Sunshine Coast band Bearfoot will round out a killer year with a tour in November and December that includes a home-town show at Rock N Roots Festival.
Bearfoot released their debut EP ‘Tribe’ in 2016 and have spent much of this year performing at a number of festivals. Frontman Asher Chapman says the band has been extending its reach beyond their local scene.
“We went to Sydney and Melbourne and just recently we played in Cairns and Port Macquarie, which is cool because I’d never been to most of those places so it was good to play music in front of new people as well as travel a bit,” Asher says.
The August-September tour was in support of Bearfoot’s new single ‘Crazy For You’, which features the vocal talents of Andrea Kirwin in a love-story duet about the first time Asher met his wife. “We’ve been married for four years now, but that [song] was [written] just as I came back to Australia after living in Vanuatu for a long time,” he explains.
“It’s probably one of our older songs but we went in to record it with our producer and technician Paulie B and he helped put a new spin on it.” Asher further explains how Andrea’s creative input brought a new perspective to the song he’d initially written.
“She was originally just coming in to do some backing tracks and we played the song to her a couple of times because she’d never heard it and she started singing along with the verses,” he says.
“It was originally written with me singing all of it, then we dropped out my vocals in the second verse and it turned into a duet. We didn’t plan on it to come out like that and she’s got such an amazing voice, so it worked really well.”
Bearfoot continue their onward-and-upward trajectory with a short tour at the end of the year, which includes local performances at Rock N Roots and Woodford Folk Festival. Asher says it’s an appropriate way for Bearfoot to finish 2017 by showcasing how far they’ve come the past years.
“We played Woodford two years ago I think and I’d say that was the start of us getting seriously into gear really, because that was just before we started setting up tours and really pushing it,” he says.
“So it’s nice to come back for that and be able to show everyone what we’ve worked out in the past two years of touring. The Rock N Roots [festival] will be cool too because we haven’t played a show on the Coast for a long time and a lot of our mates are playing at it as well.”
As for what comes next for Bearfoot, Asher says he and the band are taking their time to write and record their debut album, which they want to ensure is a bold artistic statement of their creativity as a band. “We’ve been working on new songs and trying to put together what we eventually want to make our debut album,” he says.
“A lot of that is writing and re-writing, and trying to fit our songs into a vibe that we would want to put together for an album. I really would like to take our time with the album recording and make it as good as we possibly can, make it all relevant; put together a good album and don’t rush it.”
Bearfoot Tour Dates
Sat 11 Nov - Ballina Prawn FestivalSat 18 Nov - HOME Gathering (Sunshine Coast)
Sat 25 Nov - Nimbin Bush Theatre
Sat 2 Dec - Rock N Roots Festival (Caloundra RSL)
27 Dec-1 Jan - Woodford Folk Festival (Sunshine Coast)
