been this creation of these paper tigers. As we go through the world, you realise these people are just like me. “Everyone is very similar. Everyone loves, everyone wants to be loved, everyone experiences joy, everyone experiences devastation, we succeed, and we suffer together. It’s a record about how important it is to connect with other people and understand that, while in your mind you are very important, your life is very important and has value, everyone has that in their mind. No person is less important or less valuable than you. “That’s where it went from the last record to this record. Those are the answers to the questions we got. It’s what the touring and travel taught us. It’s when I look back and all those journals, it’s what I learnt by connecting with individuals. It is that. It’s being taught by others, in other places, about kindness and
empathy in ways I hadn’t thought about it before.” There’s a joy to these discoveries. A sigh of relief that what they hoped might be true, is. A wide-eyed embrace that it’s bigger and more powerful than they could have hoped for. The fact they faced it, explored it and documented it together gives ‘Sister Cities’ a whole lot of soul. “A lot of those memories are really positive, and then obviously there’s obviously going to be some painful ones in there that aren’t going to be particularly fun to relive but are important to relive. “Every song on the record has its unique space, and some of those live in a space in loss because some of those events are events where you lose people, or you almost lose people. They have an equal importance to the pantheon of the record. Everything is about a different event or series of events, and how they tie into the place that we are. “For a song like ‘Raining In Kyoto’, that’s a song about my grandfather passing away as I got to the airport to do a tour of Japan. I was not able to attend his funeral so I went to this temple in Kyoto that had this Inari shrine and it was pouring down with rain on us all day. I walked up the stairs, and I saw that there were these enclosures and I saw that they were filled with wax. I understood that people had been lighting candles and leaving them there. I thought that I would light
a candle and think something, or say something in regards to my grandfather. I would have some sort of ceremony even though I didn’t know what the ceremony meant or if it meant anything at all. I would light this candle. “I did, and I stood in front of it crying in the rain. There was an older man close to me, we didn’t speak the same language, and he didn’t understand why I was upset and I didn’t know what he was upset about either. I watched as he pulled on this bit of cloth to ring a bell, then I rang the bell. I felt connected to him in that space. I don’t know if he had lost someone, but I felt united in loss with other people, and that’s just as important as feeling united in joy with other people.” Those connections with other people are the heroes of ‘Sister Cities’. Some, like ‘Pyramids Of Salt’, are scarlet and don’t need pulling apart. Others, like ‘We Look Like Lightning’ are found in places you’d never expect. That song came about because in one year, The Wonder Years took forty flights. “There’s a certain feeling I get where I’m in the air where I almost I feel like I cease to exist until we’re back on the ground. It’s like I‘m nowhere. Air travel can be terrifying. Just by the odds, some of those flights were really rocky. You think, ‘Well I’m going to die right here, in this aeroplane, full of people that all look terrified and we’re all strangers, and we’re all going from one place to another, and we’re all going to die together right here. That feels strange. “There’s also the understanding of connectivity between two places, and how air travel makes it seem so seamless. I can get to almost anywhere in a day, and it makes the world shrink in a way. If I started walking, from where I am, in a day, I might be at my mom’s house. But in an aeroplane, I can be in Sydney or Rio or London or Paris, or Tokyo or anywhere else. It makes you realise that while the world seems so big, it is not so big. It’s very interconnected and interwoven. Everything you do has an effect on everyone else, everywhere else.”
DAN CAMPBELL
The title-track roars with the kindness of strangers. Of home and heart in foreign lands. Of it not actually being all that foreign after all. “The record had a series
DISRUPT THE NOISE 33