Grant Lee Buffalo co-founder Grant Lee Phillips says he can’t ever imagine his former band would ever make another album.
Grant Lee Buffalo’s last album ‘Jubilee’ was in 1998 but the band reforms (infrequently) for the occasional tour. The last time they played was in 2015.
“I don’t anticipate another album,” Grant tells Noise11.com. “Opportunities come along for us to get together. Sometimes it is irresistible, sometimes it is difficult to full it off on the level we feel we need. A lot of it comes down to the sheer finances of it. The industry that we were birthed in is very different today. We aren’t with a label. We have to think about it differently to launch a full-scale tour. It is a serious undertaking just for me to go about iot as a solo artist but as a band you become much more reliant on other personnel to pull off a very basic show. It is a hard thing to get off the ground. It is much harder than people realise”.
The break-up in 1998 was a bad time for Grant. “It was a very difficult time,” he says. “There was a lot of time and energy invested in that. We had some years together even before we put that first record out. You ask yourself “what lies next?”. On one hand it seems like the road is wide open but there are certainly days when you feel out on a ledge. You can’t look down or you’ll fall off, like Buster Keaton. I wrote a song about it called ‘Don’t Look Down’. It felt like a very emotional severance”.
Grant Lee Phillips will perform the last of his Australian shows on his current tour in Newcastle and Brisbane.
17 May, 2018, Newcastle, The Wickham Park Hotel
19 May, 2018, Brisbane, Triffid Beer Garden (Afternoon gig)
http://www.grantleephillips.com/concerts
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