A Quick Chat with Sudden Debt

What are the origins of Sudden Debt? Where did it start?
Jonathon finished touring overseas in his previous band Heart Beach. He wanted to play in a band post fatherhood and post his bandmate's motherhood (the gooder the band the better). No one asked him to play in their bands so he had to start a new project. Pat was no longer in Ivy St. Jonathon had seen Pat play bass before and knew he was very good at playing the bass. A chance to hold on. Pat said he would be happy to play in a band with Jonathon but only if it wasn't an all-male band. Jonathon then cold called everyone in his phone to try and get a third member until Laura agreed to play in the band.

It's a hard thing trying to get a band together from scratch sometimes, especially after you're 25 or so. People have lives. People have other interests. People don't want to play in a band with some guy in his late thirties who has messaged them on Instagram out of the blue. Jonathon managed to get Pat and Laura to practice. This is the most precarious point for a new band, they tend to dissolve. It's hard to keep them together, you lose money, play to empty rooms, people don't like each other, write bad songs that don't go anywhere and spend most of your time sending emails, carrying amps upstairs or giving your bandmates lifts. People get bored, people move away, people have tickets to Papa Roach, people have other things going on in their lives. We tried to practice once a week, starting from nothing, we ended up with this LP after a number of years practicing around once per month. We're happy we managed to keep the band together and produce a record – lots of bands don't manage to stay together long enough to have a launch show – we're lucky.

Tell us a bit about the new album. What does it mean to you?
We've spent the last few years writing a few songs at a time, we'd play a show, cut what didn't work, go back to practice. Some days writing was really easy, mostly it was excruciatingly difficult. Repetition + repetition = progressing towards a record you're hopefully not embarrassed by in a few years. This LP is an almanac of that time period. It won't get deleted off the internet when Facebook isn't there anymore. A real-life physical object. We'll be able to look at it like a photo album – the launch show is probably closer to showing slides of a family holiday than a rock show, to be honest. Bandmates get closer to siblings the longer a band goes on, the friendship evolves as you run this (usually unsuccessful) small business called a band. The anonymity of an unknown band can be a strength though – an LP can take any form, mean anything, say anything – no consequences.

Are there any inspirations you look to beyond music when writing or performing?
No. I'm not very good at my instrument. Self-taught, no particular natural talent. This makes playing in a band hard. I can't sit down and decide what genre I'm going to play, or get out that shoebox of songs that have been flowing out of me over the years and form another backing band. I'm sitting next to a lake hitting rocks together trying to spark a song. Cold, laborious and you need the right three rocks. Nothing happens unless the right people are in the right room at the right time.

So conscious influences are irrelevant, what I mean by this is that it's very difficult to deliberately copy someone else if you can't play the guitar very well. There must however be unconscious influence in the LP. The evidence of this is that the songs are not "an original sound". This raises a more interesting issue as to how a person's musical experience indirectly influences them, in particular, why a person who consumes many different genres of music only writes music that sounds like some genres, or why a musician starts out playing one type of music when they are young but plays a different type of music when they are older or why some people hear certain influences in the LP and others hear other influences or why is it someone tells you you're influenced by a band you've never listened to (does this represent an inherent originality scuttled by the accident of birth or did I hear that record at the supermarket).

What Australian artists are you listening to at the moment?
Pretty in Pink