Riebl knew it was time to regroup with The Cat Empire when he saw the crowd’s enthusiastic reaction during a brief European tour last year. “I remember looking at the crowd and seeing a really broad range of ages, from teenagers to much older people,” he says. “I couldn’t quite wrap my head around it, because the teenagers would only have been two or three years old when we were starting out.” Seeing younger people in the crowd filled Riebl with confidents, that his band was still growing and reaching people. “From there, it was all about falling back into enjoyment of playing with the band. I love The Cat Empire’s sense of movement and when I play with the band, I feel the joy of letting go. I had to realise what the spirit of The Cat Empire was, then I could go back.”
The upcoming album, Steal The Light, has a festival-like atmosphere, and a sense of reckless abandon. “I wanted to create something that was really magical and colourful,” Riebl tells me. The city of New Orleans proved a big inspiration for the tone and colour of the songs. “I went there last year for a weekend for the Jazz & Heritage Festival and ended up staying for two or three months,” he says. “You can go out there any night of the week and hear incredible music, and there’s just something great about the colour of the city.” Riebl drew inspiration from the Caribbean-style houses of the Ninth Ward, and from the sadness and the broken-down nature of the post-Katrina city. “I love the streets and the atmosphere, and the contrast of happy and sad worked really well for the type of feeling I wanted to capture in the music.”
The single Brighter Than Gold draws directly on the mixture of jazz and old Caribbean music that Riebl heard while staying in New Orleans. “The chorus of that song is so great,” Riebl says. “The chords are really rousing and stirring – it’s almost like a religious song.” The seed of inspiration for the song came from a second-line march. “I really wanted to bring ghosts to life,” Riebl says. “I wanted to bring colourful and exciting and dark and haunted things together in a joyous procession. You could call it dark if you want, but I don’t think it’s a very dark song – I think it’s an attempt to bring a carnival to life. It’s our own carnival, an imaginary one. It was fun to write – I wasn’t taking myself overly seriously with that one, just trying to set the tone of the album, and that sets the tone really well I think.”
The Cat Empire have been making music together for a long time now – Steal The Light is their sixth album since they formed in the late ‘90s – and I ask Riebl what the future holds. “I haven’t thought about it too much,” he says. “For me, The Cat Empire was always a band of my youth. It was just so much fun for me to be involved in this thing when I was in my early 20s, when it started to pick up. Now, I’ve rediscovered that joy – I think a lot of us have. We’re better musicians now, and we put on better shows. We’ve reached a point where we can play big festival shows now. In terms of the future, I don’t know. As soon as it doesn’t feel natural anymore, as soon as it stops feeling fresh, we’ll stop.”
Many of The Cat Empire’s oldest and best-known songs – Days Like These, for instance – are about young men kicking back and having fun. I ask Riebl what it’s like to perform these from his older and wiser point of view, and he laughs. “Recently, I’ve looked through some of the lyrics for those old ones, and sometimes I like them, but sometimes I think ‘Christ, who was this person who wrote these?’” he says. “It’s necessary for bands to write new songs in order to bring the older ones to life. With this new album, we really carry a lot of that spirit, but the lyrics have a more serious tone, and that’s really enjoyable. I can sing those ones with a few older ones in between, and for me, that makes it a lot better, because I can take them with more of a grain of salt. That makes them more enjoyable for me. I really don’t want to be living in the past.”
BY ALASDAIR DUNCAN
