The Black Crowes Are Returning To Australia With ‘A Pound Of Feathers’

One of rock & roll’s most iconic and unapologetic bands, The Black Crowes return to Australia after their massive global reunion tour. Since reforming in 2019, the Robinson Brothers have reignited the fire that made them one of the most electrifying live acts on the planet, playing more than one hundred and fifty shows across twenty countries.

Their last record Happiness Bastards earned a GRAMMY nomination for Best Rock Album and a 2025 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nod, underscoring the band’s continued relevance and influence. Brand new, tenth studio album A Pound of Feathers was recorded in Nashville with producer Jay Joyce in just ten days, merging their classic Southern rock roots with new energy, showcasing their musical evolution.

On this tour, fans can expect timeless hits including Remedy, She Talks to Angels, and Hard to Handle, alongside material from these recent albums, performed with the raw energy, soul, and swagger that define The Black Crowes. The tour will commence at The Forum, Melbourne on Thursday 2 and Friday 3 April, followed by Fortitude Music Hall in Brisbane on Monday 6 April, and concluding in Sydney at Enmore Theatre on Wednesday 8 and Thursday 9 April. Rich Robinson talks to Hi Fi Way about the album.

Congratulations on the new album Pound of Feathers, absolutely brilliant. Did you expect a follow‑up so brilliant and so soon?
I’m really happy with it, I like how we did it, but someone told me that this is our tenth record. I mean, I’ve never really counted. I was like, oh, wow, that’s kind of cool. Tenth album, to me, I could have made twenty. In the day, we weren’t allowed to make more than a record a year, every couple of years, it was just the way the industry was, and the label kind of kept it.

Chris and I probably wrote twenty or thirty records worth of material over the years. To get back in the studio after Happiness Bastards and just to go in and how we did it was just fun. We love music, we love the process, we love playing. We love writing and recording and, and it’s always been a labour of love and that’s always come first for us. Getting in the studio and this time around, we use the studio as a tool. I didn’t typically, we’ll go in and I’ll send Chris fifteen or twenty things that I have, and then he chooses what he wants to work on, and then we’ll go in with a lot more finished songs.

But this time around we’re like, well, let’s go in and see what the studio provides. Let’s not finish anything. Getting in there and working like that forces you to be more instinctual in what you’re doing. We’re there as like, oh, this song has a verse and a chorus. I didn’t write a bridge yet. Or, this one has an intro and a verse, or whatever it is. Then that’s where Chris and I get in and we arrange the songs. It’s kind of cool because it’s like, oh, try this, let’s try that because we’re brothers and because we’ve been doing this for so long, we can move pretty agile to make these decisions.

When that happens, it’s really cool. You know, this time around, we had, um, Culley in the, in the studio with us, our drummer, and that turned, that was great too. You know what I mean? Because he’s just as fast. He’s there with us, we’re moving around. But I think that the joy of how we worked and the sort of play, you know what I mean, it feel, you know, it’s called playing music for a reason. You know what I mean? It should be kind of fun and it should be visceral, and it should feel good. And I really think that that record, uh, you know, represents that a lot.

What was really quite striking is the chemistry on this album which is incredibly powerful.
Chris and I have always had that chemistry, Cully, and I have it, he’s got a really good groove and he’s tapped into what I’m doing. This time around, it was just Chris and I, and Cully in the studio. When we made Happiness Bastards, we had just started working with Jay Joyce. Jay wanted a day or two, I think he wanted two days with me and Chris, just the three of us. He wanted to see how we worked, you know. This time around, because he knew we were coming in with less than finished songs. He was like, well, let’s take a week, let’s take a week with just you, Chris and Cully and we’ll just sort of flush all this stuff out.

So, Chris and I went in and we had thought about bringing the band in, but by the end of the first five days, we had nine songs done. We’re like, wow, this is really working, and it’s really cool and it’s flowing well. We just finished it. It took us about eight days to do the whole record. We’d finish the arrangement and then play it two or three times, then I would throw bass and a couple of guitars on it and that was pretty much it, you know.

That’s really what I mean by the instinctual element. You’re playing a part, you’re self editing while you’re playing. You’re like, ah, that’s a little too busy. You know, cut that out, or let’s do this, add these guitars, try to add a myriad of different textures to the record. A lot of acoustic guitars that go really well with the big electric guitars and how that works and then at the end, we flew in our keyboard player, Eric, for a couple of days, and that was it.

Does that kind of experience set a bit of a blueprint or template for how you might work next time? Or do you mix it up again and approach it differently?
Typically, we’ve always made different albums, Shake Your Money Maker, being our first, was what a first record would be. We had a producer for the first time, it was George Drakoulias. He was our friend, and he was kind of our mentor. It took us a month to make that record, and we were in there in Atlanta as kids. I was nineteen when I made that record and I was like seventeen when I started writing it. So we had had a couple years of writing and working with George, and then you’re in the studio.

