Nashville based Australian duo Seaforth (Tom Jordan and Mitch Thompson) have had a crazy year. We last saw them over here in the UK in March playing the C2C festival in London. Live shows at CMAFest in Nashville followed and will eventually culminate in their first ever headline tour of their Antipodean homeland in late October, early November. The duo have also been busy in the studio, releasing songs like ‘Good Beer’ and ‘Queen of Daytona Beach’ before dropping nine track album, ‘What I Get For Loving You’ on August 26th. We caught up with them at the Long Road festival to talk all about it.
Fantastic to talk to you boys today, thank you for your time. Talking to my friend before this interview we were riffing on the idea that we could spend the whole interview pretending we thought you were from Austria rather than Australia and we’d ask you questions about skiing, rostis and Hitler!
(laughing) We are obviously proficient skiers based on where we come from! (laughing)
It looks like you are having an absolute blast of a year. Is it passing in a blur or are you getting time to enjoy it and take it in?
Mitch: Sometimes it does but I feel like that’s when you have to take a second, look back on things and ask each other ‘What did we just do? How cool was that?’ This has been what we’ve wanted to do for forever and if you only ever focus on the next thing coming along you can’t enjoy your achievements.
Tom: We were meant to be on tour over here with Chris Young right now (Chris cancelled his Long Road festival headline slot and UK tour 2 days before it was due to start), which was obviously devastating so not everything always works out the way you were expecting it too but we’ve managed to sort out some solutions and some extra shows. We’re here at this beautiful festival today which is so cool….
It’s like you’re playing a show at Downton Abbey or at Bridgerton! (The Long Road festival is held in the grounds of Stanford Hall which is a beautiful English stately home)
Mitch: Bridgerton!!! Yes, that’s what I was trying to remember earlier, it is like playing at Bridgerton, that’s been bugging me all day! (laughing)
Which of the two of you gets the most excited about the things you are achieving and who is the level-headed one?
Mitch: Both of us get pretty excited about stuff….
Tom: Yeah….
Mitch: He (meaning Tom) can sometimes get pretty emotional about some of the stuff we do. We played a show the other day and I could tell he was getting emotional…….maybe it’s me that has the problem and I’m the unemotional one…..that’s something for the therapist, right?
Tom: We’ve both been through the ringer in different ways, even going back to us originally being booked to play the C2C festival in 2020 and it being cancelled because of the pandemic at the last minute, I actually did go to therapy because of that because it would have been a huge moment in our careers.
Mitch: We’ve had a lot of ups and downs over the years but we’ve supported each other through it all and learned to lean on each other through the good and bad times. We’ve had an amazing year this year and with the new music coming out it feels like our career is going on the right trajectory right now.
Your year started off working with Jordan Davis on ‘Good Beer’. How did that come about and what was he like to work with?
Tom: Before we met him we had always loved Jordan’s music and always said to ourselves that he would be a great tour partner for us. We got that offer one day and that was incredible. The shows with him were great, right at that post-pandemic time where we needed to play shows again but no-one knew what it was going to be like.
We had ‘Good Beer’ recorded without him, it was done and we were going to put it out and then we decided that we needed someone better than me to record the vocals……
Mitch: (laughing) We definitely needed someone to replace Tom’s vocals, for sure!
Who’s idea was the gold-themed cover for the song, that made me laugh when I first saw it?
Mitch: Dude! (laughing) We had a few ideas for the video and cover and one of the potential directors sent that idea through and we loved it.
Tom: We were already kinda leaning in that way to begin with, not necessarily golf but we wanted it to be fun and we loved the whole ‘Caddyshack’ treatment that we went with.
Mitch: I mean, we are obviously crazy fit athletes so it was so easy for us to slide into that golf world! (laughing)
All Austrian’s are top level sportsmen, right?
Mitch: Exactly, mate, exactly! (laughing)
Sean Kingston comes next, with the collaboration on ‘Queen of Daytona Beach’. That was left of centre!
