First Album Was 'Scraping The Bottom Of The Barrel'

If you hadn’t kept up with San Cisco’s appearances since they broke out with their single Awkward in 2012 and their popular rendition of Daft Punk’s Get Lucky in 2013, you’d be looking twice as they made their way up the stairs to the top floor of Fremantle cafe The Attic, particularly at vocalist Davieson and bass/keys player Gardner, who are both sporting a respectable amount of facial hair these days.

The quartet seem relaxed, despite having had an interview right before this one – this scribe discovers they’re just happy being back in their old stomping grounds after a crazy last, well, couple of years. Japan was a big highlight in 2014, Gardner expressing his enthusiasm for the crowd (“Japan was so polite and so nice, they’d clap and then just go really quiet”), while Davieson reflected on the tougher times: “You have great days where you can discover all these really cool bars, for example, but for those days, there’s also other days where you’re just like, ‘This is so fucked up, I do not want to be here. I’m so tired, I want to go home.’ But you get addicted to it, the constant unknown.”

"Albums aren’t even that important these days, it comes down to songs, so we never relied on that album to give us these opportunities, we had strong singles."

The most significant task the Perth quartet has faced in recent times has certainly been their work putting together their second full-length album, Gracetown. Davieson dives straight into the chronological turn of events. “We came off tour and we were pretty ready to just have a big break from music. So we did that for about a month, and Josh was basically just writing the whole time and setting up the studio, and then we came back and set up in his studio, just writing and putting bits and pieces together. Over the space of about three or four months, we just started demoing and writing and figuring out how to use software; we didn’t really know what we were doing. Then we went to our friend’s studio, got a lot of demoing and work done there, and then we sort of just got everything we had and sent it to Steve [Schram] to see what he thought – Steve’s our producer, he’s produced everything we’ve ever released. We weren’t really planning on working with him this time, we just wanted to know what he thought about it, and he told us a lot of it was pretty shit, so we were like, ‘Sick, can we work with you.’ He’s brutally honest, so we got back with him. The recording process was a lot different to everything else we’ve ever done.”

The first single from their new album, Run, was a pretty hefty change-up of sound for the group, bringing to the fore a much funkier focus. “Daft Punk’s record might’ve unconditionally come through a little bit – [we were playing that record] big time,” Gardner chuckles. Their respective music clip only added to the vibes, and surprisingly for the band, it worked out way better than expected. “It came together literally on the day. There was a rough idea of how I would be running on a green screen, and then the director Matt Sav wanted to get ten of his favourite filmakers to send ten seconds of footage for Run. We were just gonna cut between bits of that, me running, and then these other bits of random footage, but then on the day we were down at a Myer building, and we had all these dressups, all this shit, and we were just like ‘bugger that’. We just went nuts.” Stevens assures me, “We’re never going to be that disorganised again.”

According to the band though, what they enjoy most about the new album isn’t the shift in sound – the consensus among the four young musos is that Gracetown feels like a positive result of successive lessons learned from putting together their first album. It also helps that these new songs are just that – new. “When we released that last record, we’d already moved on from it. There were new songs coming out by the time we dropped that record.” Gardner explains. “Rocketship, one of the first songs from the first album, was the reason we got together,” Davieson continues. “We got together to record that song, in like 2010. That song was one of the songs on the album so there were a bunch of old songs – I think we were just excited to start making new music and moving forward.”

“Albums aren’t even that important these days, it comes down to songs, so we never relied on that album to give us these opportunities, we had strong singles.” Stevens reasons, and Gardner chips in: “We were scraping the bottom of the barrel with that first album.”

Stevens jumps back in. “It was a more enjoyable experience. With the first album, we were meant to record an EP and then we changed our mind and decided we probably had enough songs for an album. And we did it over two separate sessions, really far apart – one at the start of 2012 and the other in the middle, in two very different studios, so it was disjointed. We just knuckled down in one spot for this one.”
“We’re definitely on the front foot with this album,” Davieson summarises.

"He told us a lot of it was pretty shit, so we were like, ‘Sick, can we work with you.'"

That all said, it wasn’t like they didn’t struggle. After spending so much time touring the world, Davieson found it really difficult to sit down and write. “There was a while where Josh had all this material and I just had nothing, and then I had to really sit down and start picking apart how the last year and a bit had affected us as people. I sat down trying to write songs, and I couldn’t do it; I’d completely forgotten how to write songs. We just played the same set for like two years, so it took me like a month to get my chops back up – that felt really good, and it’s a mistake I’m never going to make again; I’m never going to stop writing.”

The band have undoubtedly become one of WA’s biggest success stories, and while it can be easy at times for bands to get carried away with themselves – they’re heading to the US, UK, and Europe throughout March and April – San Cisco will always call south-west WA home. The new album’s title, Gracetown, is actually named after a small town in WA with significant ties to the band. “Josh and Scarlett found this artist, this work of art in this local cafe, and we thought it was really cool and wanted to try get him to do some artwork. And there was this house down in Gracetown in the bay, it’s been there since the ‘70s, and the guy who owns it is a family friend who’s helped us out in so many ways, so we had the artist and got a picture [of the house]. Gracetown means a lot to all of us – it’s where Scarlett and I first met, and we wrote so many songs down there – and it’s just a really cool, unspoiled town, there’s nothing else really like that down there anymore. Just a lot of good memories. We locked everything away – the art, the title and stuff – before we’d even finished the record, which is like, unheard of. Usually it takes months and months to all agree on something. It’s new and different and has a bit of originality, so we went with it.”