Sydney blues-rockers The Snowdroppers return refreshed and re-energised with a brand new album, ‘Business’, and are embarking on a national tour.
“To be honest I think we're staring down the barrel of being a band for eight or nine years now which is a long time,” laughs frontman Johnny Wishbone.
“We came to the end of, I think it was 2013, and we'd done that many laps of the country, honestly we were just tired and it's easy to kill the thing you love and that's something we didn’t want to do, to have it all fall apart after so much hard work.”
Rather than carry on going through the motions of relentless touring, the band took some serious downtime during the past 18 months which allowed Johnny and guitarist, Pauly K, to pursue other performance avenues. “It coincided that Paul and I had been asked to be involved in a play at the Sydney Theatre Company, so that was last year and that took up a big chunk of the year.
“We were in a play called ‘Mojo’, which is a British play. That took up three months of the year so it seemed a fitting time to have a bit of a break. We played sparingly throughout 2014 and it was really good; everyone's quick to spell doom and gloom as soon as you have a break, but honestly, it was the best thing that could have happened to the band because we just came back to it so refreshed.”
‘Business’ is the third studio album from The Snowdroppers and was produced by the band’s live engineer, Ryan Hazell. The latest single, ‘Love Letters’, apparently started out in the style of a 'Bond' theme song but, as Johnny explains, gradually became something else altogether. “I think ‘Love Letters’ was the first song written for the record and we'd done a lot of writing,” Johnny explains.
“We kind of fucked around with a lot of songs before we had a bit of a break in 2014, from memory. There were a couple of ideas floating around that weren't really grabbing us but ‘Love Letters’ did and I think it started a little bit slower… it’s a love song, it's crying out to a girl who's not paying any attention.”
The Snowdroppers are touring ‘Business’ nationally from September. “We've always been there to entertain, that's the whole point of it; I don't really know that we're making any bold sweeping statements politically or anything like that. We're not trying to bring about world peace, we're just trying to entertain.
"We've always felt that we've got to deal with so much in life that perhaps a Snowdroppers show is just a bit of sweet escapism, not only for us but the audience as well.”
With a solid catalogue of favourites and thousands of touring kilometres across Australia under their belts, Johnny says the next goal for The Snowdroppers is to take the band to international stages. “I think that's the next real step for us, we're all ready to get out there. We're all getting a little bit older now and there's no money in music, we all know that,” he laughs.
“So I think for us, we're happy for the band to be at a level that simply allows us to do stuff we wouldn't otherwise do, and I think that's definitely [to] take us overseas and have some new experiences, meet some new people and see some places we haven't been before.”
The Snowdroppers play Bigsound 10 September and Helm Bar (Sunshine Coast) 11 September. The band's national tour continues with another 13 dates. 'Business' is available now.
