A Chat With: Splashh

Almost every time a writer describes a band, the band's hometown or current location is brought into play (i.e. "the British band" or "the LA-based duo," etc.) Well, with this band, it's difficult to pinpoint an adjective based on their geographic ties, seeing as two members live in London, a couple of them live in NYC, and their newest member resides in Berlin...but they're all from Australia or New Zealand.  Nonetheless, we caught up with the worldly rock group Splashh during their tour with Public Access T.V, while all of the band members resided together in a van currently traveling cross country.  Although it's been over three years since Splashh's debut album Comfort first made waves, the band just recently announced their sophomore album's release on April 14th. We chatted with keyboardist Jaie Gonzalez all about the new album, the recent inauguration, staying sane on tour, and what's to come this year, prior to their show this Thursday at Schubas Tavern. 

ANCHR Magazine: So let's talk a little bit about the new album and how tour is going so far. You kicked off tour the other day, in Washington D.C., right?

Jaie Gonzalez: Our first date was in Boston, and then Washington the day after that.

AM: How crazy was it to be in DC when the inauguration was going on?

JG: I mean, it was an amazing experience.  It was really cool to be there at that time.  We went to the march the next day...The Public Access dudes made a nice little event out of it, smashed a TV...it was good!

AM: Nice! What were some of the best signs that you saw at the march?

JG: Ah, some of the good signs…”Viva La Vulva” was pretty good.  There’s so many good ones!

New single "Rings" from Splashh's new album Waiting a Lifetime

AM: I actually interviewed John from Public Access T.V a couple of weeks ago, and he mentioned that you guys would be doing this tour all together in a van.

JG: Oh yea, we’re in it right now…

AM: So how has that been going so far? Has anyone lost their mind yet?

JG: *laughs* Mostly, sanity is intact.  Eleven boys in a van...it’s pretty calm actually at the moment. There’s been some cabin fever moments, definitely. The driving from Boston to DC was, just cause of all the traffic, a good 12 hours in the van.  There was some loopy moments.  We had a day off yesterday, though.

AM: Did you get up to anything cool on the day off?

JG: It was another long van day.  We ended up at a middle-of-nowhere rest stop in North Carolina or something.

AM: How do you guys usually keep occupied during the long drives? Do you have a good playlist?

JG: Max from PATV has been doing a bulk of the DJing. Toto is making a flyer for our China tour right now.  A lot of people with headphones and their phones.

AM: Nice! Talking a little more about the album now, you guys just announced last week that Waiting a Lifetime is the follow up to 2013’s Comfort. How does it feel to finally be getting a new album out after a few years?

JG: It feels great to have the record done. To just have a finished thing that we can listen to now, and don’t have to think about. We put a lot of love and time into it, so now that it’s finished we’re kicking into touring mode.

AM: Can you talk a little bit about the recording and writing process?

JG: Yea, well we recorded it at Rare Book Room Studios with Nicolas Vernhes. That’s been our first choice of where to make the record for a few years now. It was really great to have the opportunity to work there. Nico...we’d kind of been hassling him for years, getting him to come out to the shows.  I guess we could just never afford him, but then we got this deal with the Cinematic Music Group and we could finally afford Nicolas... and we got him. He made the record that we hoped he would and it came out great.  That’s been his studio for like twenty years, he lives above it...it’s a nice little place in Greenpoint. He made all the Deerhunter records there. A lot of records that we love were made there.

AM: Oh cool. So what was the songwriting process like, was it kind of spread out?

JG: Yea, the songs on the record are written pretty much over the past three years.  The first single “Rings” was one of the first songs that me and Sasha wrote together.  Basically when Sasha first came over to New York a couple years ago, we started writing songs and we would send them over to London to Toto and kind of bounce them back and forth between New York and London. Then some of the songs were written like a month before we went into the studio, and one was even written on the spot in the studio.  It’s kind of like a greater sense of our past three years of writing.

AM: You just mentioned now that you some of you are based in New York now, and you have someone based in London...and originally you’re all from Australia and New Zealand.  So do you think that the change in locations has had an impact on how you write, or even just your sound?

JG: Oh yeah, big time.  It’s cool, I like that the past few years have kind of turned into a nowhere or an everywhere band.  We’ve got a brand new drummer and he lives in Berlin.  I live in New York, Toto and [Tom]Beal live in London, and Sasha is just a gypsy so he floats in between.  I mean, now that we’re getting so deep into this touring we’re all kind of living together in this van.

