interview: jebediah

Jebediah‘s latest release, Kosciuszko, has been a long time coming. This is hardly news to anyone who has taken notice of Australian music over the past 15 years and Jebediah fans may have had their doubts that another album would ever come to fruition with front man, Kevin Mitchell’s solo side project, Bob Evans, taking off during their hiatus. But they weren’t the only ones. As Mitchell says, such doubts are normal in the life of an artist.

‘I guess there may have been some doubts at times whether we’d sort of accomplish what we were setting out to do. And I think as an artist, generally, I think you’d be lucky if you never went through a period of doubt because the whole business of being an artist I suppose is you never really know what’s around the corner,’ says Mitchell. ‘I think a little bit of doubt is probably normal. We’ve all had our stages of it but nothing you could say was really significant. I always felt that we had another record in us, I’m just glad that I was right!

‘The idea was just that we’d started recording a record but we didn’t really have a plan intact that we were following.’

For this record, the members of Jebediah decided to do away with what Mitchell describes as a set of rules that had seen them adhering to specific modes of working and songwriting over the years.

‘You come to rely on certain ways of doing things and the rules are really self-imposed, no one’s actually telling you to do that. It’s just the way that you just fall into a pattern and everybody does that at times and yeah, being in a band is no different.

‘With this record, we had no manager and no record company, we had no one telling us what to do except ourselves so we had the freedom to do whatever the hell we wanted. It’s a bit of a lame motto to have, “no rules”, but we did. It sounds like the kind of thing that you scrawl on your pencil case when you’re in primary school but it was pretty much how we decided to work, no one was going to tell anybody not to do something.

‘We weren’t setting any boundaries for ourselves I guess…that’s what creativity should be about, but it’s an easy thing to lose that after a while so this record was all about trying to get that spirit of adventure back.’

Having been a part of the Australian music scene since the 1990s, Mitchell has seen many changes in addition to those just within his own band. Of course, technological advancements have affected all of us in the Western world, not least of those in the music industry. But they’ve also pushed Mitchell to certain realisations about music and about himself, as well as giving him the ability to share much insight about the factors that have propelled a kind of musical climate change.

‘Music itself hasn’t changed that much at all, it goes in cycles. Music is still as fashion-based as it ever was and style-based and things come in and out. But everything around it has been driven by technology and that’s changed immensely. There weren’t even mobile phones when we started playing in the band!

‘As much as it kills me to say it, I guess we’re victims of a generation gap, which means that I’m now officially old.

‘Obviously the music industry itself has shrunk. When we first started out, major labels were throwing money around like crazy and that’s probably part of the reason why they’ve started to struggle because they were spending so freely. Of course all that’s changed, it’s a very different atmosphere now and I think bands have been forced to become smarter. I think the cliché of the dumb rock musician that’s just off their face and just gets told what to do…that’s completely dead. You’d struggle to find a musician that’s like that these days because you just can’t survive like that anymore. You don’t have this massive industry propping you up anymore, you have to know what’s going on and I think young bands are way more savvy than we were when we started out. We were pretty naïve.’

The mark that Jebediah has already left on Australian music is showing no signs of being scratched off anytime soon, with Mitchell firmly committed and moreover, looking forward to spending time with the band again. They begin a national tour next month including visits to regional centres around Australia, in support of their new album.

Kosciuszko is out now through Dew Process and Universal Music Australia!