Interviews (235)

• September 2, 2024
• Colleen Johnson
• 132
• 0

It’s been a minute since NYC’s Charly Bliss made their drive around North America in the headlining role, but your chance to catch the band do their thing comes in the form of a Royale gig this Friday night! The band is fresh off the release of their junior album, Forever, and it straight shimmers. It’s sure to be a great rock and roll show, filled with fan favorites from their first two albums but also a definite presence of numbers off their latest. In chatting with frontwoman Eva Hendricks, it’s clear Forever was a labor of love, an album created over years, and distance with Hendricks making an unexpected move to Australia. It didn’t stop the band from doing what they do best though, as they wrote from afar together and still made it a very collaborative process.

You can find my chat below with Eva about their upcoming North American tour, everything Forever, and more! Royale puts its nightclub hat on for Fridays and Saturdays, so this is an early rock gig! Perfect for the millennial in me! Doors are at 6 pm, with opener Raffaella hitting the stage at 7 pm!

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New England Sounds: To start it right off, this is to preview the Boston show. You have been here since the pandemic, but I believe this is the first headlining run since the world came back. Considering the album is so new, and I know you’re living in another country now, I know you’re based in Australia while the rest of the band is in New York. How are the preparations going for this tour starting on Thursday in DC? 

Eva Hendricks: It’s so surreal to be preparing for this tour. It feels like so many years of work and just time have gone into prepping for this album to finally come out. And now that it’s happening, I’m trying to be really present and enjoy all of it because it feels like, honestly, a major life achievement. We worked for five years getting this album out and never loved an album as much as we all love this one. So it feels like this tour is a pure celebration of all that. So, being back in Boston, one of our favorite cities to play, on our first headlining show in years, maybe five or so years. It feels incredible. I cannot wait for these shows. 

NES: And I know you started working in 2020 on Forever, but considering, like I keep saying that it has been four years in the making, we’re in 2024. Maybe when did you tie the ribbon on Forever? How long have you been sitting on the album after all this time, and when did it fully come together? 

Eva: We really stopped working on it, like stopped recording, in November of 2023. And then we were mixing stuff early 2024, but honestly, we started writing in 2019. While Young Enough was coming out, we were starting to write for this album. Songs like “How Do You Do It,” “Last First Kiss,” and “Easy to Love You” were all written much earlier. So it’s bizarre, and even “I Don’t Know Anything” was written way early. 

So, the scope of this record is just so enormous. Maybe Guppy, because people always say, “You take your whole life to write your first album.” But it really feels like this extremely intense period of our lives is now documented, and we can finally close the book a little bit. I always feel like with writing, until the album comes out, the era is ongoing. And then the album comes out, it’s a whole new life era, like what’s going to happen next. 

NES: Then maybe you say many of these songs were written during the last album cycle. But were some of them before you made the move? When it came to the writing process, how did that affect the writing process for this record? 

Eva: Yeah, I didn’t intentionally move to Australia. It happened by accident. It was basically like Sam and his wife were pregnant. Their baby was born in February of 2020. So we just thought we were going to take six weeks off from touring. Which is hilarious now looking at how long it ended up being. But we were like, okay, cool, we’ll take six weeks. That’s plenty of time for Sam to get used to being a new dad. So funny. So I was like, if we’re already taking this break, once his daughter was born, I was like, okay, well, I’ve been dating this guy in Australia. It’s been long distance, so I thought this would be a great opportunity to just go to Australia and get a sense of whether this relationship was for real. Then, the idea was that I would write a lot while I was there, and that was the plan. Then I left on March 3rd, 2020, and by the time I arrived in Australia, everything was happening. I decided to stay, thinking oh, it’s not going to be longer than a month or two or something. Never a year and a half. 

So, yeah, honestly, it affected the record in mostly a very positive way. I think it was just really fun to write from afar. It felt in the beginning, like, how are we going to do this, but overall, I think we were so overwhelmed by being on the road and everything. Having this sort of time to be apart but together while writing this album was a really enjoyable experience. 

NES: The album is only two weeks old, so this will be the first time that many fans will hear these songs. What are the hopes or plans for these sets? Is it going to be mostly focused on Forever, or are you still going to be playing some of the favorites, considering you have that ninety-minute set instead of a forty-minute opening set? 

Eva: I think overall, it’s going to be a mix of songs from Forever and songs from the older albums. It’s such a wonderful thing to have more material because, especially with these longer sets, you can really be judicious about what songs you’re excited about playing. Versus just feeling like, oh, we have to fill the hour. We have to do the songs that all of us are sick of playing or whatever. So yeah, it’s fun to have the new songs. And to be able to experience playing those live for the first time. 

NES: To end it off, the album is so new. This is your first time being able to tour it. Maybe hopes and goals for you and the band within these next few months as this album comes to life and has this album cycle. 

Eva: My goals with this album, at this point, are the same as our goal from the beginning. We have put so much emphasis on trying to enjoy making music again. We were touring so much on Young Enough, and we were on tour like ten, eleven months out of the year. I think we kind of lost sight of what is most important about this band. Which is how much we love each other, and my goals are just that we get to really be present and enjoy these shows. As hard as it was to get this album out, finally being able to sing these songs with people. And have people sing along and know the words, I’m so excited for that and can’t wait to experience that. So that is definitely what I’m most looking forward to.

 

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9/6: Charly Bliss with Raffaella/Royale/Boston, MA

Royale puts on its night club hat Fridays and Saturdays so this one is an early one! Doors are at six pm with opener Raffaella going on at seven pm! You can still find limited tickets here!