“I have always found it pretty strange that we’re labelled so much as a summer band,” Payne laughs. “People always mistake us as being from California, and we do have a song called 90210, but whatever. I know our songs sound very happy and summery, but I think one of the words I’ve lyrically re-used the most has been ‘winter.’ I talk about snow a lot. So I think it’s fun that sonically we come across as a happy, summer band, but that’s not often the topic of the songs at all. Even when we try and write a ‘sad’ song it ends up sounding like, ‘Oh, the beach. Let’s drive with the top down’.”
Payne laughs loudly, and it’s easy to imagine how entertaining this chat would be face-to-face; shooting pool and drinking Moosehead in some Vancouver speak-easy, for instance. She’s a friendly, colourful conversationalist, whose sentences tend to scatter all over the place like a box of overturned cats. Given her exuberance, the bright and cheerful ‘90s pop-rock tone that infuses The Courtneys’ songs isn’t too surprising. It certainly seems more valid than any overriding fondness or nostalgia for the decade that gave us both Pearl Jam and Captain Planet.
“Musically, I think the three of us are all extremely different in a lot of ways, and that the whole ‘90s aesthetic is where we cross over. Other bands that are looking back to earlier music; I wonder about that myself,” she reflects. “Maybe it’s always that way. I feel like when you’re living in a certain time period, it’s hard for you to tell what’s going on. When we look at the ‘80s, it has a specific style and a specific sound. We look at it now and it’s like, ‘Yeah, that’s the ‘80s.’ But I feel like when you’re living in it, you can’t tell what is standing out. Maybe it seems like we’re all doing this nostalgia thing, but when I look back at the early 2000s, that has a very specific sound and aesthetic. But when I was in it, I didn’t think that anything was going on at all.”
Some would say we’re all products of our environments, and if this is the case, then perhaps that sense of cultural ambiguity Payne speaks of is precisely what led to developing music that is reminiscent of an earlier era. On the one hand, you can see a certain truth in this; after all, we tend to define ourselves in contrast to what precedes and informs our contemporary lives. On the other, this causality seems a little too neat and besides, in the face of Payne’s extra musical occupations, you would certainly hope these influences remain only skin deep.
“I worked with this true-crime documentary series,” she says. “I still do, but my role has changed now. But it was my job to research all of the police documents and photos, all of these serial killer crime scene images, and work out what ones to pass along that they could use on screen. It was actually pretty full on. I’d get in touch with these people and they’d just send along everything they had, all of these really intense, gory photos, and I’d always try to not look too closely at first, but you had to know what was there. And then I’d select them and show them to my boss, who was always like, ‘These photos are terrible.’ And I’d be like, ‘Those aren’t even the bad ones. You should see the shit that I’ve left behind’.”
Shortly they will touch down in Australia for their first experience of the land of snakes and sunstroke, with gigs dotting the east coast. For a band still relatively fresh on the scene, Payne can barely believe the road their music has led them down thus far, especially when so much of it seems almost divinely, absurdly arranged.
“Before the album came out, we’d be making jokes about things we’d like to do, but it was all very delusional: just these ridiculous things that it would be awesome to do or play at, but never anything we took seriously,” Payne muses. “But now, we’ve started to do all these things. We played this island the other day, and as we were on the ferry going over our bassist Sydney was like, ‘You guys, seriously, if there’s only one more thing that can happen in this band before we die, I really want to make a choreographed dance music video.’ And it’s so ridiculous and so funny, but we’ll totally do something like that now. I just feel like we keep on coming up with more and more ridiculous things that somehow end up happening.”
BY ADAM NORRIS
