Active Child

“I put a lot of personal pressure on myself to keep making it bigger and better,” says Grossi. “That was the focus of the album, just to make it much sharper and more professional-sounding, as well as [write] stronger songs. I think some people just stay in the same gear, which is totally fine, but for me, I want to grow as an artist, but also as a live show.”

With relatively humble beginnings as a touring two-piece centred on guitar and harp, Active Child has grown to a full band set-up in the live environment, as well as taken on a more mature approach to songwriting.

“The record is a reflection of the ups and downs of the different relationships I’ve had over the past four years,” says Grossi. “It’s been a couple years since the first record and I wanted to show the different perspectives on love. I think the record has a little bit of everything: more hopeful reflections on the positive sides, and then it gets darker with introspective feelings of regret and guilt. You know, things that have gone wrong.

“It’s a reflection of my growth as a person and an artist and on the subject of love, which is like 90 per cent of my music. It seems to be something to continually come back to. My manager comes to me sometimes and is like, ‘You know, do you ever write anything else?’ and we sort of laugh about it. But I’m not going to force anything out of myself that doesn’t feel natural.”

Considering the subject of love plays such a huge influence on Grossi’s music, the obvious question that arises is whether there were any love stories that inspired Mercy.

“Almost exactly a year ago I went through a rough break-up with my girlfriend, who I’m back together with now,” he says. “We took some time apart and went through a tough period. I did a lot of the album’s songwriting at that time. I was a little bit lost creatively at that point, but it became the inspiration for the album and the artwork. It all came from how much I need music to make sense of my emotions. That was the idea of Mercy; that whoever was giving me that ability to do that, it felt merciful because I’d feel really lost without that.”

With such raw emotional material forming the basis of his work, playing the songs in front of the woman he had written them about was set to be a heart-wrenching experience. Grossi recalls the first time his girlfriend heard the material.

“Well, she was at my first show in San Diego and the last song on the record, ‘Too Late’, is a pretty frank reflection on that whole experience and it was the song we finished with. I could see her in the front row, pretty much gushing, and I lost it too,” he says.

“It was a beautiful moment but also sort of embarrassing, because I had like 300 to 400 people in front of me and I couldn’t get the words out of me. It was one of the moments where I couldn’t physically sing anything, I was just playing the chords on the piano and mouthing the words and trying to get it out.”

Now the album has been released and the tour is underway, Grossi says his focus is on presenting a polished live show. To that end, he has taken a different approach to booking venues, focusing on seated churches and theatres instead of rock bars. In doing so, he’s noticed a change in how fans consume the music.

“It’s been pretty shocking the way that people change their behaviour. Like, a few days ago we played a show in North Carolina in a regular surf rock club and it was loud and people were talking during songs, and drinking and laughing and having a good time, which was fine, but it doesn’t really work well with a lot of the new music. Just the night before we’d played a church in Texas and you could hear a pin drop after every song. There’s definitely a huge change in people’s behaviours.”

Turning the conversation to his day off, Grossi admits he desperately needed the downtime. It may seem unusual, considering Active Child’s tour has just started, but Mercy has required much more jury-rigging for live performance than his previous albums because of its sparse and orchestral production. “I write music and get trapped in it for so long and end up getting a little bit burned out. I really struggled trying to figure out how [the songs] would work in a live setting – for instance, the track called ‘Darling’is pretty sparse,” he says.

“We rehearsed for a solid eight weeks before the tour, and at this point we’ve only played ten shows and we’re all pretty tired of the music because we’ve been playing it for the last two-and-a-half months straight. I think you have to continually raise the bar – that’s how I feel.”