Spacey Jane banks on lead singer, Caleb Harper's 'trauma' for third album release
If you’ve ever thought about starting that band with your friends, this is your sign to lock in ‘cause you might end up like rising stars, Spacey Jane. The Aussie indie group was born from years of schooling and a concert in a backyard — proof that you CAN keep your friends from high school and uni. Now fast-forward a decade, and the band made up of Caleb Harper, Kieran Lama, Ashton Hardman-Le Cornu and Peppa Lane are taking on their third release, If That Makes Sense.
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The 13-track compilation was a three year labour of love, with the group spread over different cities — Los Angeles, New York, Melbourne and Perth — a definite evolution from their humble beginnings. But despite the distance, Spacey Jane found a way to pour themselves into every part of the composition. If That Makes Sense is soul-baring, vulnerable and makes you long for the days of being naive and learning how to love.
Think coming-of-age movie from start to finish.
Hand-in-hand with the album release, the quartet are headed around the world to give hungry audiences a taste of Australian garage rock, but not without taking on almost 20 sold out shows in their home country. Ahead of the release of If That Makes Sense and their tour, Harper, Lama, Hardman-Le Cornu and Lane gave us the rundown on their new process, songwriting and support acts.
LB: Now that all of you are living in different cities, what’s the new process for writing music? And how do you remain close over the distance?
Caleb: It’s kind of the same way we’ve always done it — like I’ll go away and put some songs together and then I’ll send away demos and we meet up and slowly build out a song. It just sort of happened in different places. This time everyone would come out to LA and we’d go and hire a studio or whatever and work through things.
Staying close is hard. It’s like we miss each other a lot and then we get big bursts of two months of living in each other’s pockets — like we’re doing right now. And then we sort of drift out of each other’s lives for a bit. It’s weird
Ashton: It's good to sort of have our own lives a bit sometimes too, I think. So, everything's the band. It's the best thing, but [when] you step off tour it's a bit like, “Oh, what's going on? Who am I outside of this?”. But I think we do a pretty good job of staying in touch. We send each other memes and that kind of thing.
Kieran: We have a group chat, Peppa’s not in it because she doesn’t have Instagram and it’s just the worst garbage, just bottom of the barrel Reels.
Caleb: It’s not TikTok, it’s Reels. Reels has got a lower threshold. It just lets anything through, it’s really bad.
Kieran: It’s like the stupider it is, the funnier it is.
Caleb: Italian brain rot, everywhere is kind of doing the rounds with us.
Kieran: The fact that it’s made it to [Peppa’s] stream of consciousness, it’s special.
LB: What’s your favourite Italian brainrot character?
Peppa: Ballerina cappuccina. Mi mi mi.
LB: With so many songs now under your belt, is the songwriting a collaborative process or is it truly banking on one person’s trauma?
Kieran: Caleb’s lyrics, that’s 100% [him] right there.
Caleb: So, yes.
LB: Does that ever take a toll on you, Caleb?
Caleb: Not really, it’s already there. You’re already thinking about it. It’s already in you. Writing about it is, if anything, helpful. Sometimes it’s annoying to rehash stuff. Sometimes singing it live can be a little strange, but it feels like you’re playing a character. I think we all do when we’re out there. It’s like purely self-expression, but also this sort of, extra version of yourself. I think it’s okay.
Sometimes I listen back and think “Maybe I shouldn’t have put all that in there”. It’s very personal.
LB: There’s one song in the album — “Estimated Delivery” that feels more raw and stripped back. Was it ever on the cards to make that purely guitar and vocals or was that purely reserved for “ILY The Most”?
Caleb: That’s always something you think about — how much you put into a song and whether or not it has drums at all, for example, if the drums come in halfway through the song... Or is there a solo there?
Kieran: Or can Kieran go home?
Ashton: How long has Kieran been waiting for?
Caleb: “Estimated Delivery” — the drum beat, there’s a whole story behind that, but it has a breakbeat sample originally in the demo, and the song, it didn’t have that. But the song was kind of written that day, and then [at] the very end of it, just piss farting around we put that underneath it. Sarah, who I wrote the song with, changed the song entirely, which is cool.
Ashton: It’s way better for me when there’s a beat to write all my riffs. It’s so hard sometimes when it’s just in space. I feel like I really connect to the grove of things. I love that beat.
Kieran: I can’t play off that beat live. I can’t play it as it was recorded.
Caleb: That’s not true. You can.
Kieran: No, I mean I can do it in a slightly modified way, but I mean I think it [would] be physically impossible for me to play exactly as recorded, because we’ve got a robot thing to record the [hi]-hats.
Caleb: It’s a Moog DFAM 3 Drum Machine’s Live Hats Kit. It’s ridiculous.
Kieran: I need four more arms, I think.
LB: Listening to the album there’s a real 10 Things I Hate About You vibe about it. If you could pick a TV/movie character and have If That Makes Sense as the soundtrack to their life, who would it be?
Caleb: Jason Bourne. I just think I would like to be Jason Bourne. I don’t know, do you have an answer to that?
Ashton: Not really.
Kieran: It’s hard.
Caleb: “August” to me is coming-of-age, A24, shot in the midwest of the US — anything, pick a movie from that genre. You know what I’m talking about. That’s that mood.
LB: So many homegrown acts are struggling with touring right now, but having sold out almost all of your tour dates across Australia, what do you think it is about you guys that Australia loves so much and gravitates towards?
Peppa: We’re awesome.
Caleb: We’ve really focused on touring for a long time and love it. It's something that we feel like, as a band, formed the foundation of what we do. We played for a year before we even put music out. And we also haven't been on the road in a really long time and we've been gone for a long time, which I think we were worried could have gone one of two ways. It could have been that people forgot. Turns out people, I guess, missed us — which is really nice, and it's good to be back. We’re so excited, we’re itching.
LB: And speaking of touring, which artist/bands would you want to support on tour?
Caleb: Arctic Monkeys.
Ashton: [There’s] a lot of great bands that we love and we’d love to play with.
Caleb: Strokes.
Ashton: I love Pearl Jam. We love Wilco, but that might be a weird fit.
Caleb: The 1975 would be great. Would be a great band to support. I’ll support Olivia Rodrigo. I’ve been trying to manifest that. I think that’ll be good. She puts on a rock show. It’s sick. She’s awesome. So, I think it’ll be a fun fit.
Listen to Spacey Jane’s If That Makes Sense — out now.
Angeline Barion