A Marriage Of Emotions

Texas Tea have held a potent place in the hearts and minds of Brisbane music lovers pretty much since their inception back in 2005. Their authentic take on vintage country and rock'n'roll arrived at the perfect time, just as the burgeoning alt-country oeuvre was taking off in the city, and although the duo – multi-instrumentalists and vocalists Kate Jacobson and Ben Dougherty – were clearly doing their own thing, they soon found themselves surrounded by like-minded bands and in the midst of a thriving scene.

Since that time the band has continually gone from strength to strength, releasing two killer albums – 2006's Take A Sip and 2008's The Junkship Recordings – and garnering a swag of awards and nominations along the way, as well as building a fervent following in mainland Europe.

But recently, Brisbane pundits may have noticed a change in the band. Where the Texas Tea live experience used to involve the two performers seated with their guitars and playing an assortment of ramshackle percussion with their feet to augment their beautifully-structured songs, they've now been joined in the live realm by a drummer (Myka Wallace) and double bass player (Jo Muller) – both of whom are no strangers to the local scene – and it's changed the whole band aesthetic; not radically, but substantially nonetheless. Now this extended live version of the band has worked on the third Texas Tea long-player, Sad Summer Hits, a beautiful collection of emotionally-charged songs which builds perfectly on their already substantial canon. With this new collection of songs already ingrained in our psyche, it's now hard to fathom that it's been over four years since we were last graced with new Texas Tea material.

“I know, right?” Jacobson smiles. “It doesn't feel like it's been that long for me, but the weird thing about it is that I feel like I have such a personal relationship with this album – recording it from December last year, it's actually been a relatively quick process for us because ...Junkship Recordings was a really long process which took maybe three years to make and release. But for this one we were working on the songs early last year and then we recorded it in December and we're releasing it now, so it's actually a bit of a quicker turnaround for us. But it feels weird that we're releasing it now and no one knows about it already, because I've heard it so many times. In my mind it feels like it's already out.”

Jacobson admits that the dozen songs which eventually made up Sad Summer Hits were chosen specifically to give the album a certain vibe.

“When we first started looking at songs we definitely had a bit of a pile to choose from and we were just kind of going through some old stuff and holding that up against some new stuff as well, and we really just wanted to think about a theme for the record and use some old stuff but write it in terms of the album continuity and rework some songs,” she continues. “So we had a pool of songs to choose from, and I think that [single] Heart Says Yes (Head Says No) was one of the new ones and I thought it was quite a silly song, but I showed Ben and he said, 'No, that's really cool, it sounds like Buddy Holly!' I thought it was a bit different for us.

“So we discussed that type of theme – writing happy melodies and stuff with sad lyrics – and trying to marry up the two emotions. Also, we wanted it to sound really vintage – I think we were listening to a bit of Holly Golightly and we thought, 'Oh, it would be cool to do something like that', although it didn't really turn out that way. I think that was our original idea though – to do something that was really vintage-sounding and that had a theme to it, and with similar instrumentation and the same players to give it some cohesion, which is why we had Myka and Jo come into play with us.”

While the two new players aren't official members of the band as such (“Texas Tea will always be just Ben and Kate,” according to Jacobson) their presence still had a tangible affect on the new music they played on, even if their presence didn't alter the songwriting dynamic.

“We wrote the songs first and then we went and rehearsed – I think we did about eight rehearsals before we went to the studio,” Jacobson recalls. “Myka and Jo definitely had some input when we were working the songs out in the studio, but the songs were all already written – the arrangements were already there. We experimented with a few different things, but I don't know if it changes the dynamic too much. We're always going to be Texas Tea – we've always got that Texas Tea spin. Ben and I write in particular ways, so that will always be there for us. Ben is the 'doom duet captain' and there will always be some duet where someone dies at the end, and I'll always be writing more poppy stuff. I think my voice is quite recognisable and my songs are quite recognisable as well, so as songwriters I think we're easy to spot.”

And the songs of Jacobson and Dougherty, while miles apart in both feel and form, continually complement each other so well.

“Yeah, they do,” Kate concurs. “It's weird really, because when we first started doing it I think we were just doing it for fun – it certainly wasn't serious. We were just practicing at Ben's place – I just wanted to play some country songs and Ben was just up for it; I don't even think he had an interest in country music. I don't think either of us ever thought we'd be at a point where we'd released three albums and having toured Europe five times – that didn't even enter our minds seven years ago. It's nice.”