But by the time we got to Southern Harmony, we had played three hundred and fifty shows in about twenty months. We came off the road and we had become a band, like a proper rock and roll band during that whole Shake Your Money Maker tour and we were firing on all cylinders. So, Chris and I went in over the weekend, and we wrote pretty much the whole record minus two songs I’d written Thorn in My Pride and My Morning Song on tour.

The rest of the songs we just wrote, and then we went in and recorded it. It was a live record. We made that one in eight days too in Atlanta. Every take was one or two takes and that was it. Then Amorica, we’re like, let’s make a studio album. Let’s make something that sounds like a really proper studio sound, something that that would be for the ages and so we went in and did that.

Three Snakes, we wanted to make a more organic sounding record. I had a recording console at my house that I bought, and we’re like, well, let’s just rent a house and move that in there. We were trying to make something that sounded like Led Zeppelin III, we had a very specific sonic element of what we wanted that record to sound like. And then By Your Side comes along, we decided to make a straight ahead rock record, and then take another drastic left turn and make Lions. Lions was after I had scored a movie for New Line Pictures, and it was after touring with Jimmy, it had a distracted producer, and the engineer wasn’t great, but the songs were really cool, and I really liked those songs.

Then we split up and come back. And so, every record, Chris and I just kind of have a general idea, and we both always agree, which is odd that we always agree about what kind of record we’re going to make. This one, we decided to make a record like that this time around. It may be different next time, it may be similar, I don’t know, just kind of depends on how we feel.

Were there any songs that really surprised you, how they turned out after recording them compared to what the original idea might have been?
Eros Blues is an amalgamation of a couple of songs. I actually had the chorus first, I really like it, but the chorus was hard for me to find something to fit with. I was like, man, how do you know? I had this other song that I was working with, and Chris was like, well, what about that? You know? We moved that, and then I had another song that I used as the bridge and so that one turned out really interesting.

Doomsday Doggerell was something I was just messing around on a guitar and I was trying to get a sound for another song. I had this sound in mind. There’s a band called The Cramps in from America, from like the seventies and eighties, and they were like a post-punk, like really influential kind of band. There was a specific guitar sound that I had heard that I wanted, which is a lot of reverb, a lot of vibe of vibrato, and like a real nasty sound and guitar. I was in there messing around with it and playing this part over and over again. Chris was like, what is that? I’m like, it’s nothing. I’m just fucking around getting a sound, you know? He is like, no, that’s a song. Let’s try to work it out and so I wrote it and it took me like twenty minutes. Some songs write themselves, some songs just kind of come, and then other songs like Eros Blues, they take some time, and it takes a little bit of time to piece it together till it feels good to me.

A couple of my favourites are Queen of The B-Sides, love that song, but the one I’m curious about is the story behind Do the Parasite, what’s that one about?
I think it’s a commentary, Chris wanted to put it in almost like a dance, like do the parasite dance, you know what I mean? But I think it was a lot of, like us growing up in the music industry, and there’s not, some not so savoury characters that you have to deal with.

But I’ve always felt musically, especially, I mean, musically and lyrically that people form their own intimate understanding of what a song means to them. Once you hear a song, what that means to you, when you hear it, where does it take you when you hear the song, and then lyrically, what do you get out of it? That’s what makes it really special to people that listen to music because it becomes very intimate. There’s so many songs that I’ve listened to over the years that move me in so many ways that are very specific to my life, because I’m looking at it through the lens of what did that make me feel in the moment, and what personal experiences am I bringing to it.

What were your thoughts when you had the opportunity to play the album start to end with the headphones on and listening to it more like a fan would? What was going through your head at that time?
Well, I mean, we would do that when we sequence the record specifically, because how you sequence it is an art form unto itself. That’s why we make records. I don’t believe in some record company telling young kids like, no one cares about records. Just make EP’s. I think that album is a really interesting and viable platform. It’s something that you can take home and it can take you somewhere and the sequence in how you look at an album as a piece, almost like a film, like where is this going? Where’s this going take me? You put the needle on the vinyl, and it takes you somewhere, especially the first time you hear it.

I’ve always thought of about it that way, and making full records and sequencing. It really has a lot of meaning behind what the record is. Changing a song or two can change the whole trajectory of how the record comes across. When I got the sequence and I sat there and I listened to it, typically I’ll listen to it on a big stereo, I’ll listen to it in my car and I’ll listen to it on the phone because most people listen to music now on their phones, which is kind of weird, but you want to get a general vibe of how things sound.

Because every stereo sounds different, some headphones manipulate the sound. Some headphones are kind of naked and you can hear it as it is. Some stereos do this or have filters. So, we listened to everything and it felt right to me. It just felt like, yeah, this is fucking great. This goes straight into Profane Prophecy, right off the bat it kicks off the whole record and I was really, really pleased with it.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch The Black Crowes on the following dates, tickets from Live Nation…