Thirsty Merc frontman Rai Thistlethwayte has spent much of this year in LA where he’s been doing a lot of writing as well as producing an EP for a young singer-songwriter from South Georgia. But back in April/May, he returned and reunited with the band for a few shows that led to the recording of a new album titled simply Acoustic Anniversary Album. 

“It marks ten years since we released the self-titled debut album and is sort of a thanks for the support from our fans, which we feel very fortunate to have after all these years,” Thistlethwayte admits. By the time the band reunited, drummer Karl Robertson had decided to retire from performing, so as a trio – Thistlethwayte, guitarist Matt Smith and bass player Phil Stack – they decided to revisit various songs from across their three albums to date in acoustic mode.

“I’m proud to say – I’m actually literally at a rehearsal right now – it’s been really good to think outside the box. How do you rhythmically make it happen, make it exciting, keep the interest there and get the songs to still shine? It’s been fun. I mean, Phil plays fantastic double bass and Matt wanted to flex a bit more of the acoustic guitar sound, and I was a piano player before I was a guitarist, so the instrumentation was one of the things that drove the album.”

Since the band found themselves without a deal, the logical next step forward seemed to be a retrospective with a twist.

“We went down to Melbourne to record the album with our long-time producer Lindsay Gravina and that was around the same time we started talking about playing shows to celebrate ten years, so the recording and the idea for doing the tour just came together. Selecting the songs was a little bit of trial and error, trying lots of things out and seeing what worked. Of course we knew it was sort of a dialogue between band and fans more than anything else; we should include some of the well-known songs. But we didn’t have to necessarily make it a hits-style thing. We wanted to include songs people might know but just do them in a new way. We re-did some other stuff that we’d pretty much never played live.

“We don’t have any set plans after the tour, but Matt said it very eloquently the other day – he said, ‘Look, we’re all creative people, we’re gonna be spending a lot of time together and you know what happens when we do that. We end up coming up with a plan for the next thing,’ and it obviously would be do we want to do another studio album, and I have a host of material there, so we’ll just make the record we wanna make and figure out where to take it after that.”