AM: So you’ve got a lot of touring booked for this year and the new album...is there any other big news your fans can expect this year?

JG: Anything other than touring the world and putting out a record? Well...maybe. Stay tuned! There’ll be things. We’re gonna play in China, and hopefully Australia, our homeland.  It should be cool. We’re excited to go back to Europe and play.

AM: What places are you most excited to head back to that you’ve already announced?

JG: Well we’re doing a big UK tour, and our London show is gonna be at a pretty interesting place.  Somewhere down in Peckham in South London. I’m excited to play in Paris.

AM: For sure, that’s always a great city to go to! So what are some other bands that you’re listening to at the moment?

JG: Gee, Public Access T.V is pretty good.  Any new records you’re into, Toto?  Oh yeah, Promise Land. Best band in New York City.

AM: Cool, and what was the first concert you ever went to?

JG: The first concert I ever went to was...at 12 years old, my friend and I bought tickets to No Doubt.

AM: That’s an amazing first concert.  Ok what about the last concert you went to, that wasn’t your own?

JG: That wasn’t my own... Hold on, let me think about this one second. I’m gonna say I saw Promise Land actually!

Splashh plays Schubas this Thursday, with the show kicking off at 8PM.  Grab your tickets here to make sure you see this killer show.  If you're feeling lucky, enter our Twitter contest to win a pair, courtesy of Schubas.

CHICAGO! Wanna see @publicaccesstv @TheBritanys and @splashhband for FREE this Thursday? RT & Follow to enter to win a pair of tix!Ends 1/25 pic.twitter.com/6quyZrpEWU

— ANCHR Magazine (@ANCHRmagazine) January 23, 2017

A Chat With: Public Access T.V

Talking TV drama, studio-hopping, and festival lineups with New York City’s Public Access T.V.  

New York rockers Public Access T.V mix old-school punk vibes with a youthful and refreshing energy that makes them stand out in the crowd. After playing music with other bands, lead singer John Eatherly branched off on his own to form PATV with bandmates Xan Aird, Max Pebbles, and Peter Sustarsic in 2014.  The post punk four piece released their debut album Never Enough on September 30th, 2016. Since then,the album has been steadily gaining traction, proving that kids still do like rock’n’roll, despite the opening lyrics to the band's track “End of an Era.”  In support of the debut album, Public Access T.V will embark on their first US headline tour this month.  Prior to their show at Schubas Tavern in Chicago, John chatted with us about the recording process for the album, life on the road, and what’s in the works for 2017.  

Official video for "End of an Era"

ANCHR Magazine: So first let’s talk about the debut album you released at the end of September.  How did it feel to get that work out there, and what has the response been?

John Eatherly: Well it feels like a great detachment from a lot of accumulated work over many years of songs and writing.  So if anything it just feels good putting your precious babies out there in the world and seeing what happens. We’re about to go on tour in a week, so we’ll see more reactions.  The record was a crazy experience, finally making it to the finish line of it being mixed and done.  It took a lot to get there, so it feels like I’m not so attached to it anymore because it’s out there already.  Like there’s no more old ideas to pick from as far as writing songs.  It’s like a clean slate.

AM: So you mentioned some of these songs have been around for years, and I know you played with other bands and artists before you formed Public Access T.V, so how long have some of the songs been around for, and have any of them evolved and taken on a new meaning since you wrote them?

JE: Maybe some of the songs like “In Love and Alone” and “Careful” I probably made a demo of when I was like 20, in 2010, and then kind of...I don’t know, I wasn’t really making it for any reason other than just to have fun and for myself. I wasn’t ever trying to introduce it to anyone I was playing with or anything like that, I just kind of kept it to myself. Some of them took on a new feeling because some of those songs that were older we ended up playing live as a band when we recorded the record.  So some of the songs that are older definitely have a different energy and drive behind them, just from being a unit playing it all together.  But as far as the span of time, it’s crazy, cause maybe I had a demo that I made five years ago.  Then some of the songs on the record I was recording last minute, while mixing the record. So some of it’s like really, really, really new and some of it is older.  So it’s really like this accumulation of kind of years of trying to figure it out.  That’s why it feels like such a relief.

