Saosin Return To Australia For Their First National Tour In Thirteen Years
US post hardcore icons, Saosin will return to Australia for the first time in thirteen years for a national headline tour this month! Fronted by their original vocalist, Anthony Green, the band will be playing bangers from all of their highly influential albums, 2006’s self titled, 2009’s In Search Of Solid Ground and 2016’s Along The Shadow and from their groundbreaking EP’s including their debut, 2003’s Translating The Name. Songs such as You’re Not Alone, Voices, Seven Years and Collapse which have all racked up well over 10 million spins each and helped define a sub-genre.
One of post hardcore’s formative pillars. Saosin were among the first bands to fully embrace social media as a way of promoting themselves (remember MySpace?) and they burst onto the scene in 2003 with their explosive debut EP, Translating The Name. Their poweful live shows and heavy internet presence, coupled with critical praise from the industry and media alike, cultivated a loyal underground following which has remained strong for the past two decades! Rounded out by guitarist Beau Burchell, bassist Chris Sorenson, and drummer Alex Rodriguez, Saosin’s scene-defining blend of heady artistic intellectualism and passion is an adventurous rush of energy. Equal parts confidence and vulnerability, it straddles the line between metalcore angst and melodic experimentalism and strikes the perfect balance of what makes their music simultaneously pretty and brutal. Hi Fi Way speaks to Beau Burchell about the tour.
After thirteen years you must be really pumped to be finally getting back to Australia?
Oh, dude, I am so stoked. I’m just fired up man. I’m stoked.
Has it been a frustrating time after the last couple of years not being able to tour as you would have liked?
I would say for us as a band, embarrassingly it was not tough , only because Saosin for us is like a passion project. I have a very successful career producing music. Chris has a very successful career producing videos and photography, Phil, our guitarist has a successful career with As I Lay Dying, and Anthony obviously has a very successful career on his own. For me personally, I pretty much am in the recording studio, ten hours a day every day. COVID, was literally the same routine that I always have. I was the quintessential meme of like when you see those memes of like the introverts and it’s like, I’ve been preparing my whole life for this moment, . That was me. I was relatively unaffected by everything. It really wasn’t too difficult for me. I didn’t really feel the urge to be touring as much as other bands probably did, probably because the band is not our main source of income, so there wasn’t that financial stress on us either.
Does it boil down to you want to do it not because you have to do it?
Yeah, that’s exactly it, we were just talking about why has it been so long since we’ve been back to Australia? Part of the answer is that our last album came out in like 2016. It’s just absolutely ridiculous that we haven’t been over to Australia since then, which blows my mind that time has flown that fast. It’s just one of those things where all the stars have to align for us and things just really have to be fun for us. The band is almost like a vacation and we all truly, truly enjoy it and love it. If something, and if the band is going to feel like work to us, then we just don’t do it and we just say, well, when the timing is right, it’ll happen. Right now, it’s cold here in Southern California and it’s ninety degrees in Australia. So I am very excited.
Does it feel like a bit of an element of making up for lost time here on this tour?
We’ll see how it goes, it’s one of those things where making up for lost time feels kind of sad to me. I guess where I’m at mentally, I’m just so excited to be there. Even unrelated to the actual concerts, I have a friend that I met like ten years ago when I was doing monitors for The Used on Warp Tour Australia. We met and we’ve been trying to do something together ever since, and now we can finally do something. So he’s going to come out and guitar tech for us. Now he’s a very accomplished guitar tech and touring guy.
That’s really exciting. If anything, it’ll almost feel like old friends reuniting again, even just with playing the shows, because every city has their own kind of energy. Do I sound like strange explaining this kind of thing? Maybe I feel like I have this weird deeper connection with concerts than needs to be. It’s such an exciting thing, once you get into the town that you’re going to be playing and see some of the memories, it’s like, oh man, I remember this spot, let’s go there. Every town has their own energy and I think it comes through in the shows.
