Melbourne three-piece The Vasco Era have released their second studio album, and it’s a true gem. Called Lucille, it maps an unconventional relationship, resulting in a classic concept album the likes of which popular music sadly lacks these days. The Vasco Era’s Ted O’Neil took some time to chat with OUTinPerth about this new work.
For the readers who weren’t familiar with your music, how would you describe it to them? We’ve been described as ‘blusey-rock’, but I don’t think it’d fit. I don’t think this album is that blusey, it’d be more… I don’t know, indie rock I suppose, with a hint of Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan.
What can you tell us about the new album, Lucille? Well, it’s a story of a couple and Lucille is a stripper and it’s just about the sort of emotions and situations that in her occupation Sam and Lucille, as a couple, deal with.
That’s quite an ambitious project to undertake. I mean, most bands these days aren’t creating such strong narratives. Yeah, definitely, definitely. I think with this album we start out just wanting to write songs as a singular sort of story, but the more we were writing and rehearsing the songs, the more we sort of came to see that they worked better as a full narrative. The songs seemed to have a very emotive sort of quality to them while we were writing, so we sort of decided to just make a whole story out of the album.
What made you choose this particular narrative? Well, we spent like 10 months writing and rehearsing- sort of three to five days a week and towards the end of that we were really… our brains were all fried and we were pretty over it, being stuck in a small room for such a long amount of time. So we took a week off and Sid, for about half of that week, just decided to go somewhere completely different to what he usually does. So he went to the casino in Melbourne and got drunk there for a couple of days and was just talking to people there. During that time he met a couple and in talking to them for a couple of hours it came out that she was a stripper and the guy seemed really conservative. And yeah, he talked to them for a few hours then took off and the next couple of days he started thinking about how someone being a stripper, how that’d affect a relationship, and the different emotions and situations it could get both parties into. So the lyrics, he decided to make like a conversation between Sam and Lucille.
What trajectory does their relationship take? Well, Lucille seems to be a very down-trodden sort of person who’s always been told this is what she’s doing, she’s only doing this to get by and that that’s all she can do. Sam’s sort of more… he’s more conservative, he’s got a bit of a religious bent and he wants to save her and get her away from this life and try and show her a better life. So he’s sort of struggling with that as Lucille is sort of getting sucked deeper and deeper into this world. So the last song is… I suppose I probably should let people make up their own minds; it’s very sort of ambivalent as to where they’re heading. But it’s just about that whole Sam trying to save her and her sort of being stuck in it.
Does it sort of reflect that old adage that you shouldn’t change a person that you’re with? Yeah, to a degree, definitely, definitely. It’s sort of got that element to it but it’s also more exploring the raw emotion, like the jealousy and the worry and anxiety and hurt that it can cause, y’know, that sort of thing? And I suppose the almost addiction that people can get to things. Like Lucille seems to get sort of… she’s stuck doing it and she feels dirty doing it… but while she’s doing it she loves it.
Could that also be reflected in Sam and potentially his addiction to saving her, as well? Yeah, definitely, definitely. There’s a whole gamut of emotion and addiction. It can be a metaphor for any type of addiction, I feel. Sid probably would say something completely different but that’s the way I see it.
What can people expect from listening to the album to then seeing you on tour? How does it translate? When you do the album, are you performing it as a narrative? Uh, no. Not 100% sure, but I doubt we’ll do the entirety for the thing; it’ll be more as a show, because our first album was like a narrative as well. But we’ll be having songs from that, mainly songs from this album but it’s more as a show rather than as a story. It’s a whole different sort of entity.
The Vasco Era will be appearing at Amplifier on Friday April 30 and Mojo’s on Saturday May 1. Lucille is out now through Universal Music.
Scott-Patrick Mitchell
