Hopes can be high (and quickly dashed) when a band makes the trek over to SxSW but things came together well for Blackchords. “I guess over the last 12 months we’ve been getting a lot more TV syncs and we knew we were building a bit of a fan base that way so with the new record coming out we wanted to get over to America and touch base with some of the fans we’ve made already,” Milwright says. “We also wanted to build on the TV sync stuff and try and get different licenses and get more and more TV placement going. From that, we hoped that we’d get a booking agent over in the States and be able to get over there more often than never. Things are slowly coming together for all that.”
Balancing the business side of industry conferences with the feeling of SxSW and CMW being a musician’s Spring Break can be hard but Blackchords did it well. “For us we’ve been heads down and really focused on business things after recording the record and everything that comes hand in hand with that so we hadn’t had a good, solid tour for a while,” he says. “We felt like we needed to reconnect with each other and get on the road again. It was great to be in another world and actually be a part of something so different to what we see and do in Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane. It’s nice to put yourself out of the norm and get inspired again. It was everything – we didn’t stop ourselves from having a good time and maybe we should’ve – but we also got a whole lot of business done.”
A Thin Line was recorded in 2012 in a converted barn in the Yarra valley. Red Room’s Mark Stanley came in as co-producer joined by the expertise of David Odlum of The Frames, Luka Bloom and Josh Ritter fame. “Having a seasoned producer on board and having a band that have such a strong working relationship really helped us find our own sound and voice,” he explains. “We had tossed up the idea of producing the record ourselves along the way but the reality is when you’re new to this you can’t just go in and capture what you imagine. You just don’t have the knowledge for that. We couldn’t figure out a lot of ways of getting certain sounds. Having David on board was like having an alchemist on board who could take all of these ideas that we’d verbalised and also all of these half ideas and he’d have an answer straight away. He was able to realise everything we were trying to verbalise and turn it into a solid, recorded moment.”
Record label contracts, licensing contracts and all other manner of music business deeds have preventing the album from being released until now but Milwright feels like everything is in its right place. Far from falling victim to the pattern of long album cycles, Milwright is excited about touring this album and even more excited about getting back into the studio and writing the next album. “We really created a lot of these songs for the album so it’s been great to play them live over the last few months – it’s brought a great life to them and to Blackchords,” he says. “We always thought we’d have it out a lot earlier but a lot of little things came in the way, more opportunities really. But now the band feels amazing and we really feel ready to head out into the country and tour it and get the response we’re hoping for. After that, we’ll get back into the writing and creating, we feel like this album is a reflection of where we were and we’re now coming into a new era of Blackchords after this record.”
BY KRISSI WEISS
