Calling All Cars
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Calling All Cars

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“Yeah, we’re happy with it,” he enthuses. “It was a lot of hard work but it’s paid off in the end.

“It’s all kinda still new and fresh,” he laughs, considering his favourite tracks off the new record, “and I’m in studio mode still. I need to take a month away from it, and just not listen to it, and then come back and see what happens. I’m still not sure.”

The band ultimately wrote and demoed a large number of tunes leading up to the recording of the new record, which ultimately proved itself to be both a luxury and a bit of pain, when it came to pairing them all down to the 11 that you hear on Dancing with a Deadman. They wanted to make sure The Sophomore Album Syndrome that seems to affect so many bands wasn’t a concern for them.

“As soon as we’d finished the first one, Hold Hold Fire,” he explains, “we always had it in the back of our minds, that you always hear about the dreaded second album thing, and we said ‘Shit, we don’t want to fall into that scene’ like a lot of bands do. So we actually booked out a rehearsal space for about a month, as soon as we had some time off between touring, and just demoed as much as we possibly could. I think that, by the time we came around to do pre-production, we had something like 40 songs to choose from. I think the hard work paid off, we could choose a path for the direction of this album.

“During pre-production,” he continues, “it was obvious which songs were better than others. So we started with that, and now we’ve got what we’ve got. It was obvious which songs were better than others, but some songs weren’t as fleshed out, and there were a lot of finished songs that we just scrapped. So in the end it was better that way, it worked out.”

The album has themes running through its title and artwork, although it has absolutely nothing to do with the zombie/vampire thing that is so trendy at the moment, as many people have apparently thought. “We always had kind of a theme in the back of our minds,” he recalls, “but dancing with a deadman is not literal – a lot of people think it’s like Zombie Apocolypse or something like that!” he laughs, “You hear that saying ‘like a dead man walking’, and we always thought it’s like a Western vibe, like a shoot-off kind of thing. That’s where it comes from; it looks a bit [western TV series] Deadwood. There were a few names that we were throwing around, but that was everyone’s favourite, and it was really good for imagery.”

The band have been off the road incubating the new album for so long now that they are busting out of their skins to get back on the road again, especially since they are such a live band, who only really release music to give themselves something new to play when they go on tour. “Yeah definitely,” Haydn emphasises, “we’ve been locked up in a studio for long enough now, we’re keen to get back out on the road and try out all the new material as well…we like to think of ourselves as more of a live band, we try to get that to translate into the recordings. We just love performing, and try to get as much energy into our shows as we possibly can.”

Melbourne and regional Victorian fans, as well as punters across the country, get to experience the pure energy that is Calling All Cars live very shortly, as they take off on their nationwide tour in support of the new record. Haydn describes their live set to people who may not have caught the band live yet, but plan to do so on the coming tour.

“It’s mostly hard-hitting energetic rock,” he says, “but I think that with the new songs we’ll have a bit more dynamics in the set, because there are a few slower songs in there. You’ll just have to come along and check it out.”

And as for goals for the album? “Well, just world domination really!” he quips. “No, really, I just think we’ll work our arses off. We’re really proud of this album, hopefully people dig it. Last album we didn’t really look at going overseas, but this time around, we’re definitely looking into it, so we’ll see what happens. It’s really tough and it’s a lot of hard work. I think people often think that when you’re in a band it’s kind of like the ‘easy life’, and you just travel and party all the time. It’s actually the complete opposite. It’s like ‘how are we going to find some money to eat tonight?’ But at the end of the day we’re doing what we absolutely love doing.”