It’s All Happening For Ball Park Music…

2025 is the year of Ball Park Music! Already, Australia’s favourite band Ball Park Music have released their eighth album Like Love and have announced a massive tour which is underway now and goes all across the country through June and July. On top of that they have been announced as the support for Oasis when they play Australian dates later this year. Hi Fi Way spoke to front man Sam Cromack about the album, touring and their massive gig with Oasis later this year.

It must feel like it is the year of Ball Park Music. There’s so many good things happening that it must be hard to kind of keep a lid on the excitement.
Yeah, the last two weeks has been one of the most full on two weeks of my life. It’s extremely exciting. I’ve finally got a day off today. I’ve still got a bit of press to do, but I’m back at home and plodding through some housework and stuff, so I feel like I’m finally coming back down to Earth a little bit. But yeah, lots of big things to look forward to this year. It’s a really positive feeling. It’s great.

Supporting Oasis, that must be like a dream come true type of gig?
Big time, it’s hard to put it into words. I remember being a kid and watching Rage with my sister. I remember when Wonder Wall and Don’t Look Back In Anger, were possibly even one and two in the charts. Whatever they were, they were close together in the top ten or whatever andd we just loved it. We used to hang out for those songs. So yeah, I’ve been listening to their music since I was a child. Not at any point did I ever think we’d get to do a bunch of shows together. Just tremendously excited,, binging the band at the moment, listening to Oasis nonstop and staying up late at night watching live gigs of theirs on YouTube. I was watching a stadium show of theirs last night and definitely had a moment like, oh, right, stadiums are pretty big. Never really done that before.

Do you think you’ll probably feel the nerves a little bit more with these shows than anything you’ve ever done before?
I think it’s probably fairly logical to say yes. We’ve been performing for a long time now, we’ve nearly done six hundred shows together, so being on stage with the band is a pretty familiar and comfortable feeling. I’m hoping that excitement and familiarity and that little bit of ego too will sort of take care of all the nerves. But, yeah, it’s crossed my mind. I don’t know how I’ll feel the day of that first show or stepping out to such a large venue, but we’re in it now, so just got to play on.

I would to see how Please Don’t Move To Melbourne will go down at Marvel Stadium with all those parochial Oasis fans!
Yes, yes, interesting times ahead. Hopefully it’ll all be well received!

Focusing on your own tour, I think you’re up to what thirty shows. Are you stoked stoked that it just continues to get bigger and bigger and even better for the band?
That’s it. That’s probably been the best feeling of our journey in music so far is that feeling of something that is still growing, and of course, that’s not the only reason to continue, we’ve always done it for a love of music, but that’s just the cherry on top when it feels like all these years when you’ve committed to something and tried to stay true to what you believe in, the feeling that after all this time it could still be growing in some capacity is just terrific.

Are you looking to play Like Love in full on this tour, or at least a good chunk of it?
Yeah, so we’ve been rehearsing and we’ve learned a really big chunk of the album so far. Not every single song, but most of it, that was our goal, we’re really proud of the record and had fun making it. The arrangements were simple and organic. We put it together in the studio. We wanted to be deliberately a bit unprepared when we got to the studio and be able to flesh the songs out on the fly, that meant we played stuff that comes really naturally to us, and in rehearsing them it felt really great. We really enjoyed playing the new songs. So yeah, I’d say we’ll be looking to get through a good chunk of the material and are just now starting to talk about maybe doing some special one-offs playing the record in full.

Did you have an idea in your own mind how you wanted what would be Like Love to sound?
At first, it wasn’t that we had a vision for what “Like Love” became, I think it more began in a place of feeling like we’d done seven albums and we’re really proud of those, but more than ever before we had a desire to shake things up, to get out of our comfort zone and deliberately push into some direction where we felt like we hadn’t really been there before. We did a lot of experimenting last year in our own studio, just trying lots of different things and at some point I said to the band, especially in light of the song Like Love, which had come about inadvertently, and I’d started playing it at the shows and we really loved that, and the band were really supportive of that, and that was the catalyst for going down that road a bit, leaning into that softer folky side of our music.

There’s always been hints of that in our music in the past, but this time we’ve really wanted to persevere with it. That was probably another big reason we had a producer on board too, so that they could help us harness that and keep it on track. I think when we’re left to our own devices, we seemed to just layer songs up and let them get so energetic even when we’d say, oh, let’s keep this one chill. They seem to just get so energetic and full and we were trying to fight that on this record, you know, deliberately come down to the smallest amount of ingredients and create a different kind of mood.

