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Evermore.
 After
being burnt so many times in the past, I've been trying to avoid
bands made up of siblings. But with Evermore's unbelievable
reputation preceding them, it's a little hard not to sit up
and take notice. Their first full length release 'Dreams' is
an amazing debut, and guitarist/vocalist Jon Hume is obviously
pleased as punch with how things are going.
"Although I injured my arm at the Adelaide show," Hume laughs, "so we had to skip Perth. After we played, I was going down the stairs out the back and there was a security chain I tripped over."
Potentially litigious injuries aside, Evermore are quite an amazing band to see live. Jon shares the stage with his brothers Peter (bass, keyboards) and Dann (drums), meaning despite only just finishing their first LP, Evermore have a surprisingly long history behind them. "It doesn't really feel like we're only just starting out: it's been like six or seven years that we've been playing together," Hume explains.
"Early on, the band was just something fun really. We started off just jamming and writing songs and I just started recording stuff at home a while back. Then we won a band competition in New Zealand back in 2000, and that helped get us really started, because with the winnings from that we spent some money on the home studio. And it was there that we recorded some demos, and eventually started sending them out to industry people and stuff."
What really strikes me about Evermore, however, is how three brothers can have such an amazing presence on stage when usually at their age they're all fighting over other personal disputes. "We actually do pretty well most of the time. It is usually stupid little personal stuff that we get into fights over, but really it's all just a waste of time. Usually we do okay, we're pretty together. We all have pretty similar tastes in music and we all have the same sort of idea as to where the band is headed and what it should be sounding like.
"I usually do most of it as far as writing songs and stuff, but for the record it was slightly more of a collaborative thing. Dann wrote a couple of songs, and me and Pete would come together with lyrics. He might come up with a verse, and I might work on the chorus or whatever. I think when you're starting out you're a little more precious with the stuff you've written, but I've learnt to get past that a bit now, which has really made the album a lot stronger."
'Dreams' was also made stronger by having producer Barrett Jones (Nirvana, Foo Fighters) at the helm. However, Mother Nature almost ruined the perfect match between producer and band not long into the recording process. "We did a tour with Brad through Australia, and Barrett was with them doing monitors and hanging around, and we invited him down to New Zealand to work on our album," explains Hume. "But we had this massive flood come though our home town, which quite literally destroyed our plans for recording the whole album there. I think it kind of freaked Barrett out a bit, gave him an 'interesting' impression of New Zealand. Especially since we'd told him to expect sunny weather," Hume laughs. "But we'd done most of the base work back home before heading off to Seattle so it wasn't as bad as it could've been. Plus it was interesting to go across and get a whole new approach to the album."
Unsurprisingly, the end result wasn't exactly as they'd planned. "We were pretty ambitious and wanted to make a double album originally, with a whole concept and everything. It was a shame it didn't work out though, because we'd really put a lot of thought into the whole concept of the two CDs, and how each track fit into the next and the different moods that had been creative. I think we were trying to think of how it all went together to tell sort of a narrative - not necessarily a particular story... Some parts of that have kind of remained on 'Dreams' though, but Barrett wasn't too keen on the idea and we were really starting to run out of time in the end, so the plan fell through. I think it's definitely something we might have a go at later on though."
Ryan Smith
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Evermore support Little Birdy at the Gov on Sun 10 Oct. 'Dreams' is out now through Warners.
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