Midway through their Australian Tour with Sparkadia, Imaginary Cities made their stop in Melbourne, where they played a mini-gig in the Sound Space of RRR Radio. Rusty Matyas, co-founder/ song writer/ all round musician and singer for Imaginary Cities was good enough to allow me to ask him about the makings of his band, their current tour and where they’ll be going from here.
Hello Rusty, how are you finding Melbourne?
Oh beautiful, we got in last night, when it was dark, at about 10 o’clock, we drove in from Sydney. It was really beautiful to look at, all the lights and that bridge on the freeway that looks like you’re going through some kind of space tunnel or something. It was a long drive from Sydney, having crossed Canada around 40 times in my life, it’s quite similar to Canada, the scenery changes every hundred kilometres or so and it changes into something even more beautiful.
I watched your introduction video on YouTube and it seems like you have a really great group of people to be around. It must be a good group of people to be seeing the world with?
It is. I’ve been lucky enough to travel the world for most of my adult life with bands and this probably is the most fun I have ever had. They’re just the nicest people and we all get along very well. Everyone treats each other with total respect and there’s never any fighting which is generally inevitable in a band. We have managed to sort of not go in that direction and we had some really good laughs on the drive yesterday on the way in.
That’s great that you’re in a band where everyone is so comfortable with each other and is just up for a good time.
Well you know what, if you can’t recognise the fact that you’re pretty freaking lucky playing music for a living, and I see a lot of bands where there’s a lot of complaining, and the truth is we have the greatest job in the world so we might as well be happy and enjoy it, and we really do. It’s hard being away from home for so long, pretty much gone for 3 months straight now. We were in Germany right away and you know, I have a significant other that I’m away from but you know, you make it work and I can come home and pay the bills.
Have you been to Australia before or is this your first time?
I’ve been here one other time with a band called The Weakerthans.
I see that you’re about halfway through your Australian tour right about now?
Yeah, we’re just over half way through.
What did you think of Perth and Brisbane?
Well Perth was the first city we flew to after 36 hours of flying and to be honest, I really don’t remember it very well, it was a bit of a daze. But we did spend a couple of days in Brisbane and it was really nice I thought.
How have you found the guys from Sparkadia?
Really great, I mean like, that’s a funny thing too, on any tour when you are just meeting a band for the first time, by the end of the tour, you’re all best friends, and they’re your new favourite band. But at the beginning of the tour, you know, it’s like throwing a group of five cats into a room with a group of other five cats who need to find their territory and smell each others butts for about a week before they’re comfortable with each other. And you know, from there we’ve slowly made our way into becoming really good friends with each other. They’re a great band. I’ve been talking to Alex, their singer and song writer and we’ve been geeking out about song writing, about how I think their songwriting is really great and he’s given me some compliments as well.
I know that you and Marti found each other at a venue called The Cavern in Winnipeg and I was wondering how did you find the other members of the band?
Uhh well that’s kind of the funny thing. We went about it in a bit of a backwards way where Marti and I made the record just the two of us, and we had finished the whole thing, the whole raw production of the record, and then we hand picked musicians to play live and said “here’s the CD, learn your parts”. You know, usually bands write songs together, rehearse and then tour and then go in to the studio. So it was nice that it was just the two of us and so there weren’t too many cooks in the kitchen and we got it done. And then, we got to pick our favourite people from the Winnipeg music scene, which is a great music scene and there’s tonnes of people to choose from and I couldn’t ask to be on tour with greater musicians or better people.
I read that the first song you worked on together, was one that that you wrote for Marti to sing, titled ‘Say You’, and it was put together over one night. How did you find the writing process for the rest of the album?
Pretty much all the songs were done separately (over the period of) one day. Marti and I were just going for fun and when we first stared we were just doing it for fun, and that was with ‘Say You’, the first song we did. It was just like ‘hey, let’s just make a song’, and we made the song and it was great and we said, ‘let’s make another one in a couple of weeks’, and we were just doing it because it was fun and I think you can tell on the record that we weren’t trying to make a Britney Spears record.
It was nothing too commercial. And then Steve, The Weakerthans manager, who I was on tour with at that moment, asked if he could steal those songs off my iPod and then the next day he asked if we wanted some help with management and I said ‘Uhh, okay, I guess. We’re not really a band, we weren’t really planning on doing anything with this,’ and then the next thing I know we’re putting out a record and touring the freaking world!
One thing that I found with the album was that each song really stood up for itself and it felt like there was no filler on the album, it’s a really great collection of songs. When it came to choosing the songs to feature on the album, did you guys have a wide selection that you had to cut down to the eleven songs or was it more of a case that these were the first one’s you put together?
Well we had 13 or 14 and we were just going to put them all on there, but we decided just to make it a shorter record, and we picked our favourite 11. We’ve been writing crazy since then, and you know, we’ve got about another 11 songs that we’re going to be doing in the studio in our winter, and your summer, in January.
When did you realise that everything was really starting to take off for you guys?
It was pretty sudden. We put the band together and played one show in Winnipeg at The Cavern, where we had met, and then we flew to Toronto and played North By North East (NXNE) which is like an industry music festival. From that show, which was our second show, we got a record deal in Canada and we also got signed on with a booking agent, Rob Zifarelli who in my opinion is Canada’s premium booking agent. He books Feist and Arcade Fire and all these really great bands and he asked if we would have him book us too and we were thrilled. And a few months later we started opening for The Pixies, and so it all snowballed pretty quickly.
That must have been a pretty amazing moment, knowing that you were going to be supporting a band like The Pixies?
Yeah, you know, we’re still a bit of a baby band and you know, we’ve been thrust into this. Then again like I said, I’ve been touring for a long time, but for this band, we’re just a new band and we’re being forced to find our footing quickly. It’s helping us put together a better show all the time, instead of just doing it slowly, which is good because I’m not getting any younger.
So where do you think the band will go once this tour is finished?
Well, I got another email from our manager this morning actually, and so right from here we’re going pretty much straight to Germany and then we go straight to the US and we’re on tour with The Pixies again. Then we have Christmas off and we’re going to record our new record and then we go back to Germany and I think there might even be a chance of us coming back to Australia in around May or June.
When it came to writing the album, did you find yourself going back to a constant source of inspiration or was it changing over the course of the writing stage?
Um, you know what, I think our constant inspiration is just to try to be making melodies and sounds that please our own ears and move us in some sort of way when we first hear it. I’d like to think we’re pretty good at knowing when we feel like we’ve got something that other people will like. Our kind of inspiration is just to be doing it because we like making nice songs. We’ve been going about the writing process the same way as with the last record which is either Marti has four bars of a melody, or I have a small core percussion, and we go in and build the songs from the ground up. So we come up with the arrangements, then we add the drums if it needs drums, and well, we let each song think for itself. We don’t know what it is going to sound like until we record one instrument and, it sounds sort of cliche and overly spiritual, but it’s certainly not. We’re not hippies or anything, but we let the song tell us what it needs. And we have fun doing it, which is kind of the whole point.
I guess that’s one thing about you and Marti, from what I’ve read and understand, it’s not like you two were forced into a room together and told to make music; there was a genuine interest in each of your musicianship’s and it was like, ‘we can actually put something fun together’.
That’s it, I mean, we always have fun in the studio, it really is great.
That is great. Well Rusty, that’s about all I have in regards for questions for you. I hope that the rest of the Australian tour and the next 12 months go really well for you.
Thank you very much.
Imaginary Cities’ album, Temporary Resident is out now, click here to grab a copy.