We chatted to Cameron Duddy of Midland about how the pandemic has affected the band and their dynamic, what the next record is looking like and his excitement to get back to the UK.
Hi Cameron, good to talk to you today. How’re you doing?
Fine thank you, how are you?
Not too bad, thanks. We’ve just got the news that the tour is going to be rescheduled next year, how ready are you finally to get back here?
I can’t wait, I mean leaving the house to get groceries is an exotic adventure at this point. Going across the world to see our friends in the UK and Europe, I can’t even wrap my head around it yet. It’s pretty nuts. We’ve just played what I think will be the prototype blueprint of a show for the beginning of next year in America which was a stadium at less capacity – like 30% capacity – so there was enough space, it was open air, at night. The police were there in force making sure that people kept their masks on and were social distancing, it seemed to work out really well for us. I don’t hold out much hope for the beginning of next year to be COVID free or any vaccination, so that will be where we’re at.
It’ll be nice to finally see your fans in the flesh and see them react to your music.
I can’t imagine coming to the UK – you guys have such a unique and old pub culture, that culture is such a part of the DNA of the country – next September and not being able to go into any pub on the corner. I don’t know if I’d come at that point (laughs). I don’t know, we’ve got a year to figure it out, hopefully 2021 will be better. I’m hopeful.
How have you guys been holding up at this time, being a band is so different to being a solo artist, so have you had time to come together? I can imagine there have been a lot of Zooms.
We actually wrote our whole third album over Zoom. I’m just down the street from Jess but this is how we’re interacting, at first it seemed very odd and we were all very hesitant but human beings are adaptable. A month or two into COVID, you’ll try anything. You have to understand that at this point everyone is just trying to survive, so whatever you can do to get the ball rolling.
I mean I remember the Tiger King cover from the start of COVID, which feels like ten years ago now.
It was a whole exciting thing and then reality hit.
You’ve also been doing your Six Degree radio series with Apple Music, has that been a really fun project, just getting the chance to talk to each other.
That’s like the best part of our week, co-writing and songwriting is fun and it’s exhilarating but it also takes way more effort to do over Zoom so you have to be really focussed. The radio show though that we’ve been doing for Apple Music Country has been a little light in our lives, we get to explore the DNA of music and how everything touches in this interconnected web, with artists and songs and songwriters. The trick is to start in one place, so episode one, track one started somewhere and we’ve drawn a line from that first song now through to episode eleven. You can keep going, everything touches and it’s fun, it’s a challenge and it’s also a way for us to be armchair musical historians and often times you’re doing research.
You get to find out some random trivia that you can use the next time you’re over for a pub quiz in the UK!
Exactly! Well look we pretend to know everything but Google is just a Google away.
You’ve said that the third record has been written now, do you know what it’s going to look like? I guess the pandemic will have changed your songwriting, but a lot has changed in all your personal lives since the last record and has that been reflected in the songs that you’re writing?
Yeah, I think probably, more than anything creating music or painting – which I’ve been doing a lot of – or screenwriting, it’s all an attempt to occupy your mind and express yourself, life is what happens when you’re living. If you’re taking stock of things that are happening while you’re in motion, taking stock and cataloguing those things is just generally fodder for the fire and it has fuelled some of the songs that we’re writing. Look no further than the second album, you could see exactly what was happening in Midland at the time, mostly the songs were about being on the road and unrequited love and things like that. This third album will likely be less about being on the road and it will be more pensive, but also fun. Really, all we want to do at the moment is have fun.
You’ve got to look for those moments of joy amongst everything that’s happening.
That’s the way to survive, this album is going to be maybe more carefree, with shades of seriousness and truth. It’s just a continuation of what we’ve done. In a lot of ways we were able to get back to the DNA of the band, the road can really stress your relationships with everybody, your band, your family.
It was a time to sit back and reflect then and look at how much you guys have achieved in the last few years?
They say that familiarity breeds contempt, when you live next to somebody on a bus for most of the year anything that they do can annoy you, forget that we were young men once with nothing but our dreams and our friendship. Coming out of warped speed will cause you to reflect. I will say hat all three of us have had a chance to really get back in touch with each other and our friendship and our wives and our children.
That’s such a cool thing to look at and see what this time has given you.
Yeah, look it’s been a hundred years since the last pandemic and that means that there’s really only a few people that were alive back then, likely zero people who can remember what it was like back in 1918, with the Spanish influenza. This is the first generation that will have a recorded history of what it was like to stay at home and get in touch with ourselves and our loved ones, maybe that will be good thing, maybe we will have some sort of spiritually or emotionally enlightened, vulnerable and positive forced family fun.
Do you think there will be many things coming out of Midland before the end of the year?
It’s hard to say, we’re looking at a release plan for a collection of demos that we recorded, before we were even Midland. The three of us had got together out in Sonic Ranch in Texas and recorded a bunch of demos for fun, it was those demos that we used and listened back to and decided that we had something here, after that we formed Midland proper. Those demos have been unearthed and with it the video footage that I took at the time in the studio, we put together a documentary and mixed and mastered those songs as they were cut in all of their looseness and earnestness. We’re hopefully going to release that stuff before the end of the year as a stop gap to the next album which will come out next year.
That’s super exciting! Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today and can’t wait to hopefully see you live in 2021.
Thank you for your time, I’ll do anything at this point to get out of my kitchen, so thank you!
