Interview: June Of 44 - Debut New Zealand Shows

Journeying our way in March for their first ever Aotearoa headline events, June of 44 are the near-mythical Louisville, Kentucky collective of Fred Erskine (Hoover), Sean Meadows (The Sonora Pine), Jeff Mueller (Rodan, Shipping News) and Doug Scharin (Codeine). Their massively influential oeuvre includes 1995's debut album Engine Takes to the Water, Tropics and Meridians (1996), Four Great Points (1998) and Anahata (1999), after which they went on extended hiatus, reconvening and delighting fans with 2020's long player Revisionist: Adaptations & Future Histories in the Time of Love and Survival.

Te Papaioea's First Move are special guests for Jo44's Te Whanganui-a-Tara headline date at Valhalla, singer / guitarist Harry Lilley (manager and sound engineer for iconic venue The Stomach up until very recently) had an informative chat with Mueller late last year via the magic of Zoom. Read their conversation below and don't miss Jo44's long-awaited debut local shows, also performing at Tāmaki Makaurau's The Mothership with REPAIRS and Swallow The Rat — joined for both dates by Sydney’s A Broken Sail...

June of 44
with special guests A Broken Sail

Tuesday 21st March - Valhalla, Wellington w/ First Move
Wednesday 22nd March - The Mothership, Auckland w/ REPAIRS, Swallow The Rat

Tickets available HERE via UTR

Jeff Mueller: It's been sort of a wacko year for us, honestly, because in 2019, we had a lot of momentum to kind of trudge along. We all have families and things going on, but we were cultivating a bit of a plan for what would happen in 2020 and 2021. Then the pandemic happened. Maybe, you're familiar with the pandemic. But anyway, this past year has been so nuts because we've been so busy with... catching up to a lot of the plans that we had already been trying to put together. Like this trip to Australia and New Zealand that we're embarking on in March next year, it's been since before the pandemic when we started communicating with Anthony. So yeah, we're really excited.

Harry Lilley: When I saw that announcement that you guys were coming down our way... it's pretty rare to get US bands of your kind of ilk all the way down to New Zealand. Even getting them to Australia and then getting them over to New Zealand for a couple of shows is usually quite a big deal. I think too, it's an especially big deal for a lot of us when a band that sort of resonates so strongly with a lot of the musicians here, decides to take the time and come all the way down here.

In all truth, we've been wanting to come there for literally the past 25 years... we were able to make it to Australia once and our flight home laid over in Auckland and I was like, "I want to get to the airport and see some people". This a super positive, really a beautiful opportunity for us to come and see you, and wanting to do it. Literally ask any of us and they'd say the same thing. New Zealand has been on the top of our list.

I've listened to a lot of your older material and was really familiar with it. Then when you guys announced your tour, it sort of led me down the path to find your new album. I sort of started diving into that and I found that really interesting, listening to the old stuff, listening to the new stuff, seeing the change in the feel. There's obviously a time difference between when things were recorded and a difference in the sound of the recordings, you know, and the sort of the modern recording style. But there are some things that kind of seemed to ring true through both, even though there's some quite stark differences.

If you're speaking of the Revisionist record, which is our most recent record, I'm so proud of it. It's not the record that I think we wanted to make, as much as it was the record that we had to make in order to kind of get into a place... We had all of this drive and motivation to get that record into the studio and get it out of the studio and have it made, so that we could sort of progress into a bunch of newer material that we're going to be working on. In a couple of weeks, we're all getting together for a few days to write a bunch of new things and demo some things out. But I'm super happy with the way that record turned out, [it] is sort of a weird Frankenstein of an album... and the time that it came out, like, who puts out a record in August of the pandemic? But we did it, you know, we just had to get this thing up.

As it relates to our earlier music, phase one of June of 44 back in the nineties. Like you mentioned a moment ago, there is a significant amount of time and space in between 1999 and 2018 when we got back together. So clearly we've all gone down different rabbit holes musically and changed things up in our approach — to playing and writing and aesthetics. Everything is sort of evolved. We had separate sort of dissimilar aesthetics to begin with when we first started in 1995, or '94 for that matter, but now we're even more sort of stratified.

But we have this collective want to make music together, I do think there is an urgency. And sort of a fearlessness in some ways to the making of our earlier records that I think that they benefit from, as well as maybe they don't necessarily benefit from. We have a friend named Jay who talks about some of our songs. Like, "I just wish they'd played this live like five times before they recorded it in the studio. I wish they knew the song". Because in some instances, we could barely kind of get through the song, maybe not even with an ounce of confidence, but we could get through the song enough to record it when we made some of those records. Now I think [we're] a little bit more prickly and particular about that sort of stuff.

