The Temper Trap’s story is one of coincidence, hard work, and pure talent. A combination of old-time friends and random relationships, the Melbourne foursome have become one of the biggest buzz bands of this year, in part thanks to the beautifully simple and ambient “Sweet Disposition,” which wound up in Zoey Deschanel’s romantic indie flick, “500 Days Of Summer.” These days, the guys are touring the good ol’ USA and starting work on material for their sophomore effort. I had a chance to chat on the phone with TT drummer Toby Dundas about the band’s start, sound and how their hit song came to be. Check it out.
How’s it going today?
Pretty good, man. We just got into Rochester, New York for our first time here. Just played a bunch of shows in Canada that went really well. So yeah, it’s cool.
How’d you guys meet and start playing together?
Me and Dougy worked together and that’s how we met. He and Johnny had known each other for six or seven years before that. Lorenzo, who wasn’t our original guitarist but joined after a couple of other guys left— me and him had been friends since we were like 12, 13 years old, so we’d known each other for a long time as well. Someone told Dougy that I played drums— he was looking to get something going— so we started playing a few jams. Johnny kinda came in a few weeks later, he didn’t really play bass, but this other dude that was gonna come didn’t show up so he kinda got roped in and taught himself to play the bass. And we just started writing heaps of songs and started to play gigs and after probably ilke a year and a half, our second guitarist moved to Amsterdam and that’s when Lorenzo came into the picture.
Sounds like things just fell into place for you guys.
Yeah, it was quite like that actually.
How did you guys discover your sound? Was it planned or more organic?
Yeah, more organically. I mean when we first started out it was more simple, bluesy rock stuff. None of us were amazing musicians or anything so we were just learning to play our instruments, learning to play together and writing simple songs. We just gradual grew, started adding more layers and then we got a sampler and started being able to run electronic textures in the background. Add a few guitar peddles and suddenly you’re able to make some more interesting guitar sounds. It just kinda grew over time until we arrived where we are now.
How easy was it to implement those new sounds into the band?
It was a gradual process and still something we are coming to grips with. It’s certainly much easier to be a straight-up guitar,bass, drums band. But now that we’ve come to work with this [new] stuff here, you often open yourself up to little problems onstage which can be a bit of a nightmare. It just gives a lot more scope to have more textural stuff and ambiances and sonic landscapes that you can put under the more traditional thing. Hopefully, the record is something that people can listen to more than once and get different stuff each time they listen to it.
Have you gotten set on a sound for the band?
When we were writing [for this album], that’s when we found something that we were really happy with. I think we definitely got to a point where we felt like we had a sound. But we’re also a little bit musically schizophrenic and I thin that while we were happy then, a lot has changed since we wrote that record. As we start to wind down the touring phase and think more about writing album number two, the couple of new songs we’ve written are certainly off in a bit of different direction, so it’ll be interesting to see how, when we really get into the writing process next year for that [album], if it continues down that path or comes back to the sound of the first album.
Do you guys write together?
Musically, it’s all pretty collaborative. Once we’ve got a structure, Dougy will take that off and write the lyrics and the vocal melodies. Johnny wrote some stuff on the first album as well. But musically, someone will come in with an idea and we’ll kinda jam around it and see to what other stuff we can come up with. Yeah, it’s a pretty collaborative process, which is great and I think that kinda leads to the— There’s quite a bit of variety in style on the first album and Dougy’s got a great voice which ties it all together which works well. But it does give us the chance to experiment a bit more in terms of genres and stuff.
I definitely can hear a lot of personalities on the album.
Oh, really? That’s cool.
I know you guys have toured all over, including America. What’s different this time around?
Yeah, it’s going pretty well. We’re getting to play and starting to go to places like Rochester, we played in Mont Claire in New Jersey, we’re going to Detroit this time through. So I guess that means the word is spreading out of the big cities into these smaller places that we’re coming through. I guess that’s the main difference, spreading out into the non-major cities. America is a really diverse country and we really enjoy coming here and traveling through that. Experiencing all the different cultures and food. It’s a fun place to come and spend some time.
What have been some of your favorite places to check out?
We went to Ottawa for the first time and that turned out to be really fun. Put on a really good sold-out show, met some cool people and had a good time on a Sunday night in Ottawa. I’m looking forward to going back to Columbus, that was really good last time we played there. And I don’t know whether to be looking forward to it for fun or just because it can be an interesting place to visit but Detroit. A lot of people have said a lot of different stuff about so I’m kinda intrigued to see what exactly it’s like.
Tell me a little about the creative process behind Sweet Disposition. It won a songwriting award, right?
Yeah, in Australia. Lorenzo just got a delay pedal and was mucking around with some scales and came up with the riff, brought it into our rehearsal studio. Johnny was on his honeymoon at the time, but Dougy and I jammed around with it and came together quite quickly. It’s not a particularly complicated song, so we just kinda got a structure, and Dougy came back the next practice or maybe two practices later and had that vocal idea and melody, and yeah. It came together really quickly, a lot easier than our other songs. When we started playing it live, there was an immediate sense that people liked the song and that it was a nice uptempo number, but we’ve all been really surprised that it’s had so much success. It’s been really cool that’s [the song] has opened up a lot of opportunities for us and allowed us to come tour all around.
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