Did anything in particular influence that?
I guess in many ways a lot of the influences for the record are influences I’ve had my whole life. I grew up listening to a lot of songwriter, acoustic and folk music from the sixties and seventies which was always playing in my house and always cherish that style of music. I’ve written a lot of songs in that vein, but I guess quite a lot of them have just remained with me. I’ve thought, I don’t know if it was consciously or unconsciously, maybe these aren’t right for the band, but I had quite a lot of songs in that style that were ready to go. Many of them are quite old, I’ve been working on them for years. Once I made the pitch to the band, they were really excited to do it. I had quite a lot of material that we could work on.

There’s some modern artists too that I’ve listened to a lot in the last five years or whatever, and more and more I felt like, oh, I want to go kind of go in this style a little bit for at least one record. The most obvious one to mention is probably Big Thief is a band I’ve been pretty obsessed with, they have a more folky or singer songwriter kind of bent to their music, but they’ve also got a real, like fearless, courageous kind of quality to their music. It feels like they can pivot in any direction at any time. I think I wanted to find a bit more of that for us as well.

Did you end up with more songs left over?
Well, no is the short answer. I got ten songs ready for the record, and that’s all we took with us when we went to Sydney to record the album. So it was those ten or bust, which is kind of fun to have that pressure to not really have any spare material. I think it’s the only album we’ve ever done where there’s literally no b-sides or any leftovers from the sessions. Every single thing we did there was what made the record.

How was the studio experience in Sydney?
We had talked about exactly what kind of music we were going to work on. We felt like we’ve done the last three albums produced by ourselves in Brisbane, which is put together very slowly, obviously we have lives and families and whatnot in Brisbane, so assembling an album like that can still be a lot of fun, but can happen over a long period of time and be a little bit fractured in the way you work. So we were really fantasising about how good it would be to get out of Brisbane, escape life for a little bit and just fully focus on this big creative event and that was awesome. So nice to all stay with each other and have less distractions and just be rocking up to the studio every day as. I think other artists would agree, you kind of dream of that adventure, being somewhere just to focus solely on your music. It was heaven. We were a bit stir crazy by the end, but that’s just recording. But it was fantastic. Absolutely loved it.

How was playing it back after you received the finished version?
Yeah, it’s funny, so the producer we’re working with, his name’s Matt Redlich, including the new album, he’s done four of our albums. So, he was a very familiar face and we were working very fast to get through all the material while we were down there and we were working to tape a lot as well. We weren’t able to take bouncers home at night, which I think was a good thing to knock off and not be able to obsessively listen to what you’d worked on that day and start fussing about it or thinking you need to change things or whatever. It was kind of nice and old school to just go home and think we did our best today and hopefully it’s all coming together. It does give it some different spiritual energy where you’re just working towards the finish line and not looking back.

When we went home from Sydney, I think it was actually probably two or three weeks before we had any bouncers set sent through from Matt. So, we had another agonising wait sitting around being like, oh my God, I hope it’s decent. It can be quite confronting to hear it all at first because you just have been relying on the versions that are in your imagination and you can get your expectations in some weird and off balance kind of places. But eventually you just come to terms with what you’ve made and we worked through mixing it. It didn’t take long before we had a finished product and we’re messaging each other in the band thinking shit, I think we might’ve done all right here. This is feeling pretty good.

Are there plans for new music? I heard a story that the next album might be more of a rock record.
Yeah, well, I don’t know if I should confirm or deny, it’s not entirely untrue what you’ve heard there. In terms of completing such a thing where we’re quite a way to go at this point, we definitely have had some big ambitions and like I hinted at, we worked on a lot of music last year. Definitely feeling keen to maybe turn around some more music in in the near future. The year’s just getting so busy, you make plans but things are popping up, exciting things, we’ve been trying to plan to get back to Europe for the first time in a long time and then the Oasis opportunity popped up. So we’ve been doing a lot of rescheduling. I am struggling to find an opening in my calendar at the moment that would see us recording any music, but you know, it’s certainly just a great love of ours and there’s never a day that goes by where I’m not mulling over songs in my head. I’m excited to put something together and I don’t know what it’ll be, but certainly the new album has given us a new confidence to walk in different directions, to really be more courageous with what our band can sound like and to not be afraid to go down different roads and explore different things.

Even to look ahead it must be hard to top this year off again next year?
That’s it. I guess the beauty of this journey we’ve had in music is that we’ve thought that the whole time, exciting things keep happening and you do have times where nothing exciting happens for a bit and you can lose your confidence or feel unsure about what the path forward is. But definitely one of the most thrilling things about this line of work is that massive, unknown quantity that’s always sitting there. I was just driving to the studio one day when I got a call from our manager saying, Oasis wants you to support, you know, big things like that just come like a bolt out of the blue. It’s definitely, for a personality like mine and I dare say my band mates are the same, there’s something about the thrill of what could possibly walk through the door is just too exciting to walk away from.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Ball Park Music on the following dates, tickets HERE…

On tour with Oasis, tickets from Live Nation…