After a show at the Bottom Lounge in Chicago on The Everglow 10th Anniversary Tour, I was lucky enough to sit down with Nathan Hussey of All Get Out for a quick Q&A (with a special appearance by Josh Kean).
This is one of the last few show dates on the Everglow tour, how was the experience? How was the tour? Any moments that stood out?
It’s our first tour in two years and we have new songs to play so it’s definitely exciting but scary at the same time, but it’s been great and we’ve been pretty well received in each city. It’s also a little exhausting as we are near the end- I almost forgot how exhausting touring can be.
I know when you guys were touring for The Season you didn’t take too many breaks, and you mentioned in a few interviews that you’d like your next tour to be a bit more spread out. How has your approach changed to touring for Movement compared to then?
Yeah, we definitely wanted to spread out our shows and the tour this time around, and times have changed so we don’t necessarily have to go as hard. We’re also a little more further along than we used to be, and to be noticed before you had to be on tour a lot to continue promoting your stuff whenever you could. It’s strange because the band grew more when we were off for a few years, which has been pretty awesome. It felt like hands free work or just our work that trickled along from before. I’m interested to see the reception on a different tour and lineup, it’ll be cool to see how new audiences react to us. We’re pretty pleased so far and eager to see what else continues to happen.
What was your approach when writing and recording? Does it all come at once, or more sporadically?
It’s usually ideas that sit around for a long, long time and we work on it, put it down, throw it away and maybe come back to it. That’s how it goes most of the time.
We always call it a junkyard of songs because there’s a ton of parts that go into each song, but sometimes it just works out and it happens in one shot and we keep it. The songs from the EP were ideas I had for years and I had to let those songs kind of settle in, get confident about them, listen to them over and over again until I hated them and then loved them again. It’s a weird process you go through every single time. It’s exciting and nerve-racking when you’re taking a new direction, but more so cool to see everything evolve.
NS: How do you decide what songs are for All Get Out and what songs are for your solo stuff?
Nathan: Most of the songs I write are always for AGO and the stuff that’s more of a sore thumb or doesn’t necessarily fit in goes to my solo stuff. But for the next solo album I think I’ll do more of a stripped down sound so it can be differentiated more. My last stuff (Ground Me) still had some more rock to it, so I’ll probably do something more lighter.
With the music industry changing so much these past few years with Spotify and social media channels, do you guys find yourselves doing a lot more of the business side of things? How do you think it’s changed since putting out The Season? Does that kind of stuff affect the band at all?
We use a ton of Instagram, Tumblr and things like that to update our fans, but we intentionally try not to crowd the space but just interact with people. We noticed a lot of new fans from Spotify as well. It’s pretty cool to see fans come up to us at shows and tell us they found out about AGO because we were a suggested related band, and just from that they end up coming to our shows and such. It’s definitely a different time now with those sites and obviously you miss out on things that you could call potential profits, but on the other hand sites like Spotify are also very helpful in the long run. These fans that find us through it end up coming to our shows and taking the time to meet us after. And they buy vinyl, which is such a huge thing now- it’s like if you have a record player you got to get vinyl, and that’s way more effective for us than if someone just downloaded our song. It’s more of a gesture and it’s part of the package as a band now. Vinyl is one of our biggest sellers. It’s cool to look and compare to file sharing from 2000, because now you know where your fans are coming from and you can see your demographic. I can see that someone listened to a band that led them to listen to Manchester Orchestra or whoever and that’s how they found us. We as least get free data now. It’s like a much easier and organized way to get to music.
What’s next for AGO? Will there be another tour? I may have seen a tweet mentioning Manchester Orchestra and the next album.
The night of our last show on this tour (June 16th) we are heading out to a cabin and finishing up some writing, then the week after we are headed to Atlanta to record with Andy and Robert from Manchester Orchestra. It’s really the four of us that are the new record, me, John, Andy and Robert. I mean it’s 100% All Get Out, but there’s a lot of collaboration and everybody’s playing and singing. Thirteen….I mean eighteen, yeah eighteen year old me is pretty excited.
Are you guys intentionally putting out the next album sooner than the time between the Season and the latest EP?
Absolutely. Well, the last album took a year just to come out after it was done and we had already toured plenty on the songs before the official release, so whenever we toured after that we were pretty much done with some of those songs. The next album timing will be a lot quicker- we’ve already finished a third of it. No set date. We initially we’re hoping for this fall, but don’t want to kill the quality just for time. We’re aiming for early next year.
Any favorite cities when touring?
Definitely Austin. I’m not saying this because we’re in Chicago, but I do like coming here. New York is beautiful, but it’s always so stressful. Also, and I’m not sure why, but I always liked playing in LA, but Austin is by far my favorite.
What is an artist or song your fans would be surprised to hear you listen to on tour?
We listen to the new Modest Mouse a lot on tour. That and Justin Timberlake. We love JT in this band- he’s the man. I haven’t played it on tour yet, but I really like Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill and I’ve always been a fan of Matchbox Twenty –even if Rob Thomas wears those little earrings- I still love them.
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If you haven’t checked out All Get Out’s EP Movement …you should probably get on that. I haven’t stopped listening to it since Balance was first released. Great EP, great band and some of the nicest guys around. Also, as a huge Manchester Orchestra and AGO fan, I cannot be more excited to hear the next album (18 year old me is also very stoked). Thanks again to Nathan for taking the time to speak with us.
Nathan Hussey will begin his solo tour with Aaron Gillespie of Underoath and William Beckett of The Academy Is on July 1st at The Boardwalk in Orangevale, CA. For more tour dates be sure to check AGO’s website or Bad Timing Records. http://badtimingrecords.limitedrun.com
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