Tom: We wrote that song with our buddy Rocky in the middle of the pandemic. It was kinda the first song we wrote after the disappointment of the cancelled C2C festival in London in 2020. We didn’t do anything for months as the whole world shut down and ‘Queen of Daytona Beach’ was the first song we wrote when we started it up all again. We had that reference to ‘beautiful girls’ in the verse and we thought we’d need to change it up because Sean Kingston might sue us or something…..(laughing)…..but the more we listened to it, the more we got attached to it.
One day we just said, ‘Wouldn’t it be crazy if we could get Sean to feature in the song?’ We got in touch with his team, sent him over the song and it just kept moving forward!
Mitch:……..And then we paid him $2 million!!!!!!!!! (laughing)
I was just going to ask if it was a Snoop Dog situation where you pay millions of dollars, he does it in one take and refuses to do any edits or extra takes!!
Tom: It worked out great, we set up a ‘Go Fund Me’ to try and recoup some of the costs back……………….(laughing) He killed it, literally. We got his part back and it was amazing, all these players and parts to it, we loved it. We sent him one text asking if he needed any help with it and he sent back a text saying no and that he’d sort it and that was the only interaction we had with him! (laughing) But, man, he killed it.
The title track to the new album, ‘What I Get For Loving You’ blew my mind. I think it’s your best song yet. Did you feel like you’d got something special when you wrote that?
Mitch and Tom together: Thank you, man!
Mitch: That song started out completely opposite to how it ended up. It started out with Tom making up hip-hop beats and we were going to Post Malone it! We had written the melody and the lyric, ‘What I get for loving you’. That was all we had. We stripped it down onto a piano and the song just began to change.
Tom: I just started playing the chords on the piano and we sang the song and we were like, ‘shit man, this really lives in this realm much better than where it was.’ From a songwriter’s standpoint, that song is one of the ones I’m most proud of.
Does that go to radio or is it not a ‘radio’ track?
Mitch: If someone wants to take that one to radio, let’s go!!!!! (laughing)
Which of the songs on the album were your favourite to record in the studio?
Mitch: ‘Dr Phil’ is the one that stands out for me in the writing process. We wrote that one with our buddy, Ernest. He got in touch with us before the write and said that something had come up and that he couldn’t make the time anymore. He asked us if we could make an earlier time the same day and we were in the room with him at 8am in the morning!!! (laughing) It was such a fun session – we had never written that early, ever, we brought in a ton of coffee and ‘Dr Phil’ came out of it. We’d written a great song before anyone else in Nashville had even got up! (laughing)
It’s like when you have to go on the Bobby Bones show and sing at 5am in the morning. You’re last appearance on there was great, seems like it is time for another one?
Tom: That whole appearance was so much fun. I think the label had sent a Christmas card and I think it was Eddie that recognised the similarities in the glasses and the hat! Bobby’s been great to us since, we went out and played BobbyFest with him in Wichita, he’s a legend.
You are finally going back home to Austria (nod nod, wink wink) to play for the first time since you left. No wonder the tour is called ‘It’s About Time’.
Mitch: ………and that’s why we called the tour that. We were due to play the same year as when Covid hit so not only did the UK get cancelled but that did too. We’d sold out the Sydney show, we’d never played there before despite the fact that we grew up there, so we were gutted not to be able to go back in 2020. Sydney and Melbourne will be pretty heavy with friends and family coming out to see us this time around. We’ve been out here in Nashville for 8 or so years now and most of our friends and family have never seen us play! They’ve seen us do little acoustic stuff out in Australia but nothing on the scale of what we like to do.
Tom: We’re at a better place than we’ve ever been live-wise too, so the shows back home are going to be so wild, man. We’ll give it our best and hope the Austrian crowds dig it as much as we do! (laughing)
Check out Seaforth’s excellent new nine track album, ‘What I Get for Loving You’ on all platforms right now.
