Set Sail is composed of members from opposite sides of the world and they have traveled almost all of it as well. Their “summer pop” feel will make any day you’re having feel like its disappeared and you were teleported to a vacation on the beach feeling the warm rays of the sun beam down on you. These guys have gone through more than you know. They are talented, genuine, funny, and most of all in it for the right reasons. Listen to the title track of their new EP, Hey!, released back in June here and check out the detailed and fun interview we were honored to have with them below.
Your band is truly different. You’re composed of two American’s and one Australian who started in Sydney and then decided to uproot to Europe to play. What can you tell us about this choice to go to a place none of you were from?
As one of the Americans in the band, when I first moved to Sydney I actually went for an early graduation from high school and then flew out the morning after I graduated. Our singer Brandon was similar, quite a free spirit, same with Josh. For us to decide to go and run around the world for 6 months playing music, well it sounded like a lot of fun at the time. We were quite young, I was 20 and the other lads were 21 so we were old enough to have an idea what to expect but at the same time still had the recklessness of teenagers and few enough back problems to handle crashing on couches and the floor of our tour van for six months straight! We literally arrived at our mate’s house in Paris with 8$ between us, our music gear and our tickets out. It was a crazy adventure.
You have so many different cultural influences because of where you have been. Do you think your music would be different if you had stayed in Sydney, or even if you moved to the US and never went to Europe?
Definitely. A lot of the songs we’re recording for our debut album and that were on the Hey! EP or the acoustic tracks we’ve released to our fans were written all over the world and definitely influenced by the scenery, culture and country we were in at the time. Stockholm, Paris, Auckland, New York, LA, Barcelona – you could say each of them had their ‘own’ song that came out of time spent there.
Many people have certain band’s they listen to only in the summer or only in the winter to get them in a certain mood. Your genre on your Facebook says “Summer Pop.” What would you tell someone who only listens to you only in the summer (because of this) to try and convince them to listen to you in the winter?
Haha, the summer pop thing came up because we haven’t seen a winter in 2 years I think. The Australian summer is the US/European winter so if you’re touring back and forth between hemispheres you end up never needing a winter jacket. I’d say our music so far has been pretty light and carefree – reflective of the age and places we were in when we wrote it – but a lot of the stuff we’re recording now for the album is much more mature and won’t be limited by anything we’ve done in the past musically.
You guys dropped out of college where you were pursuing law and literature degrees. Was it hard to leave that behind?
For me, very. I’m half-Korean and have that side of my family which as anyone who’s mates with an Asian cat would tell you, they’re VERY much into education! I love studying as well but traveling the world and experiencing the massive range of perspectives that gets opened up to you is just as valuable to me as an university degree. We’d love to go back at some point but our main love is playing music and we’re going to live the dream of being able to do it full-time as long as we can.
Your new EP, Hey!, released back in June. What was the most exciting thing that happened in the making of this EP? Any good stories?
Where to start! We recorded it in a tiny room we converted into a studio in a dodgy, low-rent part of Sydney. Besides wondering if you were going to get mugged every time you left the studio at 4am, recording Hey! (the single) was a great experience. We called up all of our mates that were singers and crammed everybody into this tiny space to do the group vocals for it. Sweaty as.
Has the response from the fans been what you expected?
The response has been good, especially overseas. We’re touring right now in Korea and just played their biggest rock festival, Korean fans are insane! Australia was mad fun touring there, we got to go to a lot of the regional areas and smaller cities that we hadn’t played before, little pubs in Tasmania and Queensland on the Sunshine Coast. Lovely times.
If you could pick a track from the EP that sums it up as a whole, which track would you pick and why?
“Hey!”. Hands down. Besides being the most fun to play live, it in a sense sums up the whole last couple years of our lives, from traveling around the world to a shoestring to doing the DIY indie band thing in Australia, living on a budget but still choosing to follow your dreams instead of settle for a ‘normal’ life.
Where do you see yourself going from here? Is a full-length album in the works or will you take this time to tour (maybe in the US)?
That was a very tough choice actually. We were planning to tour the US for the release of Hey! there but looking at this year, we would have had to get in a lot of debt to tour and it would have taken up all the time we have before going back for shows in the Australian summer. It’s been two and a half years, a lot has happened and we’ve been lucky enough to gain a lot of fans, especially in Australia. We don’t want to keep them waiting forever for an album and we’ve got 16 songs waiting to be recorded so we cancelled the US plans and are now spending all nighters demoing in a studio in Korea prepping to record the album!
What would you say has been the most difficult part of your career for you all personally and collectively?
There’s been a lot of highs and lows, definitely. All that people see in your ‘public’ image are the highs, but for every crazy story of playing under the Eiffel Tower or a sellout show in Sydney there’s days and days of eating ramen noodles, long-distance relationships with significant others, seeing your family and friends once a year if you’re lucky, the list could go on. If there was a single hardest time, it would probably be when Brandon got deported from Australia. We had just come back from Europe, done a headline tour around the country and finished a songwriting trip in New Zealand for Hey! There was a lot of momentum building for the band and B getting deported for two months was a massive blow, personally, timing-wise and financially. We had to cancel shows, take cafe jobs, petition the government, fill out forms upon forms, try and work with media to get support for his cause, it was a huge ordeal.
How did you, or do you continue to, overcome these struggles?
You have to appreciate every moment and take it as it comes. Every epic story has it’s failures and defeats as well as it’s great moments. It helps once you realise that it’s not always going to work out and when it does, appreciate it, when it doesn’t, find a way to make it work. Being a group of friends helps as well, to get personal my parent’s divorced while we were in the middle of the Europe-US tour and having the lads around definitely helped. Shit happens. It’s how you deal with it and whether you give up or keep going that matters in the end.
What is the ‘highlight’ of your career so far?
The most memorable moment for me personally was this time when we were playing for the cast and crew of The Great Gatsby on set in Sydney. We were set up on a stage in this massive tent where they were all having lunch. We were sound checking – not heaps of people there- and for some reason I started playing the Titanic theme on my violin as a joke. I didn’t know this, but literally right as I started playing it Leonardo DiCaprio walks in. Our drummer tells me that he walks in, stops, looks over then just shakes his head and walks over to get a lunch tray. The whole tent was laughing under their breath. Beautiful coincidence. Apparently he stayed for half the set and enjoyed it which was very cool of him. Random as but I suppose unintentionally taking the mickey out of DiCaprio would be one of the most memorable moments so far.
What is the one dream the moment at which point either personally or collectively you would be able to say yes I’ve achieved this, I’m living my dreams?
I think it would be when we sold out Oxford Art Factory in Sydney. As a band, we’d travelled around the world and toured around Australia before but to finally sell out that venue in our hometown was one of those moments where you’re like “this is actually happening.” Then you go onstage and start playing and get that rush of blood and adrenaline, there’s nothing better. That’s why you do it.