AM: For sure. So can you talk a little bit about the actual recording process?  I know you mentioned you recorded some songs when you were already mixing, but did you pretty much do the album all in one go? Did you record in one studio?

JE: It was pretty crazy actually.  Our record credits are like movie credits, it’s really long.  So part of it’s recorded in New York, part of it’s recorded in Jersey, one song was recorded in Nashville.  Then like six songs are recorded at two different studios in London.  The reason it was so all over the place is because we were never, we never had uh, the luxury, I guess, knowing that we had two weeks at a studio and going in with that time to complete it.  It was always like two days here and maybe three days here, and then go and bang out as many songs as we could.  And then I’d like two of them, you know?

AM: Yeah, and that’s kind of cool then because the songs take on a different meaning, you know, you’ll associate it like “oh we recorded this in London,” so it’s got that aspect.

JE: Yeah, the stuff that we recorded in London was tracked as a band. Because we had been playing the songs live for quite a few tours.  So some of those ones, like “In Love and Alone,” that version that’s on the record is just like the first take that we did.  It was just a live take, there was no multi-tracking.

AM: Wow so it was just one take as a live band?

JE: Yeah, so some of it’s like that, and then some of it is like the opposite. Like really tracked and-

AM: broken out?

JE: Yeah!

Public Access T.V is John Eatherly Xan Aird, Max Pebbles, and Peter Sustarsic

AM: So talking more about your tour, is there anything you’re planning as a new aspect to the show now that you’re headlining? 

JE: I don’t know...maybe how we think about the setlist might be a little bit different.  I tend to not want to play any slower songs as an opening band.  So it might be a little more dynamic.  But this tour is gonna be real fun because we’re going on tour with our friends, this band called Splashh, and we’re all sharing a van together. It’s gonna be like 12 people crammed into one van. I’ve never been in a van with that many people before, so it’s gonna be real crazy.

AM: Yeah, definitely document that!

JE: Yeah we have a friend coming to film the ridiculousness of it.  

AM: Oh cool! So what cities and venues are you looking forward to playing?

JE: Certainly Chicago.  I’m originally from Tennessee before I moved to New York in like 2008, so we haven’t really played any shows in Nashville- we played one.  We’re gonna go there, so that will be a cool vibe, and maybe some family going to the show. Then, I’m excited to play Bowery Ballroom in New York, and we’re playing Schubas in Chicago...that’ll be really cool.  The bigger cities I guess.

AM: Have you planned anything outside of the gigs, like touristy things at all?

JE: Not really, I think we’ll just kind of see what we get into.  It’s gonna be so many of us together in a confined space, so I’m sure everyone will be really antsy to run around and do things.  We just kind of roam around, probably like in the neighborhood that the venue’s in, and just kind of see what we can find.

AM: You recently were announced to play Shaky Knees Festival.  Are there any other festivals that are on your bucket list to play?

JE: A big one that I always wanted to play was Bonnaroo.  We did that last summer, and that was like a checklist for me because I’d always have friends as a teenager going to Bonnaroo. So that was like a cool way to go. Coachella? I’ve never been.  Festivals are just like insane. Like, I’m not dying to go to any festivals as a festival-goer, but I would certainly love to go and play them.

AM: For sure! If you could pick any 3-5 bands to headline a festival, dead or alive, who would you want?

JE: David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, John Lennon...and Public Access!

AM: Sounds like a great festival! Do you have any other goals or resolutions for this year?

JE: Just hopefully staying busy and recording more.  Just trying to stay as busy as we can working on being a band and being friends.

AM: Are there any other bands that you’re really into at the moment?

JE: I’ve been listening a lot to the band Sparks from LA.  I don’t know...I’m always kind of like- I don’t really know what I’m listening to.  I’m in a phase where I’m not really listening to too much of anything, other than like background music.I’m not feeling particularly in tune.

AM: Yeah, I’m sure it’s hard when you’re invested in your own music to get into other stuff.  Last question- not related to your music at all, but since you’re called Public Access T.V, what’s your favorite TV show at the moment?

JE: Well I don’t have a TV or cable, but my favorite TV that I recently have been watching, is a very dramatic show called Nashville.  It’s kind of like a soap opera.  It’s jam packed with all the drama you could ever need in your life.

Public Access TV will be at Schubas on Thursday, January 26th.  Grab your tickets here, and listen to Never Enough here!