Kevin Devine On Tour…

For the first time since 2014, New York singer songwriter Kevin Devine will make his long awaited return to Australia for a special and intimate acoustic headline tour in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide proudly presented by Destroy All Lines. Devine’s twenty-year career includes ten full-length records, eleven EPs, twelve Devinyl Splits, three albums with his band Bad Books, and now a wildly successful Patreon called “Social Club,” which delivers fans new original music, cover songs, live stream concerts, archival recordings, and more, every month. Kevin talks to Hi Fi Way about this whirlwind tour he is on now.

Are you definitely excited about getting this tour under way?
Oh yeah. This might sound crazy or maybe it sounds like a lie. I remember exactly where I was standing. When the offer for this tour came in. It was like in November of 2023 and I just played a show at a club in in Brooklyn called Saint Vitus and I was walking my friend back to her apartment. She lives around the corner, and I took out my phone on the walk back and there was an email from my booking agent with this offer to come do this tour. I haven’t been in Australia in ten years. I was there maybe four or five times between 2008 and 2014, and honestly, I never thought I’d get over there at all. Before 2008 I was kind of a very welcome miracle in my estimation that it happened once, let alone four times, and then I just kind of thought, given the way things are these days for like mid-level musicians, independent musicians, I just kind of thought, well, maybe that’ll never happen again. When this offer came through, in all honesty, I’ve been excited for six months.

Do you feel with this tour that there is an element of making up for lost time and getting reacquainted again with Australian audiences?
I certainly hope so. Australia, it’s funny. It’s been like I said, literally ten years. I was there in 2014 supporting my friends in Manchester Orchestra. I was there in 2008 for a festival called Soundwave and did some side shows as part of the festival. Then I think I came over in 2010 with some friends of mine a band called Brand New and then I think in 2011 I did something called Harvest Festival and again there was always like side shows on those tours, but that’s the other thing, this is actually the first I’ve done headlining club shows in Australia, but I’ve never done like a tour that was a Kevin Devine headlining tour. Since then I’ve also had this funny, nomadic independent career where it’s like I don’t I, you know, I very briefly had a couple of records there distributed by an indie label from Adelaide called Hobbledehoy.

Outside of that, I’ve never even really had physical distribution in Australia. So it’s funny to me, like the time we live in, that you can have an audience of some size just based on the Internet and on having done some shows. But to me, it’s like some sort of insurrectionist coup that there’s even anybody in these places that knows who I am because it’s again, it’s not like we’ve had tonnes of radio play or major label representation or anything like that over there so. There’s an element of making up for lost time, and there’s also with me. I always have felt like the best tool I have at my disposal is how I represent myself in conversations like this and how I present myself and my songs in live performance. That might not be a recipe for gaining like twenty-five thousand, fifty thousand, one hundred thousand people at a time but you gain these fistfuls of people that tend to want to stay with you for the long haul. I think there’s an aspect that’s making up for lost time, and I think there’s also think there’s an aspect of after ten years you’re almost starting over in a way. The fact that people have already bought tickets and there’s people who are going to come out to these shows indicates that some of them will still be around ten years later. I’m trying to reintroduce myself to them, hopefully they bring some of their friends and we meet some new people along the way as well.

Playing solo and acoustic does that allow you to connect with fans on a deeper level as opposed to playing with a band?
There’s a bunch of reasons for that. Some of them are creative and aesthetic, some of them are like administrative and reality adherent. The truth is, there’s a few things, every song I ever write with the exception of a very small amount less than ten, but every song I’ve ever written for this project under my name and for the stuff I do for Bad Books, starts with me and an acoustic guitar. Even stuff that ends up being like electrified sort of punk informed or like heavier rock informed music starts in a room with me and a guitar. In my heart of hearts I think that there’s something timeless about the capacity to sit down and communicate to or be communicated with by someone who’s just playing you a song on whether it’s a guitar or a piano, a harp or a hand drum or whatever it is, there’s something irreplaceable about that I do believe, and something that is like the heart of the heart of the thing. I also love stepping on a fuzz box and screaming and jumping around and playing with my friends or orchestrating larger arrangements of the god damn band thing that I do.

I do think I feel like my core mission, especially if somebody like writes a lot of words is to try to communicate the guts of the song to the fullest capacity and also try to do that as dynamically as possible, whether I’m alone or with five other people. I’m not afraid to play alone. Whether it’s in a living room or it’s at a festival in front of ten thousand people like, I feel like it’s my job to figure out how to take up space on the stage and be able to communicate with the audience. That being said, it’s also one fourth as expensive to be a guy with a guitar as it is to be a guy with three other musicians and renting amps and drums. That’s not to say that’s the sole arbiter of those decisions because it isn’t. But sometimes, particularly with a thing like this where you’re flying literally the entire way around the world to reintroduce yourself to an audience for the first time in a decade, I think for everyone involved, the promoters and myself, it just made more sense to dip our toes in the water first as this. I will say that’s that that is the truth. I’ve always loved Elliott Smith and was like the biggest deal to me. So many people like that. I watched Elliott play a lot with the band and thought it was great, but I also watched him play a lot by himself and thought like I could just watch this guy do this forever. I like being able to come over and do it and it also has the added benefit that it’s less financially back breaking, if that makes sense.

Are you focusing on any particular album on this tour or is it like an entire career retrospective?
It’s definitely more of a career retrospective. I feel like even like the artwork for the tour and the advertisements have been thematically based on the imaging for our most recent record, which was called Nothing’s Real, So Nothing’s Wrong came out in the States in 2022. It’s been available digitally in Australia, but I don’t think there’s been physical distribution there, but I do think I’ll probably make a point of playing four or five songs from that record just to introduce them. Also, since I’ve been in Australia, I put out a record called Instigator, which I was not able to tour over there, so I’ll probably make a point of playing, let’s say six to eight songs from those two records, since they’ve never been played over there. At headlining shows, I work in stuff, I have ten records so it’s a lot of music, but I almost try to make it a point to play at least one song from everything since the second record. I wrote the first record when I was like seventeen years old, so some of that stuff feels a little distant to me at this point. Everything from a record from 2003 called Make The Clocks Move forward from that point I still feel those songs represent parts of my present psyche, even some certain aesthetic things. I try to play stuff from everything since then, and then once in a while go back to that first teenager here and there. But yeah, I think it’ll be probably be slightly heavier on those last two records, but everything will be represented.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Kevin Devine at the following shows, tickets from Destroy All Lines…