It’s October, 2016. A freezing John Floreani, with long hair stuffed under a baseball cap, is stood in front of a petrol station holding a copy of his band Trophy Eyes’ new album Chemical Miracle, released just that day.
Even in that moment, Floreani had ideas for a new album billowing away in his brain, along with thoughts of self-deprecation and doubt. Now, with a new home in Melbourne, and after time away in the US, Floreani has a new outlook on his music and his life.
Despite being on what seems like an unstoppable upwards trajectory, Trophy Eyes was almost a temporary entity. Their debut album Mend, Move On – according to Floreani – was a personal failure, a record that left the band feeling defeated about their future. It’s follow-up, 2016’s Chemical Miracle was their last opportunity to make something they were proud of.
“We left all of our boundaries behind,” Floreani says about their thought process going into Chemical Miracle. “We said, ‘Let’s write a record that is our favourite record we’ve ever written.’”
The thinking behind their soon to be released third album The American Dream was similar to that of their sophomore effort. Trophy Eyes weren’t out to meet anyone else’s expectations. They made sure they loved every part of their music first.
Although the recording process wasn’t painstaking, it was still meticulous and pedantic, with most of the audio recorded over a five-week period with sound engineer Shane Edwards in Thailand.
“If you want to translate what you’re feeling or what you think, if you want to translate a passionate vocal onto a record, you have to live it and you have to do it just right. Sometimes you have to be a little over dramatic or a little bit more animated to make sure that it comes across,” Floreani says. “A lot of the time you have to dig up [heavy] shit.”
Floreani drew on a slew of bleak thoughts and moments that he experienced throughout the album’s creative process, including a run of nights out in Thailand where Floreani felt his tendency to self-destruct exacerbated.
“Drinking excessively and going out a lot and being like that always makes its way into my songs because it’s something I’m not really proud of but it’s something that I always find myself in the middle of,” Floreani says. “I’ll be like, ‘I don’t care, I’m staying in tonight,’ then all of a sudden I’m ten drinks deep swinging from the ceiling somewhere.”
Feeling worn down, Floreani needed to leave Australia for more than just a therapeutic sabbatical. He needed to start anew, to live in a place where he knew no one – so he moved to Burleson, Texas for two years. Floreani’s new environment eventually earned him a new perspective – inspiring the themes and sound of The American Dream.
“The American Dream is something that exists. There’s a chance for everybody. Anybody can go there, start anew, and get what they want.
“Something I always thirsted for was a white picket fence and a dog called Lucky. That was the life I wanted. I craved it. I wanted to wake up every day in the same place and be surrounded by people where if they found me passed out on the front lawn they’d be like, ‘Oh my god, what are you doing?’ not ‘Yeah, John’s passed out again. Let’s do that again’,” Floreani says.
“When I got maybe five or ten songs together, I realised they all sounded like Texas. They sounded like crickets and summer. They sounded like the rock’n’roll that I can hear from the bar down the street that would play Bruce Springsteen, and people are flying American flags. I felt a sense of, maybe not pride, but some kind of patriotism – which is strange – but I felt like I belonged there.”
It’s October, 2016 again – before Texas – and Trophy Eyes had wrapped up a tour in the States and Floreani was back home. He had a horrible feeling. He slowly felt a helplessness towards something that’s impossible to escape. He felt hatred for himself.
“I got to this point in my life where I was like ‘Shit, I’m just like everybody else, I’m just an idiot, I’m just a fucking 30-year-old guy. Uneducated, unqualified, and stuck in this stupid world I didn’t ask to be born in and now I have to live it like some mundane idiot.’
“Being somebody you don’t like personally on a cellular level is torture, it’s like spraying a shark with shark repellent. I can’t imagine anybody having to feel that feeling,” Floreani says.
This pain led to the inception of the band’s most recent anthemic single ‘More Like You’, where you can hear the Floreani of old before he felt like he transformed in Burleson.
“The ‘More like you, less like me’ isn’t for secondary gain. I didn’t want to be somebody else – to look different or to be a better person or be rich or have a better life or anything like that. It was simply because I was in a place where I literally couldn’t stand the thought of myself,” Floreani says.
“That was scary. I remember waking up a lot of the time and the first thought that would pop into my head would be ‘Oh. Fuck. We woke up.’ That was a scary space to be, and when I look back and I hear that song and I listen to myself, especially in the second verse where I’m actually just screaming, it chills me and it scares me and it makes my throat tight. It makes me think ‘You poor guy.’ I’d go back and give him a hug if I could.”
