Sons Of The East: 'When You Force It, You’re Never Going To Get The Magic'

Reports of indie folk music’s death are greatly exaggerated. Sons Of The East are living proof of the genre’s sustained popularity. With little more than an acoustic guitar, banjo, and three voices singing in harmony, the Northern Beaches trio have built a massive following across North America, the UK and Europe in recent years.

Their reputation at home has also ballooned – Sons Of The East will play their biggest Australian headline shows to date this August, six weeks after releasing their long-awaited second LP, SONS.

“We’re really excited,” says guitarist and banjo player Dan Wallage. “There’s nothing quite like playing shows at home.”

It’s just under three years since Wallage and his bandmates, lead vocalist Jack Rollins and multi-instrumentalist Nic Johnston, released their debut album, Palomar Parade, named for the Northern Beaches street on which it was recorded. A lot has happened in that time.

Along with the streaming success of the Palomar Parade singles On My Way, You Might Think, What I Do and Another Night – the band reached 6.8 million listeners on Spotify in 2024, clocking a total of 73 million streams on the platform – Sons Of The East have been more or less living on the road.

“We did around 110 shows last year,” says Wallage, who’s speaking to The Music from his Northern Beaches apartment. “We had such a big year.”

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The band are in their element on tour – they’ll follow the Australian tour with an extensive run of shows across Europe, the US and Canada, which takes them through to November 2025. But a short break was necessary in order to complete SONS.

So, after supporting Kip Moore on his Australian and New Zealand arena tour last spring, Wallage, Rollins and Johnston retreated to their Brookvale studio, along with their manager and producer, Bry Jones, to put the finishing touches on the album.

This allowed them to enjoy a cruisy summer at home, with each band member taking every opportunity to get in the surf at Queenscliff Beach. But now the album’s finished, Wallage says they’re itching to get back out there.

“You have a little bit of time off, which is nice, and then all of a sudden, you get a bit antsy sitting at home. You’re like, all right, I’m ready to go play some shows.”

The success of Palomar Parade didn’t come out of nowhere. The album arrived a full nine years after Sons Of The East’s self-titled debut EP. The band’s second EP, Already Gone, came out in 2015, and they played their first overseas shows a couple of years later.

Songs from the two EPs, such as Come Away and California from their self-titled effort and Into The Sun and My Repair from Already Gone, remain fixtures of a Sons Of The East live show, while Into The Sun is easily the band’s most streamed song.

But it’s only since the release of Palomar Parade that the band’s long-held aspirations have become a reality.

“We’d always dreamed of touring around the world and in the last few years we’ve been able to go back to all these different places and play bigger shows, and the same here in Australia,” Wallage says.

He adds, “When we started this band, we were young kids at the time, but we did it because we loved playing music together and we just wanted to get on a stage and play songs for people. That still is kind of our core thought.”

It’s not just the touring lifestyle that appeals to Wallage and his bandmates, nor is it the status that comes from selling out shows everywhere from Prague to Connecticut, Amsterdam to Fremantle. Rather, playing live is a core part of the Sons Of The East DNA – it’s as fundamental to the trio’s constitution as their laidback personalities and their fondness for a three-part harmony.

“We just love being on stage,” Wallage says. “We used to play gigs at the local pub to mum, dad and our siblings, and so if you do that for a couple of years, it gets you going.”

It’s no surprise, then, that life on the road had a major influence on SONS. For starters, a significant portion of the album’s 12 tracks took shape in green rooms and hotel lobbies around the world.

“You’d finish a soundcheck in Paris and then someone’s working on an idea,” Wallage says. “And then two days later, you’re in the Netherlands or Berlin and you keep working on that idea, but you’re in a whole new environment.”

Some songs came bursting out midway through soundcheck. “You’re trying to soundcheck, one of the boys just goes on a tangent, you’re like, ‘That’s kind of cool,’ and so we have to stop quickly and our sound guy gets pissed off at us,” says Wallage. “We quickly record the idea and then get back to soundcheck.”

Props must go to the Voice Memos app, which played a crucial role in capturing the band members’ spontaneous jolts of inspiration. “If you went through all our voice memos on our phones, it is just ideas the whole way through the tour, kind of non-stop,” Wallage says.

Sons Of The East fans were able to track the band’s progress over the last couple of years, with the album’s first single, Hard To Tell, released as early as July 2023. Five more singles have followed, including the countrified Oh My My and the soulful, harmony-laden Rescue Me.

All six singles have been embraced by the Sons Of The East audience, proof that the less-than-ideal songwriting circumstances did nothing to sully the band members’ creative juices.

Wallage and his bandmates didn’t make a formal plan to write the new record on the road, and he thinks this is the key to the album’s strength.

