Off And Running

Drummer Dylan Phillips was studying for a Master's degree in piano in Montreal, Canada, when, in October 2010, an old friend of his invited him and keyboards player/guitarist Conner Molander to come along to a jam he was organising, to which singer and guitarist Devon Portielje also came, though ostensibly as the jam's bass player. There were five at that first jam and they immediately realised there was something special going on, though the initiator and other participant soon dropped out, leaving the trio to become Half Moon Run.

“Eventually I dropped out of school and Connor dropped out of school and we went for it a hundred per cent,” Phillips explains the journey to the recording of their debut album, Dark Eyes, “and we'd played probably less than ten gigs before we started recording. At that time I remember we liked to give people the impression that we had lots of music, to get things going when really we had no idea what we were doing.

“It's a three-way writing process,” Phillips explains. “We all get in a space together and we try and birth ideas in the jam space if we can and we always surprise ourselves when we start writing or when we find something good because we all have really different ideas about what we want or what we bring to the table I guess, but we somehow manage to meet in the middle and create something we wouldn't have been able to on our own. We finished some songs while we were in the studio and everything came together in the last minute.”

Before that however, the trio had already done some recording courtesy some student friends at a school of audio engineering, and “they wanted us to be the band for their project – record one song for them and get a free recording out of it – and one of the people who works at the record label we signed with worked at that school as well, teaching, heard the music and from there we were contacted by the label.”

With a sound that references the dream folk pop of artists as diverse as Simon & Garfunkel and Radiohead with a dash of ambient electronica, Half Moon Run quickly found themselves building a solid enough live reputation to score a 32-date European tour this past May, followed by a 25-date tour of the US supporting Metric and most recently a North American tour with fellow Canadian Patrick Watson and his band.

“We just play all the time, which is great – it's really improving our live show and we're becoming better musicians and we're learning a hell of a lot about what it means to be on tour, both in the professional sense and in, like, our personal lives and stuff. It's been incredibly valuable, but the next step for us is to write good songs.”

For Half Moon Run, live is actually where they feel their strength lies, for all the pride they feel in their debut album. “When we went in to record, as soon as we started to use all the studio tricks, add layers and start splicing drums and patching everything up and making it studio perfect, then it started to kill the music. We started to learn that actually we get the best recordings when we try to emulate what it's like to play the songs live in the studio. That's why, for us, the album is kind of a rough version of what we do live. For us, the live show is where there's the most energy and where we have the most fun.”

Half Moon Run will be playing the following dates:

Saturday 29 December - Tuesday 1 January - Peats Ridge Festival, Glenworth Valley NSW
Wednesday 2 January - The Vanguard, Adelaide SA
Thursday 3 January - Yours And Owls, Wollongong NSW
Friday 4 January - Brass Monkey, Cronulla NSW
Thursday 10 January - Spirit Bar & Lounge, Traralgon VIC
Friday 11 January - Ding Dong Lounge, Melbourne VIC