Definitely Coming

A.A. Bondy is sitting on the side of the road in New Mexico. It wasn’t meant to be this way.

Bondy should be touring Europe with The Felice Brothers. But in the early days of December, Ian Felice came down with a painful rash on his face and head. It was soon diagnosed as shingles, and suddenly the tour was off, meaning Bondy spent exactly a week on the other side of the Atlantic. “Yeah. Enough to fucken get jetlagged and spend a lot of money,” he laughs. “It does suck. For everybody … We just got back from Europe and now I’m driving back to California.”

Los Angeles, California is where Bondy calls home these days. For a long time it seemed the Alabama native was as restless as his folk-alternative artistry, living in the Catskills in northern New York State for most of the past half-decade, and then Mississippi for a year. Indeed, it was his love of surfing – and a girl, of course – that took him to California. “I had been dreaming about and talking about moving there for a while, because I wanted to surf. I was on my way. She was just like the…” he pauses, “the catalyst, yeah.”

It’s natural, then, to wonder if the move to California has rubbed off on Bondy’s new record, ‘Believers’.

“It certainly has something to do with it. I don’t know what it is, though. Any time someone goes into Sun Studio or wherever to make a record on the same exact equipment as Elvis used and stuff, they think they’re going to get something along those lines. The way people button their shirts, the way they walk across the floor, the way they talk to each other, the way they smoke their cigarettes: all that stuff ends up on tape. But it’s utterly impossible to recreate the past, so I think it’s interesting that people set out to do that kind of thing. In that way, I think geography would get into the making of the record or into the painting of the picture or into the writing of the book or into the pumping of gas, even. As a human being you’re totally affected by your surroundings, whether you like it or not, and that stuff finds its way into your work.”

What Bondy is sure of is that this, his third solo record, is the first time his work feels like his own. “I do feel like this is my own,” he muses. “And I know exactly where the pieces came from, for the most part, but once they were assembled they became something else. But I feel like the guitar playing is mine and my voice is my own now.

“They’re traditional songs, I think, but I just wanted them to be scored like you would score a film. The songs themselves are like performances and photography and what you saw, but the noise you hear grinding away in the background is actually the score. I remember saying that out loud at a certain point while we were making the record, but before that I had just a vague notion of what I wanted to do. Which I’ve always had but it just seemed like it was the first time I had the will to accomplish it,” Bondy laughs.

Bondy enjoyed adapting ‘Believers’ for the live environment. With his touring party now adding up to four players, the scope has widened considerably to reproduce these songs onstage. There’s plenty of instrument switching, but “it’s worth it”. And Brisbane will witness the fitness when Bondy and his band take over the Powerhouse this Monday night, despite some spurious reports that the tour had been cancelled.

“I am looking forward to it – it’ll be my first time. It sounds like we’re going to be all right because we’re just on the east coast. It’s not like we have to go across the country. We’re basically Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney, so I don’t think we’re going to be subjected to too much toil. I’m just trying to figure out how long I can stay, because I have some folks down there who have offered to take me surfing.”

Of course: the surfing. Still, Bondy’s refreshingly honest about his take on touring in general. “There’s about 12 hours out of the day, including sleep, that I enjoy,” he laughs. “The driving can take a hike, and the sitting on some abandoned couch in a basement in Denver can go get fucked too. I like the playing, I like the arriving, and I like the leaving.”

A.A. BONDY PLAYS THE POWERHOUSE THIS COMING MONDAY, JANUARY 23