Not much has changed in Adelaide so there is every chance those favourite spots will still be here! Has it been fun rehearsing all these songs and getting ready for this tour?
We haven’t rehearsed at all yet, I’ve been just slammed mixing albums. I think He Is Legend is coming back over there pretty soon and I mixed that album right before it came out. I mixed another Lightworker album, a Dead Sarah album, and now I’m working on the Sea Floor Cinema album. I’m just back to back up until the day I leave. Like this week I have to go up to LA to film a product release video for, for Ernie Ball Music Man. Then there’s a couple other things I have to wrap up before I leave. I guess that’s the bittersweet of having your job being in the music world, all these things kind of happen all at once.
I personally start rehearsing this week and I’ll be streaming a lot of like my rehearsals on Twitch as I usually do. That’s always kind of exciting because, oh man, it is the most stressful thing playing guitar on Twitch. I sweat more playing on Twitch than I do at an actual concert. It’s pretty exciting though because pull the curtain back a little bit and show, I will admit I am not the world’s best guitar player, I would rate myself as like a very above average guitar player. When I start the rehearsals, there’ll be a lot of jokes in the chat and I’ll joke about myself. and oh man, I messed that part up. I messed it up again. A week into the rehearsal I’ll have everything perfect. I think it’s kind of fun for like the people to watch and see the progression of what it’s really like for, I guess I’ll call myself a professional musician, but like what it’s like for someone to not play a lot of these songs for so long and then have to try to learn them again from memory. There’s the process and the frustration that goes into it and watching the progression I think is really fun.
When you haven’t played them as much do they change much and take on a life of their own?
We try to keep them pretty close to the album mainly because I’ve seen, been at some concerts where some of the elements of the song that I really loved had been stripped out of the song and been revamped into a different version and it’s been kind of disappointing for me. I get that maybe like ninety percent of the crowd really enjoyed it,but for me personally, when I go and like watch someone perform, I like to hear the song as the way I know it rather than a different kind of version of it. Even though I realise that yes, that can be very creative and very cool, but for, for me, I prefer it what I’m familiar with.
Are you really stoked with how Translating The Name EP keeps on keeping on and each vinyl release keeps selling out?
It is unbelievable. It’s so crazy to me, I still picture us as this underground emo band. It’s funny being around or having such a long career, because my kids are in elementary school and a couple of the teachers at my kids’ school on back to school night or something say you look really familiar. Finally they are able to put it together. They’re like, oh my gosh, I went to like all of your concerts! It’s just so interesting to me, especially because we don’t do very much or don’t do a lot frequently, I should say. The band always feels like it’s something that existed a long time ago for me because of my day to day of being in the studio. It’s just kind of like my nose is so focused on the task at hand that I always forget that I’m in a band until someone reminds me that I’m in a band. It’s strange! I mean the vinyl selling out is just absolutely crazy to me. It’s so, so cool and obviously so thankful and that we were even able to pull it off as well.
Is there much pressure on the band to do a new album?
I’m definitely getting the itch to do it. I’ve got about, I’m looking at my playlist right now and I’ve got about thirty-three songs ready to go. Like I was saying when the timing is right and all the stars line up we’ll do it. But as far as pressure, no, I don’t feel any pressure to do it. Do I wish that I could provide people with more music? If they want it? Absolutely, because I know for me, when I find a band that I really like, I wish they would just release a new song every day because I just eat it up and I can’t get enough of it. On the artistic side of it, we just really try to make it to where if we’re not a hundred percent happy with it, then it just doesn’t get released. If the timing’s not right and we’re all not vibing, and we all have to be in a good spot. And then also too, like I was saying, with our careers, we also have to be able to schedule our careers around dedicating the time to do the album. That means a lot of us will have to reorganise our schedules for a couple of months to make it happen.
Interview By Rob Lyon
Catch Saosin on the following dates, tickets from Destroy All Lines…
