A Thousand Horses’ full-length follow-up to their 2016 debut, ‘Southernality’, ‘Broken Heartland’, was released on August 26th. You can read our review of this exceptional album now. Delivering everything that fans have come to love about the band, ‘Broken Heartland’ is rooted in blue-collar charm and southern attitude. It’s the quintessential sound of four road warriors who’ve covered countless miles together and who, at times, even wondered whether there would be a second album.
Forged in the fires of record label departures, pandemics and the fickle nature of both the recording industry and social media, ‘Broken Heartland’ is the sound of a band that endures, through the good times and the bad. We were thrilled to grab 15 minutes of the band’s time from deep in the heart of a recording studio where they were putting the finishing touches to some acoustic versions of these wonderful songs.
Thank you for your time today. It’s great to have the band back and firing on all cylinders with such a great album.
That’s lovely of you to say, thank you very much, that’s awesome.
There must have been times over the past few years when you thought this body of songs would never see the light of day?
(laughing) That crossed our mind a few times, yeah.
In the darkest of times did you ever consider walking away or were you always going to persevere?
I think we always planned on persevering. Life has been so hectic for the band in these past few years, hectic but beautiful at the same time. Life changed and things got more difficult for us real fast in terms of our personal and professional lives but we’ve rode the wave and here we are!
A big chunk of these songs were planned for release in 2020 and the album was going to be called ‘Let the Band Play On’. What Happened?
Well, 2020 for sure didn’t let the band play on! (laughing) Once the pandemic hit and life changed for everybody we needed to figure out what we were going to do with these songs. We decided to change the name of the album and add in three new songs that we’d been working on to freshen the whole thing up a little. We added in ‘Another Mile’, ‘Gone’ and ‘When I Hear Your Name’ which we felt made the album even stronger.
We felt like ‘Let the Band Play On’ was teed up for 2020 and 2020 didn’t happen so we wanted to pivot to something fresher. It was a blessing in disguise because it felt like a new project. It’s hard to sit with something for two years and still feel that rush of excitement and adrenaline that we did back in 2020.
Have you been pleased with the reaction to the album?
Very! Everybody’s been really supportive and really excited about it. It’s been fantastic to see the fans so pumped about the album because they’ve been waiting a long time to hear these songs. We didn’t wait this long by choice, I can tell you that! (laughing)
On your own label and masters of your own destiny as well. Tell me a little about your record label, Highway Sound.
Highway Sound we created just for us, as a band. We wanted a way to distribute our own music and do things on our terms. We wrote a song called ‘Highway Sound’, it’s a newer song that hasn’t come out yet, but we made that the name of the label. It’s just the four of us, it’s our little thing.
We decided this would be the fastest way to get the music to the fans because we’re the only concern that this label has! (laughing) There’s no red tape and no waiting around.
Has there been some adjustment to the fact that you guys are now businessmen as well as creatives?
I guess, in a way, we’ve always kept our eyes on the business side of things, you kind of have to in this industry. We still have a great team around us. We still have our management and our business manager and booking agents, you know?
It’s the same basic team but we are now on a different label, which is basically our own now!
There are conversations about what we spend money on now and which projects and ideas are worth investing in, which would be things that traditionally the label would do but it’s been kinda fun to do that and play that side of things.
So, I guess the next step, a few years down the line, now you have a record label, is a bar on Broadway!
(laughing) Yeah! Totally! Now you are talking! It won’t be a rooftop thing, we are going to go three floors underground! It would have to be called ‘The Stables’, right? (laughing)
How would you say you guys have changed as musicians and writers since the release of ‘Southernality’?
Oh man. We’ve definitely matured. We’ve been on the road since ‘Southernality’ came out and that changes you. We’ve also learned more as we’ve gone along this journey in terms of who we are and what we are.
We’re in a place now were we are ready to grow and push and try new things musically. We weren’t in that space on ‘Southernality’ but why would we have been? We’ve honed out craft and that journey never ends.
Because a large chunk of ‘Broken Heartland’ has been ready to go for a few years now is it safe to assume albums three, four and five are also in the can or at least in your thoughts? (laughing)
We have a lot of songs right now, yeah! (laughing) Because it took so long to get this album out to people, we want to make up for lost time now. We want to turn on the faucet of new music and never turn it off again!