Yeah, really interesting you say that though. Because when I listen to those records, part of what I love about them so much is how genuine they feel. There's sort of another aspect to it, which I think comes down to the way that they were recorded as well, that really puts you in the space with you guys and you can feel things being stretched and pulled, and you can feel the acoustics of the space as well. That's something that's really made quite an impact as a listener, even when I've first picked them up years after they were made. When I was first getting into them and a lot of other people I know as well, it's something that really stands out about them. I was going to ask you whether that was something that was intentional or not.

I think we all collectively thought that the music benefited from keeping mistakes or keeping things raw. The integrity of the song benefited from not going back and fixing mistakes, or making all the notes perfect, or the way we sang and all those sort of things. Keeping things as authentic and un-messed with as possible. I listened to some of those records now, I hadn't listened to them in ages. it was interesting. It was an interesting exercise to have to listen to some of that music again, just to sort of get some of those songs back, in order to be able to know my parts, to be able to figure out how to play them again. Some of the things — I appreciate what you're saying — but there are some things I wish we'd done better... I wish we'd fixed stuff.

But I feel like that's inherent to being a musician, though, right? Like, anytime you put something down as a record… you're going to have that. No matter how it's received by everyone else. 

I think that's true for sure… but at the end of the day, I think we all are well aware that there's no such thing as perfect and what might be, like 100% for one of us may completely fall apart and disintegrate in the hands of the other 75% of us in the same boat. And also, I think music is proprietary. Like anything, I think it sort of sits in the ears and the mind of the person that's listening to it, and they make it. You know, I would never want to say… one record of ours is better than the other because… everyone has a different opinion about things. I think that it's important that once you as a musician, I think, and as an artist or anybody who expresses themselves in a way, I think — there's part of what we do that's in pursuit of finding an audience.

Making music is in pursuit of finding an audience. So the most important thing is making something that has purpose. It's sort of a responsibility, to make something that has use rather than just putting out like emptiness. And once you give something away like that, once you make something and you release it for anyone to sort of grab on to and to hold, I think it's a responsibility also to let them own it without trying to say one thing's better. Let it be what it is to whoever it is that's perceiving it.

Yeah, that sounds incredibly zen of you to just let it go and let it happen. I was wondering, when I listen to June of 44 and I sort of put it in place around a lot of other bands that you guys have been in at the time, and the space and the music that was being made. It's kind of always stood out to me a little bit. I guess what you were saying before about the different influences coming into that space and being combined, that produced something really interesting and unique, even amongst a kind of cohort of bands that you might now identify as being a bit of a movement... I was wondering if there's a way that you yourselves would describe June of 44? It's easy for me to say “you sound like this and this and this” but have you guys ever gone “this is what we sound like”? That might be a terrible question, sorry.

No, it's not at all. When we talk about influences, I don't necessarily think that they necessarily have to be limited to just musicians. I'm influenced by architecture and by writing and by the visual arts and by experiences that I have at the grocery store. Those are things are a confluence of source material for me in terms of what my output is. I need all of that in order to kind of come up with anything that's of any value to me. But I would say "underground music", you know. I'd say, we're not really a rock band and we're not really like — a lot of people identify themselves with a genre called post-rock or math rock. I think we have like bits and pieces of all of those things. But I think that the underbelly of our music, I think we sit with a community of people that I consider to be the music and the alternative world or the underground. If that makes sense.

That’s something that resonates. If I was trying to pick out where to place you guys or if I was thinking about you and the kind of the cohort of musicians and music that I really love, it's all kind of in that underground space and there's like a lineage of that… It's more of an attitude, perhaps, you know?

Yeah. I think we rely heavily on for our music to succeed in a live setting. We rely heavily on ourselves to give the music away as we rely on an audience to sort of receive it. For us… playing to a room with 500 people in it and maybe only ten of them are really paying attention.. and music just kind of goes out and then falls like a lead balloon because there's an energy in the room. Whereas playing to 50 people and every one of them, it's like they're there with us. It's like the success of the music, I think for us has a lot to do with the success of the show, has a lot to do with just how well we're able to connect with the people that come to it.

When you're on tour, have you got a bit of a plan for what kind of material you guys are planning to perform? As you mentioned, you're thinking about writing some new stuff…

That's the hope, you know. We have collectively, we haven't really tried to. We were going to try to write a bunch of new songs when we were in Europe. That was in May. But ahh the COVID got in the way. We had four days scheduled to write and we didn't. We got through one of them before our drummer got the COVID. So we didn't write any music. And then our July trip in Europe was truncated because it just had to be, we didn't have enough time at either end of it to write. But so the hope, as far as what we plan to bring in — we're playing a run of dates and at the end of this month in the United States — and the hope is to have two or three new things to play live this trip. And maybe four or five new things to add to that by the time that we come to Australia and New Zealand. If none of that happens, we certainly have no reservations about just kind of going through our catalogue and playing whatever it is that feels right. Every night, some of those songs are drastically different. You might not even recognise them anymore. So it's just a wash of a bunch of different music.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.