Take a look at Royal Baths’ touring schedule and you begin to wonder if they’ve ever spent any time at home.
Guitarist and vocalist Jeremy Cox shares the same notion, openly pondering how long he and his bandmates have been on tour.
“We’re always on the road, it seems,” he sighs from a tour bus that’s snaking its way through the woods north of Baltimore, Maryland. “Actually, when we finish our Australian tour we’ll be flying directly to Italy, where we’ll be for six weeks. After that, I think we’ll probably just go to sleep for a couple of months,” he laughs.
The ceaseless moving about – country-to-country, city-to-city, hotel room-to-hotel room – is part and parcel of supporting the band’s latest release, ‘Better Luck Next Life’, but it makes it harder for Royal Baths to settle into their new home in Brooklyn.
Originally from San Francisco, Cox and Jigmae Baer, the group’s second core member, made the move cross-coast late last year, searching for a larger scene and more receptive audience for their lo-fi, psychedelic garage punk.
“I think we’ll be based there for a while. As home as home gets, New York will be that. When we came to New York it seemed like people really saw what we were doing for the first time, more so than I feel they were in San Francisco. At least, there just seemed, obviously, to be more people in New York and I also think that since we were on a New York label we already had our name out there. San Francisco is a relatively small scene, and if anything people became more interested in us because they saw that we were pursuing this further and have since started flying us back over more and more.
“I’ve met a lot of very friendly people,” Cox says, “and it should be noted that most of the people in the New York scene are transplants themselves: kids from Florida, kids from Chicago, just everywhere, anywhere and everywhere. It’s fast-paced and in a sense could be considered cutthroat, but I think a lot of people come to New York when they have a vision and they know what they want to do, and that’s very exciting.”
Among other things, it would be easy to think that the city had an impact on ‘Better Luck Next Life’, which was released just over a month ago. But this intense new longplayer was recorded in Portland almost a year ago, and was actually recorded back in sunny California.
“That delay was frustrating," Cox says. “We really wanted to get this material out there. We recorded it on two-inch tape, which is very difficult to mix with, so our initial mixes were a complete failure and we had to come in and redo those. It was really a matter of being too broke to pay for anything and waiting a couple of months to see if we could scrape together some money to fix it up and get the sounds that we wanted to out of the recordings that we made. I hate to play the broke artist all the time, but that’s kind of the reality of it, you know?”
Almost as a mark of the delay, the band have already recorded their follow-up record. “That’s true. It’s just in its infancy. We finished recording just before we went on tour, and we’re still mixing that right now. But we’re waiting nervously to see what we can get out of it.”
Cox and the rest of Royal Baths will have to wait a while longer, as they continue on their extended tour. Next up is Australia – their first visit – and Cox is excited.
“Definitely. We’ve heard a lot of good things, and most of the bands that we’ve meet who have been from Australia have been really awesome. As people, they’ve been very, very cool, so I’m really excited. Also, it’ll just be great to get out of the cold of the United States and find some warmth,” he says, laughing.
“But when we play live, we usually like to keep it exciting for our ears and I feel like that comes through. If you’ve been playing the same show over and over and you’ve become bored with it, audiences will be aware of that. So we like to change the set list as much as we can to keep it interesting to our ears. It’s going to be the four of us, absolutely, so you’ll be getting the full show.”
ROYAL BATHS PLAY WOODLAND BAR THURSDAY MARCH 29.