“I think by not putting pressure on it, you’re in these new environments, so you’re naturally being creative and you’re not forcing it,” he says. “So you do just pick up a guitar, even though you’ve got a show that night, and start strumming an idea because you’re just a bit inspired or a bit creative, which is really nice.”

The old-timey folk number Time Will Tell, which features mouth organ and a particularly raspy vocal performance from Rollins, is a prime example. Wallage came up with the song’s shuffling chord progression while sitting next to Amsterdam’s Singelgracht canal.

“I was just sitting there on the guitar, strumming away before we played a show at this beautiful venue in Amsterdam called Paradiso,” he says. “They have a little green room which is on the canal, and I was just sitting there strumming this little chord progression and then Jack started singing a little melody over it.”

Throughout the writing and recording process, Wallage, Johnston and Rollins were careful to avoid thoughts of how they might repeat the success of Palomar Parade and the two EPs. “When you force it, you’re never going to get the magic,” Wallage says. But they did have one major aim for SONS, and that was to bring the energy of their live show to the recordings.

“The last two years, we’ve done more shows than ever before,” Wallage says. “So there was definitely a level of wanting to bring that live element. Like, what it feels like to be at a Sons Of The East show, whether that’s the really big sound or a more intimate moment.”

This is easier said than done, but the band made a few tweaks to their recording approach to achieve this goal, starting with how they tracked their vocals.

“Harmonies are such a big part of our show and part of what makes Sons Of The East,” Wallage says. “We do a lot of group vocals on this record. So, rather than us each singing our individual parts with headphones on, we’ll have the song playing in the room and we’re all standing behind one mic and we’re fully going for it, like it’s a live show.”

“We’re trying to get that adrenaline up,” Wallage adds. “Nothing beats when you’re standing in front of a bunch of people and you’re like, ‘Oh, god, now we’ve got to do it live.’ So we were trying to recreate that feeling.”

Some songs on the record were captured live in the studio, such as 10 Days, a stripped-back number that shines a light on Johnston’s vocals and guitar playing. They also chose to go without a metronome for several tracks.

“A lot of the time when you do a song, you do it to a click, you grid it all up and everything,” Wallage says. “But some songs want to move and change tempo a bit. So, we might be tracking guitars and vocals at the same time, it’s flowing and moving, which is much more reflective of what you do on stage.”

Across the board, the band and their producer adopted an ethos of letting the songs take the lead. “We hadn’t really done that in the past – we’d been a bit structural – so I think there was definitely more of a fluidity to how we recorded a lot of these songs,” Wallage says.

The result is an album that isn’t so much a transformation of the Sons Of The East sound, but a magnification of what the trio does best. The synergy between Wallage, Rollins and Johnston is discernible throughout, a reflection of the trio’s deep interpersonal ties.

The band’s three members have been friends since high school. These days, they’re not just friends but also business partners and, for much of the year, roommates. They’ve staunchly guarded their independence since the very beginning. “We always wanted to own our music. We felt like, we created it, we should get to own it,” Wallage explains.

Sons Of The East have been approached by record labels big and small over the years, and there are definitely perks that would come from working with a major. But given their prevailing success, Wallage says staying independent is a no-brainer.

“We’ve been so fortunate that now we kind of are a record label in ourselves, and we have an amazing team that we’ve been working with that we keep adding to as things are getting bigger,” he says.

“We’ve been very diligent about finding the right people to work with and sticking with them. We want to have long-term relationships with everyone we work with, and I think we’ve been really lucky to do that. They’re all just such beautiful people. I think that’s such an important thing, just making sure you’re surrounded by the right people.”

Building a capable and supportive team around them has freed Wallage and his bandmates to relish playing live.

“We’ve been fortunate enough to do some solid festivals overseas, and the bigger the stage, the more excited we get. But at the same time, some of our best shows have been playing to ten people in some very tiny town in Austria or something.”

So, can Wallage envision Sons Of The East doing their own arena tours in the not-too-distant future? For now, he’s staying focused on the Australian tour, which will visit theatres in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth in August.

“We definitely just want to keep getting the venues growing and more people coming who can enjoy themselves, and that’s why we’re so excited about the Aussie tour. It is the biggest rooms we’ve done, so it’ll be super fun,” Wallage says.

That said, playing at home poses its own unique challenges. “It’s always nerve-racking doing a Sydney show because finally the parents come back after all these years,” Wallage laughs. “At the start, they’re going, ‘Oh this is cute,’ and now the pressure’s on. And I tell you what, they’ll have notes.”

SONS is out now - you can listen to the album here. You can purchase tickets to the tour via the band’s website or Live Nation.