Sad Summer Hits definitely broadens the Texas Tea palette beyond mere country, incorporating elements of '50s pop, rock and even soul into the mix.

“Personally, I wanted to expand and make sure we didn't get in a rut – I wanted to challenge us a little bit,” Jacobson reasons. “I think a happy song is much harder to write than a sad song, and I wanted to write some stuff that sounded happy – not necessarily that the lyrical content was happy, but something that was poppy and throwaway and fun. I really wanted to do that, but for it also to have its own edge – for it to be different to what others were doing.

“When I started writing songs after ...Junkship I started writing songs that were just sad sack songs, just really devastating. They were really self-indulgent, and I got to the point where I'd written ten of these songs that were, like, 'Poor me, everything's fucked...' and one day I just went, 'Oh my God, just snap out of it!' I think then in the next two days I wrote The Alphabet Song and Heart Says Yes..., and it was kind of like a joke to myself because I just had this need to write something that was happy because wallowing in misery was getting ridiculous.”

There does, however, still seem to be plenty of sad lyrical content on the aptly-titled Sad Summer Hits.

“I know, I say this don't I?” Jacobson laughs. “The sad stuff is still there – some of it made it through, and I still really like the sad songs – everyone can relate to a sad song. I'm really happy about the songs that ended up on the album, but none of those super self-indulgent songs made it on, I think they'll remain under wraps.”

With two equally-adept songwriters in the ranks you'd think that there would be plenty of jockeying to have content placed on records, but Jacobson argues that this couldn't be further from the truth.

“Ben's songs are always quality – he's one of those guys that no matter what he writes it's always good – whereas I probably write more songs for Texas Tea, but fifty percent of them are crap and we have to throw them away,” she offers self-deprecatingly. “So it's always just a matter of finding the good ones of mine and then just going, 'Well, Ben's ones are obviously going to be on there'. It's just the truth really. I just write and throw stuff away – I've never had a possessiveness over my songs, I'll always chuck things if they're crap.”

And now with the new album finally out in the world, the Texas Tea crew are looking forwarded to taking it on the road.

“We really don't get to tour that much in Australia because it's too expensive, but it will be good to get out there with the full band. It will be great taking that to the other cities, because Brisbane's seen us with the full band a little bit, but we've never played like that outside of Brisbane so it's going to be great. Bring it on!”

DOUBLE OR NOTHING

Adding a drummer and double bass player to the Texas Tea live arsenal has already paid handsome dividends, but given that it's just been the two of them in the band for so many years, was it an easy decision to expand their ranks?

“Yeah, it was pretty easy,” Jacobson admits. “That's another reason why Heart Says Yes... is important for this record – we were playing it together and it sounded good, but we were, like, 'Man, this would sound awesome with a full kit and double bass!' I think that was the clincher – we reasoned that if we were going to do it for one song, and we want to have continuity, maybe we should just write songs for a band, and we just kind of did that. We always knew from the start that we'd use a full band, and it wasn't difficult at all.

“It was pretty funny how we found them though; we kept talking about having double bass and drums, and we wanted kind of jazz-type players who could basically do anything, but we didn't know anyone who fit the bill. We'd be talking about it for about six months and we were playing a show with Pear & The Awkward Orchestra at the Powerhouse one afternoon, and Ben and I were standing at the merch desk setting up, and we were like, 'Where are we going to get a double bass player and a drummer?' and we looked up and Jo and Myka were soundchecking, and it was, like, 'What about those guys?'. We just talked to them about it and they said, 'Yeah, sure' – they were fans of Texas Tea and really wanted to do it, so it was super-easy after all that talk.”

Texas Tea will be playing the following shows:

Thursday 18 October - Brisbane Hotel, Hobart TAS
Friday 19 October - Old Bar, Melbourne VIC
Sunday 21 October - Grace Emily, Adelaide SA
Friday 26 October - The Zoo, Brisbane QLD
Saturday 27 October - The Loft, Gold Coast QLD
Sunday 28 October - Spotted Cow, Toowoomba QLD
Saturday 3 November - The Newsagency, Sydney NSW