Come On Live Long are a five-piece Dublin band who have spent two EPs bridging the gaps between folk and electronica, with a few massive indie rock sing-along crescendos in the classic Arcade Fire style thrown in for uplifting measure. They release their debut album, Everything Fall, on July 6th, marking a definite step up in quality in just about every way. Rob Ardiff and Daithí “Dots” O’Connor, vocalists and multi-instrumentalists both, are excited for what comes next.
Are you looking forward to getting the album out there finally?
Daithi: We’re at that stage where we can’t listen to any more mixes now, we have to put it out. We’re really looking forward to it, it’s starting to pick up momentum now and it’s going great.
Rob: I don’t like to think about it too hard. I just want it to arrive. We’ve got loads of gigs leading up to it though, so it’s going to be nice to warm up to it rather than having this one launch hanging over your head and you’re thinking about it all the time.
What would be the biggest lesson you’ve learned from going from the EPs to the album?
Rob: The energy and time we put into the mixes was enormous, in comparison to the Mender EP. And the amount of time we put into getting the synth and electronic sounds perfect. Ken, the bass player, he really came to the fore with the writing on this album too. He really was working hard on that. Then Louise as well. Louise really latched onto a couple of tracks and they really worked out, like the ‘Little Ones’ song and a couple of others. We were just more of a band. We were just more harsh too, there was more of a guillotine process. We wrote about 30 or 40 half-songs, then we got 13 of those to go with and we ended up using ten. We had these funk and disco tracks, like, a fucking disco track! It just didn’t fit in.
Do you have ambitions for the album? Is the job done when it’s mixed and mastered or do you worry about what happens when it comes out?
Daithi: No, I don’t think so because it was nothing to start from. We played our first gig in the Shebeen Chic on a Sunday afternoon at a craft fair and there was no one at it. So all this cool stuff happened and I always try to think back to that when there was no one there. If someone writes a review or something like that, that’s great but at the end of the day, you’re only as good as your last gig and you’re only as good as your last rehearsal. That’s how I take it anyway and that keeps you rooted. If you start thinking outside that, you’re getting away from the focus.
Rob: It’d be lovely for someone to come along and say, “We’ll take this and give you hand and get you all the gigs and get you the tours”… I don’t know, I don’t know how it works. All we do is write music and see what happens then. We’re just constantly trying to write and improve the ideas behind the songs and how the songs work.
Daithi: I think we’re at our happiest when its the five of us in a rehearsal room working on a new piece of music. Anything after that is a bonus.
I was reading a review of the Mender EP and there were a lot of other bands mentioned, bands that you sound like. Does that annoy you at all, being compared to other bands?
Daithi: No. On the end of the ‘Mountains’ track, some guy left a comment that said it sounds a bit like Coldplay. I thought, sound! If we sell as many records as Coldplay, I’ll buy him a house, whoever said that. It doesn’t bother me at all. I think it’s just human nature to make a reference, you have to refer back to something to be able to describe it to someone. It’s just how humans communicate I think, not to get too deep or anything! You always need a reference point.
Rob: Especially in the internet age, where there’s just so much. But we’re not trying to sound like anything, we’re just trying to sound like ourselves. That’s what making music is about, isn’t it?
Everything Fall is available now.
