Nate from Anberlin was confidently quiet about the new tour “An Evening With Anberlin”.
Images came to mind of stools, glasses of water, spotlights that emphasised the pale nature of the guys. It was all there.
‘We talked about a couch. I hope we can manage that! We’re going to be doing a bunch of stuff we’ve never done before. Songs we’ve never played before. We want to be close and personal, make people part of it.’
Nate explained that hen hoped to pull out a bunch of ‘B-sides’. I was surprised. Had they many?
‘We have a ton of B-sides, actually,’ he intoned. ‘They’re all from the same era. 80’s early nineties. We’re going to be performing a bunch of covers, we’ve never even recorded before. We’ll see.’
Was it going to be the life of Anberlin starting with the teen angsty anthems of lost youth, then moving on to the reflective style of “where has my life gone” of the mid thirties?
‘It’s going to be our lives for sure!’
In 2010 they released ‘Dark Is The Way Light is A Place.’ Nate was sure there would be a number of songs from the album. ‘Blueprints For The Black Market’ will also feature in the play list.
‘Hopefully there will be songs from every release, plus some that you have never heard before.’
I was trying to add up the number of times the boys from Anberlin had been to Australia. I thought five. I was wrong, it was in fact their eighth visit.
‘I have had to add multiple pages to my passport many times. Australia is one place I always enjoy visiting!’
The concept of a couch, Anberlin and their extensive repertoire is a first. The guys are testing running a completely new idea for the world down south. I guess they figure that if it bombs, we’re so far away no-one will notice. I doubted that it would bomb. Nate also doubted the fact. I guess with all the years of performance now, Anberlin would have the patter and the style down to a fine art.‘
‘I’m not sure it would work anywhere else,’ he admits. ‘We’ve always had a connection with Australia, the fans there are so laid back. It wouldn’t work in the States, no one has a long attention span anymore, after an hour people would be getting up and leaving. We never thought of doing this idea anywhere else before we came back to Australia. Australia has welcomed us like no other place on Earth, that’s for sure.’
One of my big questions was: were they going to recite some Dylan Thomas onstage?
Nate was keen for the keyboard player to get up and do it.
‘He came up with the idea, maybe we’ll make him do it.’
I saw it flash before my eyes. He steps up to the microphone.
‘A poem by Dylan Thomas,’ cue massive gasp from the audience.
‘Definitely a black cape,’ suggests Nate. ‘It’s too good to happen.’ He laughs.
I added up. It had been two years since they had finished writing for the last release. Was there a new song or two piling up in Nate’s guitar case?
‘Definitely. After Australia, we tour the States then we take off the rest of the year to write. It should be out sometime in 2012. We won’t be changing our sound. We want to still sound like Anberlin, we don’t want to shock fans. Hopefully we will all be growing together and progressing together.