After a 12-month absence from the stage, Australian favourites Tonight Alive will return to the live arena to perform an exclusive set at UNIFY Gathering in January.
In December 2018, the band cancelled their US tour and announced a hiatus from international touring to prioritise their mental and physical health. The band haven’t performed together since.
Now, after an extensive break, vocalist Jenna McDougall is rejuvenated and thrilled to perform at the festival. “I guess UNIFY felt like the perfect way to reunite,” McDougall explains.
“It’s amazing. We’ve never had this amount of time off before. It is a very conscious decision to take time off and regenerate extensively. Because in the past, the max amount of time we’d ever had off was two months since I left high school.
“Even two months is an awkward amount of time where half the time you’re coming down from the ride and the next half you’re preparing for the next one. I’ve never felt more excited and prepared for a show than this.”
“I’ve been claiming my sovereignty and my autonomy; it feels amazing.” - Jenna McDougall
If that wasn’t exciting enough, the performance is billed as ‘Tonight Alive & Friends’ where the band will be joined on stage for some mystery collaborations with a few of their famous friends. “I guess this is a really lovely opportunity to share the love. We’ve made so many friends over the years and I’m really looking forward to collaborating more.
“That’s something I’ve come to understand about myself is that I really enjoy teamwork, even having this time off the road now, it’s actually quite confronting being just a solo person, not travelling in a group of 10 or 12 people.
“I really resonate with sharing and with community and connecting to people, so I’m really looking forward to doing that through music.”
McDougall has been performing in Tonight Alive since she was a teenager. A full year off the road was a mammoth amount of time she has never had for herself before. “It has had its highs and lows, but right now I feel like I’ve reached a sustainable high. Like I’ve said, it was confronting at times realising that you are an individual.
"As much as there are always people you can reach out to, it was actually a really good practice for me to become more independent from the band, from my family, from a sense of identity that I had developed through being in the band.
“It’s been amazing. I’ve never had this many tools and this many resources at my disposal to work on my health and to be the happiest I can be, to be productive and have rhythm and routine.
"Those are the things that I think I severely underrated, that I’ve never had a chance to experience before. It’s been a pretty wholesome time, to be honest.”
Although the time off took some getting used to, it was an opportunity for self-discovery and a chance for McDougall to make her personal wellbeing a priority. “It probably took six-plus months to find a rhythm with it actually. It’s like a whole, new situation for me. You’re learning to be the master of your domain.
"You’re governing your life. That’s the first time that no one else has had a say in where I’m going to be, what I’m going to do, and how I’m going to do it. I’ve been claiming my sovereignty and my autonomy; it feels amazing.”
For fans, all they saw was a band touring the world and living the dream. But of course, that wasn’t always the case and managing your own wellbeing while on tour is a constant struggle.
The stability of home life eventually enabled McDougall to develop routines that she couldn’t on the road. “I still put so much focus and effort and time into it on tour, but it’s always going to be compromised.
“Even when you do have endless time on your hands to work with, which I did, I felt quite lost at times this year. Even when you have that amount of time, it’s quite hard to stay on track I feel.
"At least with someone like me, that has had an ever-changing environment and I’m easily distracted. I found it hard to stay grounded, when my whole life I’ve just been uprooted every couple of months and moved somewhere else.
“My health improved a lot because I’ve been able to see a particular practitioner consistently and I have been able to create a routine for myself, cook everything I eat and be on juice cleanses if I choose to be.
"It’s just something that I’m probably more grateful for than a lot of things that have happened in my life, that people would think ‘that’s got to be the best thing that has ever happened to a person’, I think this time off is kind of that for me,” McDougall explains.
Tonight Alive are on our Nov-Dec front covers in NSW, VIC & QLD
Tonight Alive’s most recent album ‘Underworld’ was released in 2018; it was a cathartic record and an honest representation of what had happened to the band in the past year. It explored the darkness and pain that McDougall had experienced and was a raw and real insight into a band reconnecting with their authentic selves.
“What I’ve noticed is that when I’m in crisis and things are under intense pressure, that is when the most growing happens for me and when I’m at my peak of being self-expressive, honest and in flow.
“At least for me, ‘Underworld’ was a very authentic experience making the record. We wrote that album pretty much at my house and we returned to our producer, Dave Petrovic, who we did all of our earlier recordings with.
"It’s like this album that is a reflection of my soul, it’s so true to who we are as a group of people, as musicians, what I say on that record is really important to me.
“Going into the record cycle with that tone was really, really special, but it was also an extremely painful time where we just lost a member of the band and we were totally rearranging our dynamic, it was scary as hell.
"There were a lot of times on that album tour where I was crying right before I was going on stage and just collapsing afterwards. But the performance, I was more proud of it than any I had ever given because I was in it and that feels raw.
"Everything I was saying was coming from an open wound. It was an incredible experience and very connective with our fans.
“As much as I was hurting throughout that year and constantly getting sick and trying to recover, on repeat; as much as that was all happening, I think we were in flow, it was what needed to happen, it was really beautiful actually.”
