Evermore - Taking the Dark Truth To The World
Author: Lydia Jenkin
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Evermore have been among our most successful bands of the decade with a Silver Scroll Award, six NZ Music Award nominations, six Aria Award nominations, an MTV Award, chart-topping singles and two hugely successful albums (250,000 copies sold and counting). Fielding-raised though Melbourne-based since 2004, the three Hume brothers have indeed been so successful that Australians are happy to claim them as their own. Despite those various achievements, the release of a third studio album was not the definite eventuality one might expect. Eldest brother, frontman and album producer Jon Hume spoke to Lydia Jenkin about throwing out the Evermore rule book and choosing instead to deliver a genuine 1970s-styled concept album.
Evermore will be 10 years old this year. That’s a long time to spend working and touring with your band, particularly when you work and tour as intensively as Jon, Pete and Dann Hume have done since their mid teens.
Backing up the success of their 2006 second album the brothers undertook a whirlwind of appearances, shows and festivals. They were still touring a year later, adding to their ever increasing number of live shows (now over 300). Finally finding themselves with a little down time towards the end of 2007, they turned their attention to writing material for a third album, and found themselves at something of a crossroad.
“We had this weird initial period where we were all going in quite different directions, and there was a bit of tension I think, in the air for some reason,” explains lead singer and guitar slinging brother Jon. “You know, we’ve been doing it for a long time, and just musically, and to a degree personally, we were all moving away. I was writing on the one hand these orchestral bits of music and on the other hand this quite electronic heavy synthy stuff that I’d never really done before. And Dann was writing sort of folk music, and Pete was doing his own thing as well, so it was a bit weird. We didn’t really know where it was all gonna end up. We didn’t really know if any of the stuff we were making was Evermore music.”
Indeed the growing apart had reached a point where the possibility of the band splitting had surfaced, and the first real time off in almost a decade was taken. The trio had wanted to make a concept album since Evermore’s formation and agreed this was the opportunity. It would give them a way to mesh their diverging styles and create a united purpose, even if that meant moving away from their established Evermore sound and taking a real risk in the increasingly single-oriented music market.
“I guess as far as this record goes, we were at a point where for us to be excited about it again, we needed to try something new and to throw out the rule book of what Evermore was about. We came to the realisation that Evermore is just the three of us and it’s whatever music we want to make really, it’s not limited by what our last album sounded like or anything like that. It was sort’a like, ‘If we’re gonna keep doing this band let’s do something really interesting and really push ourselves’.”
Ideas were tossed around, inspiration ultimately coming from the particularly relevant cultural issue of the blurring line between news and entertainment. Trashy media, political propaganda, and consumerism were all themes they wanted to address, and eventually they hit on the idea of presenting the album to listeners through a fictional news/entertainment empire called Truth of the World. Each plays a character – Jon being the Ringleader, Dann as reporter Donovan Earl, and Pete the Soldier (a militant supporter of ‘The Party’ – the political arm of Truth of the World).
“It was triggered by Dann actually, he came up with the basic idea of news reports kind of cutting in and sort of being a commentary of what the songs were about, and that idea just sparked a million others. Like developing the character of Donovan Earl as this news reporter with a slightly twisted personality, and then, ‘Oh, we could have ad breaks, and then we could have political campaigning’. Just the whole media thing, they’re throwing so many ideas at you the whole time, and so many stories. It was just a really freeing idea ’cos it meant we could fit in just about anything. We fitted a verse in about the global economic crisis, there’s a verse about an old woman with a shotgun going on a rampage.
Backing up the success of their 2006 second album the brothers undertook a whirlwind of appearances, shows and festivals. They were still touring a year later, adding to their ever increasing number of live shows (now over 300). Finally finding themselves with a little down time towards the end of 2007, they turned their attention to writing material for a third album, and found themselves at something of a crossroad.
“We had this weird initial period where we were all going in quite different directions, and there was a bit of tension I think, in the air for some reason,” explains lead singer and guitar slinging brother Jon. “You know, we’ve been doing it for a long time, and just musically, and to a degree personally, we were all moving away. I was writing on the one hand these orchestral bits of music and on the other hand this quite electronic heavy synthy stuff that I’d never really done before. And Dann was writing sort of folk music, and Pete was doing his own thing as well, so it was a bit weird. We didn’t really know where it was all gonna end up. We didn’t really know if any of the stuff we were making was Evermore music.”
Indeed the growing apart had reached a point where the possibility of the band splitting had surfaced, and the first real time off in almost a decade was taken. The trio had wanted to make a concept album since Evermore’s formation and agreed this was the opportunity. It would give them a way to mesh their diverging styles and create a united purpose, even if that meant moving away from their established Evermore sound and taking a real risk in the increasingly single-oriented music market.
“I guess as far as this record goes, we were at a point where for us to be excited about it again, we needed to try something new and to throw out the rule book of what Evermore was about. We came to the realisation that Evermore is just the three of us and it’s whatever music we want to make really, it’s not limited by what our last album sounded like or anything like that. It was sort’a like, ‘If we’re gonna keep doing this band let’s do something really interesting and really push ourselves’.”
Ideas were tossed around, inspiration ultimately coming from the particularly relevant cultural issue of the blurring line between news and entertainment. Trashy media, political propaganda, and consumerism were all themes they wanted to address, and eventually they hit on the idea of presenting the album to listeners through a fictional news/entertainment empire called Truth of the World. Each plays a character – Jon being the Ringleader, Dann as reporter Donovan Earl, and Pete the Soldier (a militant supporter of ‘The Party’ – the political arm of Truth of the World).
“It was triggered by Dann actually, he came up with the basic idea of news reports kind of cutting in and sort of being a commentary of what the songs were about, and that idea just sparked a million others. Like developing the character of Donovan Earl as this news reporter with a slightly twisted personality, and then, ‘Oh, we could have ad breaks, and then we could have political campaigning’. Just the whole media thing, they’re throwing so many ideas at you the whole time, and so many stories. It was just a really freeing idea ’cos it meant we could fit in just about anything. We fitted a verse in about the global economic crisis, there’s a verse about an old woman with a shotgun going on a rampage.