We have a lot of songs ready to go for the next record and the record after that too! We’ll continue to write and play and put out as much stuff as possible.
The title track of ‘Broken Heartland’ is one of the most cinematic songs I’ve heard in a long time. There are so many great lines and images in that song. My favourite is ‘every restaurant has tables for one, only.’ Do you guys have a favourite line or image from that song?
Oh man. We like that one a lot too. We also like ‘If you make enough wrong turns, it’s easy to find.’ We also like ‘On the corner of last second chance and never coming back, there’s a fortune teller always selling lonely.’ That’s one of the best lines we’ve ever written.
When we were writing that song we imagined this slightly Tim Burton-esque world, something akin to his film, Big Fish, you know?
The song feels like it should be part of a 20 minute mini movie.
We tried to make one of those, in three minutes! (laughing) That was the idea behind the video, we tried to make the place feel like Broken Heartland. There is a lot of imagery in that song that lends itself to the video format. If we had a bigger budget, we would have made a bigger movie! (laughing) We need to go back and talk to the label about it! (laughing)
I grew up listening to the great hard rock bands of the 80s and I can hear the southern ones like Tesla, the Black Crowes and Georgia Satellites in your music. Who were your musical inspirations when you were growing up?
Some of those. The Black Crowes were a huge influence on this band, collectively, I think. We’ve been compared to Tesla before, we’ve heard that said but we didn’t grow up listening to them. Everybody knows their song, ‘Signs’, right? But beyond that, aside from their song ‘Love Song’ we don’t know a lot about them.
We listened to a lot of Aerosmith, a lot of Rock n Roll, for sure. Classic rock and 90s rock: a lot of that influenced us alongside the Country music elements. Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson and Tim McGraw were big influences which all meld into the A Thousand Horses melting pot because we pull in stuff from all over the place. You’ve also then got to throw in artists like Tom Petty and the Rolling Stones alongside stuff like Metallica. Man, when you get a guitar in middle school you just want to shred, right? So that’s where Metallica came into it!
I love the uncomplicated, straight ahead rock of songs like ‘Don’t Stop’ and ‘Gone’. Both of those songs are going to be great live. Do you have half a mind on your live set when you are putting an album together or does just the best song win?
I think you have to have some thoughts about your live set, for sure. We like to keep some fun stuff in there and make sure there’s some upbeat tracks because one of our favourite things to do is go out and play live shows and be a touring band. It’s somewhere in everybody’s brain when we are putting an album together.
‘Never Liked the Rain’ is possibly my favourite song on the album. Do you guys have a favourite song you recorded in the studio and a favourite you like to play live because it’s not often the same song?
That’s true. Some songs are definitely more ‘studio’ songs, in fact some songs are an absolute pain in the ass to play live! (laughing) ‘Never Liked the Rain’ is one we haven’t busted out live yet because it has got a lot of parts to it. That was definitely crafted in the studio and was changed a lot too from the original demo.
‘Don’t Stop’ strikes us as being a great opening song for a show. We are working on the new set right now and looking forward to playing that one live.
You’re at that point in your career now with two albums and an EP where putting the set list together might mean leaving out some fan favourites. Or are you just going to have to play longer shows? (laughing)
Longer shows!! We’ve been playing the songs from ‘Southernality’ for so long now that it’s fair to say we are excited about playing the new songs, for sure. It’ll need to be a fine balance between what we put into the set, what we take out and how long we have to play.
If it’s a headlining thing, we have a little more room for manoeuvre and can probably go as long as we want. It’ll be fun to sit and craft the setlists once we get our heads out of the studio and out of recording land.
Is that the plan for the rest of the year now? In and out of the studio and shows, shows, shows?
Pretty much, yeah. We’ve got a few shows this year but we are gearing up to stay out on the road a whole bunch in 2023 and planning to make it back overseas as well. We have such great memories of coming over to Europe to play for the fans there. We were literally on the plane in March 2020 heading back over to London when the world shut down so we want to pick up where we left off in 2020.
A Thousand Horses ‘Broken Heartland’ album is out everywhere now.
