiting for a call from a man half way across the world can be a cruel reality. Especially when you know it’s only 8am there and there’s surely been a gig the night before. Thankfully, Kris Schroeder, of The Basics is about as polite and chatty as you could get that time of the morning.
On the release of their third studio album Keep Your Friends Close, I’m lucky enough to learn about what happened between releases and how the trio finally found themselves in a studio. “If I had my way I’d be putting them out a lot more than we do. But it takes a lot of time and money, and getting the three of us together that often can be hard; we’re all on different schedules,” Schroeder concedes.
Written in outback Australia, recorded in Melbourne and mixed in the famous Abbey Road Studios, The Basics did things differently this time around. Their classic mix of clean crisp crooning and rockabilly guitar licks lessens slightly on Keep Your Friends Close, and takes on a more serious and adult sound on songs like With this Ship. While still a perfect blend of everything their sound has to offer, Schroeder admits there have actually been a lot of changes with it. “It started out as a completely different album and was originally more poppy but, like everything it just evolved naturally into what it is now.”
In the three years between releases the band has made a progressively steady rise to fame and gathered a slew of fans along the way. Part of this is undoubtedly due to one third of the band being Australian music darling, Goyte. When I ask Schroeder if this has affected the band at all he responds, “It has of course, yeah. But it’s never changed anything between the three of us, certainly not any key dynamics that we’ve got. The thing that gets to me the most is people’s inability to see it at face value at times. They often come along to the shows expecting something and walk away realising that we’re totally different to that. You know, we’ve worked really hard to get to where we are, and we haven’t done it piggy backing off someone else’s success, and for people to suggest that really gets to me.”
Gigging their way across Australia for the last eight years, the band are like poster boys for hard work. Often playing two gigs a night at venues, it’s hard to know where they find the time to write an album. But Schroeder quashes this almost immediately by saying they simply enjoy playing live. “For us it feels natural and we have a lot of fun up there… It’s so nice now, being in Europe and playing shows to people that have never seen or heard of us. For them there’s no lineation between old and new, it’s all new. And, it’s nice thinking we’ve made some new fans along the way and are succeeding in what we came over here to do.”
The Basics will be playing Canberra’s third Trackside Festival on Saturday 21 November 2009. Tickets available through Moshtix.
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