Ahead of the release of their new album The Last Resort, we sat down with Jess Carson of Midland for an interview over Zoom about the creation of the record.Â
Hi Jess, it’s good to speak to you today. How are you? Are you getting excited for the UK tour after all the forced cancellations.
Well, it did get a little to the point of comedy with with how many times we had to reschedule this tour. Now it’s about time, we very much look forward to the UK tours. When we first started this band it was like, when can we get to the UK? This is really where we wanted to play and this was the first band where any of us got to go over and play. It’s incredible. I mean, it seems like country music has grown so much in the UK.
I think the appetite now given we had two years away from everything is even more hungry than it was before the pandemic. The new album The Last Resort is out on 6th May, what does this project specifically mean to you? It does sound like an evolution in your guys’s sound yet again.
I think we’re always trying to evolve, that’s for sure. Our tastes are generally the same. It’s not like we’re really interested in making some crazy left turn and being a completely different band, I mean, we still want to write the best country songs that we can and record them in a way that’s interesting. Hopefully the the full album tells the story – somebody told us when we released the first half of the album that if you play the songs in a different order then it’s a story about a guy and a girl meeting and then they break up. Hopefully it’s meant to be a thing where you put it on and you listen to every song and you don’t need to skip songs.
I think there’s a lot of interest because you’ve got a lot of different levels on this project. You’ve got two solo writes on the record – is that something that you’ve done a lot more as a product of the pandemic?
We are a vocal group in the truest sense. We enjoy the writing process, so it makes sense for Cameron and I to do a song, I love the writing process – it’s the ultimate chase. You’ve gotta write a lot of bad songs to get a few good ones. It’s almost like gambling, but I love that process, trying to push yourself and trying to figure out a new way to say something and to tell a story.
Do you find certain people, like Shane MacAnally, it’s easier to write hits with or those more hooky songs that might be the singles on the project?
It just varies so much. I think if we lived in Nashville, and we wrote there – like a lot of staff writers do, where they write five days a week, then maybe we would have a more formulaic thing, but you can’t go into it with any expectation. I would say it’s pretty obvious that we’ve written some of our hooky songs with Shane McAnally and Josh, I mean, he’s a monster. He’s a master in his own right, that’s his talent – ‘Drinkin’ Problem’ most notably. One of my favourite songs on this record is the title track with Shane and Josh.
I was gonna ask about that one. It’s got this outlaw feel, I feel like you guys have always stood apart as the outlaws of country, do you find that can be a burden in terms of how you change and how you evolve as a band, because people have personified you as that? Do you just take it as a bit of fun?
I think our approach is a lot different because we don’t live in Nashville. You’ve got to really acknowledge that that’s a pretty major thing to be a country band in the mainstream and not live in Nashville – it’s almost unheard of. Now, you can be someone like Garth Brooks and not live in Nashville, after you’ve established yourself, but almost everybody lives in Nashville. I think it’s maybe easier for us to remain outliers. I guess, you take up probably more sounds and more different things that you can bring in that make you continue to be different, because you’re not taking in the same atmosphere that everyone else is.
We keep going through different eras. I think when we first started, we were actually listening to really old country stuff from the 60s and 70s. Now, I feel like we’re probably most inspired by the 80s and 90s, so it’s almost moving chronologically.
My final question was just about The Last Resort EP last year and now you’ve got the full length project with the songs all cohesively written. Can you talk me through the order of things? Was the project there and then you divided up the songs which you’re going to do for the EP or was it a case of seeing what fans have responded to the most on the EP and building on that for the album?
No, it was really all written in a block of time to be the full album and we just broke it in half, we’re just sitting on for quite a long time.
It’s nice for fans to still be able to get into the nitty gritty of them rather than when sometimes when you release an album songs can get lost.
Hopefully the album is is that kind of album where you want to listen to every song from top to bottom.
I definitely agree, I think there’s a lot in there which is interesting. You’ve got King of Saturday Night that is so different from Sunrise Tells the Story. Thank you Jess for your time today, I’m excited for people to hear the whole project.
