'A Really Positive Thing': The Paper Kites Return To Their Roots

The Paper Kites

In the late ‘00s, all a musical kid wanted to be when they grew up was someone with the rugged aesthetic of a farm hand, singing songs in log cabins about break-ups and ‘Winter Blues’, in harmony with four or five of their closest, bearded, flannel-wearing friends, and a banjo in tow.

The indie folk phenomenon of roughly 2006 to 2012 was the perfect moment for Melbourne quintet The Paper Kites to emerge with their one-two punch of successful singles Bloom and Featherstone; the former became (and still is) a wedding processional staple, and the latter featured on Grey's Anatomy, setting their platform in the coveted American market.

Unlike the indie folk quartets and quintets of yesteryear, though, The Paper Kites have been anything but a flash in the pan.

Over the course of nearly two decades, they’ve carved out a remarkable career, with a sound spanning blues, ‘80s noir rock, and, of course, that magic combo of banjos and delay pedals.

They even dipped into country rock territory on 2023’s At The Roadhouse, an album and subsequent touring cycle which saw it play theatres around the world with the help of a couple of extra musicians, dubbed The Roadhouse Band.

Still, that was merely one chapter of a much larger story that shows no sign of closing soon, ahead of its seventh LP, If You Go There, I Hope You Find It. 

Things have changed in the 16 years since Bloom, though, as guitarist/keyboardist Christina Lacy explains. 

“I'm still trying to work out the best way of being a touring musician and a mum”, she says. ”I’m someone who reflects a lot and keeps trying to better myself.

“It’s not a normal job (touring) – my eldest child asked me once before I left for tour, ‘Why can’t you just have a normal job?’ It's a unique setup, but when I'm home, I’m a stay-at-home mum while trying to find time to rehearse, be creative, have meetings with the band – all the usual stuff.”

Lacy isn’t the only one feeling this pull; the band now have family responsibilities to balance. Being a band with the market appeal of The Paper Kites inevitably means a touring cycle results in time away from home.

And while this is the rock n’ roll (or folk n’ roll) dream for many, like the band's music, everything has to exist in balance and harmony.

“We talk about it on the road a lot – about what those first 24 hours are like getting home,” she explains. “It’s very full-on coming back into normal life.

“I almost don’t have time for the post-tour blues. The people you come home to couldn’t care less you’ve just played to 2,000 people in London – they just want a sandwich!”

Despite these good tensions, the band have their sites set on another lap around the world with its new album this year. However, after a few years of touring, this time around, the band wrote the album with a mindset of “stillness”.

Writing within conceptual boundaries has become a trademark of the band over the years.

Their second LP, 2016’s Twelvefour was composed by frontman Sam Bentley between the hours of 12 and 4am, and their fifth LP, 2020’s Roses, was a collaborative record of duets. At The Roadhouse was cut in an old diggers' store in rural Victoria.

This time around, they took a slightly more conventional approach, recording at the legendary Sing Sing studios in Melbourne, but a bulk of the material was written at its makeshift rehearsal space on a farm in the Yarra Valley. The indie folk dream of thousands of teenagers in the 2010s is very much a reality for the band. 

“We spent a lot more time writing together than in the past for this record, and also a lot more time in the studio writing,” Lacy says. 

“Whereas in the past we’ve gone in very rehearsed, this one was a lot more free, and the result shows that it was a really positive thing for us. That time in the rehearsal space made it all come to life.

“We were just rehearsing and playing for the sake of trying to see what would come about, rather than thinking ‘We’ve got an album and we should rehearse the song’ – it was more ‘Here are some ideas, let's see what this album turns into’”.

The result is a record that continues the sonic direction of At The Roadhouse, largely delivered in an intimate folk style, but with splashes of rock n’ roll around the edges.

A big difference this time around, though, is that – for the first time in nearly a decade – it's just the five band members again. After two albums of collaboration, this is just The Paper Kites as a five-piece. 

“It was really nice but a bit strange doing this just ourselves”, Lacy admits.

“Since the Roadhouse tour, we’ve been on a couple of support tours where it's been just the five of us, plus occasionally a live pedal steel player – but we did wonder at first, ‘Can we still do this?’

“This album is us just getting back to our roots, and it feels very true to what we play well.”

When releasing At The Roadhouse, the band invited fans to visit the house where the record was recorded, where they performed a selection of songs.

This time around, audiences around the country will get the chance to hear the new album in full, performed by the band in an ‘in the round’ setting at a series of small shows in Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide.

Such is the excitement around the record that the three shows sold out within hours, with the band adding matinee performances to meet demand.

“We wanted to really celebrate the album and give it the release that it deserved, so we wanted it to feel like people were sitting in a rehearsal,” Lacy explains.

“We’ll be in the round, we won’t have fancy lighting or techs handing us our gear – it’ll be organic, and we hope it feels intimate and special. We want people to feel like they’re just sitting in a jam space and hearing the album live for the first time together with us.

“We’ve never done a record live in full like this before, start to finish,” she adds. “It's a new thing for us and a really nice way to commemorate the record coming out.”

Despite the novelty, Lacy is quick to point out that for the rest of the tour cycle, fans will have the chance to hear some old favourites from the back catalogue. And despite the new demands of life on the members, there’s no chance they’ll stop appearing live, either.

“We’ll never not want to play live,” she says. 

“It’s so special, and it's become more special with the way music has become with all the artificial influence coming in. Playing live with a real group of human beings is becoming more and more sacred.”

Lacy was the one who came up with the title If You Go There, I Hope You Find It, having scrawled the phrase on the window of a rusted-out abandoned bus on the rehearsal farm. 

While she wants others to decide for themselves what “there” and “it” are, she notes that in essence the album is about “exploring that sense of always searching for something even when we’re content”. 

A lot has changed in the world since The Paper Kites first arrived on the scene. But having stuck true to their roots for nearly two decades and reaped the rewards, it's hard to imagine that, at least musically, they could still be searching for “it”.

Their new album sounds like both a realisation of contentment while still having a yearning to grow. If any of us are lucky enough to find what “it” is this year, we’re lucky that we have this band to soundtrack the journey for us.

The Paper Kites’ If You Go There, I Hope You Find It is out now.

This piece of content has been assisted by the Australian Government through Music Australia and Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body