The Courtneys have had one hell of an unexpected ride. From casually bashing out an album over the course of a weekend, to finding themselves featured on MTV,Rage, and selling out venues, their trajectory has been enviable, to put it mildly. But drummer and vocalist Jen Twynn Payne is not only equally surprised by their success, she comes across as a ridiculously charming, entertaining person as well. The Courtneys’ tone is upbeat, warm and infectious; a very West Coast sound. Which is only unusual when you realise they hail from the frozen Canadian north.
“To be honest, I have always found it pretty strange that we’re labelled so much as a summer band,” Payne laughs. “People always mistake us as being from California, and I guess we do have a song called ‘90210’, but whatever. I know our songs sound very happy and summery, but I think that one of the words I’ve lyrically reused the most has been ‘winter’. I mean, I talk about snow a lot. So I think it’s fun that sonically we come across as a happy, summer band, but that’s not often the topic of the songs at all. Even when we try and write a ‘sad’ song it ends up sounding like, ‘Oh, the beach! Let’s drive with the top down!’”
Payne laughs again. She is a friendly, colourful conversationalist, whose sentences tend to scatter all over the place like a box of overturned cats. Given her exuberance, the bright and cheerful ’90s tone that infuses The Courtneys’ songs isn’t too surprising. It certainly seems more valid than any overriding fondness or nostalgia for the decade that gave us both Pearl Jam and Captain Planet.
“Musically I think the three of us are all extremely different in a lot of ways, and that the whole ’90s aesthetic is kind of where we cross over. Other bands that are looking back to earlier music, well, I wonder about that myself. I feel like maybe it’s always that way. I feel like when you’re living in a certain time period, it’s hard for you to tell what’s going on. When we look at the ’80s, it has a specific style and a specific sound. “We look at it now and it’s like, yeah, that’s the ’80s. But I feel like when you’re living in it, you can’t tell what is standing out. Maybe it seems like we’re all doing this nostalgia thing, but when I look back at the early 2000s, that has a very specific sound and aesthetic. But when I was in it, I didn’t think that anything was going on at all.”
Shortly The Courtneys will touch down in Australia for their first experience of the Land of Snakes and Sunstroke. Payne can barely believe the road their music has led them down so far, especially when so much of it seems almost divinely arranged.
“Before the album came out [in 2013] we’d be making jokes about things we’d like to do, but it was all very delusional. But now, we’ve started to do all these things! We played this island the other day, and as we were on the ferry going over, our bassist, Sydney, was like, ‘You guys, seriously, if there’s only one more thing that can happen in this band before we die, I really want to make a choreographed dance music video.’ And it’s so ridiculous and so funny, but we’ll totally do something like that now! I just feel like we keep on coming up with more and more ridiculous things that somehow end up happening.”
The Courtneys out now through Bone Soup/Future Popes. Catch them atFrankie’s PizzaonThursday March 5.
