Sure, picking up an ARIA nomination for your debut album isn’t shabby. Touring the world, amassing legions of fans? Fantastic. But having your album first go gold, then platinum, and then getting a framed plaque to hang on your wall? That is the stuff of dreams. At least, that’s what we expected to hear from The Rubens’ Sam and Elliott Margin.
“Oooh, fans or trophies? That’s a hard one,” laughs Sam, the band’s singer and guitarist. “Good for different reasons. The idea of reaching people, having some kind of effect, is great. Hearing stories about people in tough times being helped out by our music, that’s nice. And yeah, having the plaque to put on the wall is pretty cool, the kind of thing you always hope to be able to do as a musician. But it’s definitely secondary to why we do it. You’ll find when you go into some producer’s studio, they’ve got them still in the plastic wrapping propped against a wall, and that’s always on purpose. Or they’ll have awards sitting on the toilet, that kind of thing. Another Grammy? Oh, just put it wherever.”
Keyboardist and backing vocalist Elliott laughs. “I hung mine straight up. No waiting. Zaac [Margin, guitar] used his to hold a window open for ages. He saw it was the perfect size and wedged it in. Job done! You really hope no-one comes along and steals it now, ’cause it’s just sitting there. Someone would snatch it and he’d be left there crying, ‘Oh no, my breeze!’”
Unsurprisingly, the brothers have some of the most relaxed banter you’re likely to find. Our conversation is peppered with thoughts and anecdotes that start at one side of the table and finish at the other, and while they are quick to poke fun at each other, it is immediately apparent their musical raison d’etre comes from a very serious place.
“I think no matter what the songs already mean to us,” begins Sam, “they can end up meaning much more because of the way fans respond to them. Stories of people saying they walked down the aisle to this song, that they proposed to someone with a certain song, that it helped them through some dark time. Those songs get added meaning. Obviously we haven’t had the chance to see that yet with the new record, but it’s kind of exciting because you just never know.”
“The only new song we’ve been able to road test like that is ‘Cut Me Loose’,” Elliott agrees. “The way we write, it doesn’t happen together. It all comes together in the studio – we make it happen then and record it there. The first time we’ll play it live is when we’re actually rehearsing it for the album. We don’t really know how any song is going to develop, or how an audience is going to respond to something. It’s all guesswork, really. We won’t know until we’re on the road.”
That opportunity is not too far away now. Kicking off from Splendour, The Rubens are touring well into November, and their set is almost guaranteed to evolve with each passing performance. It is a far cry from the frantic, hit-the-ground-running experiences of their first national tour, when their sound was still new and their stagecraft still developing.
“We’re in a much better live position now, since we have two records to choose from,” Sam says. “And we’ve never done rehearsals like this before. Last time we came straight off the back of that record into our first tours, and we probably weren’t that great then. We were still learning. You’d sometimes see in older gigs we’d have too many slower songs and we’d have to work out how to kick that lull. This time, we want to make things move, and this record is more up-tempo. It gives us more options of how we want each set to flow.”
The Rubens’ live performance is not the only facet that has evolved over the years; their songwriting has moved into some dark and striking spaces. Yet contrary to the usual catharsis that encourages such lyrics, the Margin brothers’ own lives are at a far remove.
“Lyrically, I’m super comfortable with darker things because none of it is about me or Elliott,” says Sam. “If I was writing stuff as a way of venting, I think it would be hard. It would be even harder to perform live, because I’d be too emotionally attached. I think if you’re a singer-songwriter, that works best – just being one person there performing. In a band, not so much. But we like the idea of writing fiction. I like starting a song and having no idea what I’m talking about in the first verse, and working out what it’s all about. Getting into that character, which might sound a bit wanky, like method acting.”
“And if the songs are that little bit ambiguous,” Elliott adds, “then people can put whatever meaning they want on it.”
“Like, ‘My Gun’ was a story, right?” Sam explains. “Most people could see that song was basically about being afraid to come out of a relationship, and so, destructive as it is, you keep on with it. But then there’s other songs, especially on this record, where it is more ambiguous, and I think that’s a good thing. You don’t want to be spoon-feeding your lyrics to people.”
Hoops is out Friday August 7 through Ivy League. The Rubens appear at Enmore Theatre, with Saskwatch and Winterbourne, on Saturday October 31. They’re also appearing at Yours & Owls Festival, Wollongong, Friday October 2 – Saturday October 3
