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[ Actualités ] - Posté le 17/08/2008 à 11h59 - [Permalien]

English version:

Joseffeen and I met Rob Sawyer just before his concert in Bordeaux (France).
Here's the interview:

Muzzart : Your first album 'Stuff' was released last year, could you tell us a little about it?

Rob Sawyer : It's a collection of songs I wrote over the last two years. We recorded it ourselves in a house in a town called Geelong which is in Victoria (in Australia), it's about an hour from Melbourne. I was living in the house for six months and the guys I was living with moved out, so we turned the house into a studio. I actually got an arts grant by the government to record the album. I was supposed to spend the money in a studio but we bought all the gear ourselves and we recorded the album in the house. On the album there are other musicians: a drummer and a bass player. On drums is Fab Pertile and on bass is Simo and there's also a saxophone player, Joel, who plays on a track. They're friends. Simo played bass in a punk band and Fab played drums on my first EP.

Muzzart : How exactly did you get this grant?

Rob Sawyer : It's called Victorian Arts Grant and every year, I don't know if they do it any more, they grant out money to art projects. Say, you're an artist and you want to cre    ate an art studio or if you're a musician and want to record an album or you want to do a tour, you just have to write an application and submit what you want to do and what it will cost you and how you're going to use the money. I guess you win it in a way depending on how good your application is. I had a manager at the time, he wrote the application for me and we got the grant.

Muzzart : Where can people buy your cd?

Rob Sawyer : It's not really available through a distribution but you can get it on the internet. You can go to my myspace www.myspace.com/robsawyer or the website you can buy it on is
www.musicplug.net.au, they ship worldwide.... other than that, come to a show!

Muzzart : A lot of people compare you to John Butler and we were wondering what you think about this.

Rob Sawyer : I've been pretty cool with it for a while and I do love what he does, especially his early stuff but I think we are really different in our own ways. I've done some interviews recently and journalists often compare me to John Butler and Xavier Rudd and I'm like 'What about me?'. It's annoying sometimes but it's also good in some ways because people recognize his success and his music.

Muzzart : What are your main influences?

Rob Sawyer : My influences would be reggae, obviously Bob Marley. When I first heard fingerstyle acoustic guitar, it was a guy called Tommy Emmanuel and also Jeff Lang because he 's the master! A mix of that and punk music like Bad Religion and a few Australian punk bands. I try and play music that's based around finger style acoustic guitar and bring in these influences. I'm trying to get the punk influence in there.

Muzzart : What influences you in punk music?

Rob Sawyer : I like that no one gives a shit about anything, you know, 'this is my music and fuck you if you don't like it' (laughing). My bass player plays in a punk band and I recently went to see some bands play but they don't really have the success that I've had because there are so many punk bands and it's a really hard industry but they love what they do, they don't give a shit about who likes it or not. It's a good way of looking at it. And I really like the music when it's really energetic and gets you pumped.

Muzzart : Is this your first tour in France?

Rob Sawyer : No, I toured last year in June for two weeks but I didn't come to Bordeaux. I started in Lille, we went to Montpellier, Thionville, Lyon, Nice and Paris. This time, I'm here for one month and two weeks in Holland. I've also been to London for a couple of shows and I'm gonna come back to France for another couple of weeks of shows.


Muzzart: Have you toured a lot in Australia?

Rob Sawyer : In Oz (Australia), yes, since when I finished school when I was 18 which is three years ago. I've been travelling and touring with different artists and on my own promoting my own shows. Recently, a few months ago, we did our first full band tour and played our own shows all around Australia. It was good fun. We just drove the whole way so it was lots of driving, I think we did like 40 000 kms in two months.

Muzzart : When did you start playing music?

Rob Sawyer : I started playing shows when I was in year 12, that's the last year of school but I started playing guitar when I was 14. When I started playing shows I just played the guitar, just instrumental. About three years ago I started singing. At first I was really nervous and shy but I thought that it would bring my music to the next level, to be on a broader spectrum and to appeal to all ages. Playing fingerstyle acoustic guitar was  only appreciated by an older audience or people who played guitar. If you sing you can create a more diverse style of music that appeals to all generations.

Muzzart : How do you compose your songs? Do you write the lyrics first or the music?

Rob Sawyer : It's a mix of both. I struggle with the lyrics sometimes but it's good to go on trips like this because you meet heaps of people and it's inspiring to go away. I just write down the odd lyrics here and there and I come up with songs like the instrumental parts that might fit a certain song or sometimes they both come at once.

Muzzart : How do you work with your band?

Rob Sawyer : I've only been with the band for the past year so it's based around my music. I write the guitar parts and I let them write their own parts. Sometimes as well I might have a cool drum idea in my head and say 'it's something like this'. But we've written a couple of songs lately.  We've all really had input into the different parts and it's been good.

Muzzart : What are you going to do after the tour?

Rob Sawyer : I'm gonna go back to Australia and I've got a few shows already booked in but lately I've had this idea of riding a bike from Melbourne up to Brisbane which will probably take me about two months (laughing) and I've been trying to figure out how to carry everything. It would be a cool sort of way of doing a tour so we'll see, I don't know.

Muzzart quizz :

Muzzart : What is the definition of a good song to you?

Rob Sawyer : I don't know, maybe a song with a good bass line, not necessarily something that will catch you straight away. There have been some really awesome songs where it's taken me a while to listen to them. First you might hate it but then you listen to it after a while and go 'wow, it's amazing how it's put together'... or... maybe something with a good chord structure, with chords that haven't been used a million times or maybe they have been used a million times but they seem new in a different way.

Muzzart : What's the best show you've ever been to?

Rob Sawyer: It's really hard! I'll have to say one of the best shows I remember was Jeff Lang in Australia at Appollo Bay Music Festival which is in Victoria on the South coast. I hadn't seen him play live in ages and I had been quiet with playing and listening to music for a while and I saw the show and I was like 'wow, this guy's a freak!'. It was just him and a bass player and it was amazing.

Muzzart : What are you listening to at the moment?

Rob Sawyer : I've been listening to Ernest Ranglin before I came, just a couple of weeks ago. He's an old Jamaican dude who plays reggae but it's all instrumental and he plays that jazz guitar and it's really cool. His cd is called 'Below the bass line'. I've been listening to it and trying to figure out some guitar parts...'cause I thought I should learn something.

Muzzart : What's the most shameful band you've been a fan of?

Rob Sawyer: There's probably a really good one... I think I'll have to say when I first started listening to music, not when I first started but I was really young, I don't know how old I was...I had a walkman and I had... what's the band?... 'All that she wants is another baby...' (singing)...

Muzzart : Ace of Base!

Rob Sawyer : Ace of Base! I loved it, it was great! I listened to that over and over!... but I was little...

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