The Getaway Plan - Finding Out What Is What

It’s been a year of firsts for The Getaway Plan, they recorded their first album, made their first film clip, and in the New Year, the boys will be playing in Tasmania for the first time as a part of MSFest. Matthew enthuses “It’s going to be amazing! We’ve always wanted to come to Tasmania. I think it’s a beautiful place and it’s going to be great to play somewhere we haven’t really played before.” For The Getaway Plan to get a fresh crowd is really different, “we’ve sort of been pretty much everywhere you can in the last few years and Tasmania is sort of the one place that’s untouched for us. It’s going to be really great to see how people respond to us down there”.

Touring is integral to the success of any band, and for The Getaway Plan it can get “a bit intense sometimes, being away from home so much”. But the boys have a good attitude towards touring. “It kinda comes naturally after time, I mean at first it was a bit weird being away from our families and away from our girlfriends, but everybody kinda just adjusts and before you know it you’re used to the routine and it doesn’t become so much of a hassle [to be away] anymore and that side of it becomes more like a job I guess, it’s not bad.”

The Getaway Plan are about to hit the roads again for the Boomtown Showdown, a showcase of the bands on the Boomtown label – which is more of a family than a record label. “Everyone on the label is great friends and personally, I’m a fan of everyone on the label. It’s such a strong label and every band has something different to offer and musically I absolutely love every artist on the label. On top of that they’re all amazing guys, I can’t think of one person who isn’t a really, really great person and that helps considering we’re going to be on the road with 3 of those bands (The Amity Affliction, In Fiction and Elora Danan) for a month straight.”

While they’re on the road for the Showdown, The Getaway Plan will be showcasing songs from their debut album Other Voices, Other Rooms including the first single ‘Streetlight’, which has been streaming on MySpace since early October and was released on November 3. ‘Streetlight’ was chosen as the first single because it “is kind of a hybrid of the rest of the songs on the album, it gives people a gauge as to what to be prepared for when the album is released. We tried to pick a song that had as many elements of the rest of the album in the one song as possible”. From the rest of the recorded be prepared for “a lot of melody”.

Other Voices, Other Rooms has been an entirely different process than the Hold Conversation EP, “we have definitely started to write our songs based on structure as a whole rather than parts. It’s a completely different story when you’ve got one guitarist because you have to rely on talent as songwriters rather than as instrumentalists, as musicians. I guess when you’re writing with one guitar you have to really focus on it because there’s no hiding, you can’t just hide behind the harmonised guitar part, everything’s really stripped back and bare so it’s more focusing on the song as a whole”. This was also reflected in studio, “None of [the songs] changed a whole lot. We spent a lot of time writing before we went in so we had gone over the structure of the songs time and time again. A lot of the time when you go into the studio and the producer wants to change around the songs it’s because there hasn’t been much time put into the structure. There were a few changes made, but nothing really huge. He was extremely happy with the songs which is quite flattering.” He is American James Paul Wisner, who has produced records for Underoath, As Friends Rust, New Found Glory and The Academy Is (to name just a few).

The boys got in touch with James Paul Wisner after “searching Australia for about a year straight for producers. Pretty much as soon as we finished recording our EP we started looking for a producer for our next album”. They sorted through a large number of Australian producers “but no one was on the same page as us. We had some meetings with some people and it didn’t go badly but we definitely wanted more, so we decided to look overseas”. From there they found a guy in Florida called James Paul Wisner and “he was amazing, like straight off a really great guy, really in touch with what we were doing, absolutely understood everything that we wanted to do and he was on the same page as us 100% and was very keen on working with us as well which was crazy”. Which is how The Getaway Plan found them selves in Florida for the American summer.

But don’t worry; there won’t be a relocation any time soon. “Florida is hot, and the people there are rude. Florida is pretty horrible to be honest, we had a great time recording but as far as Florida goes that was a really, really bad experience.” Ah, there’s no place like home!

After the Boomtown Showdown The Getaway Plan is the national support for My Chemical Romance and Circa Survive. The boys have got a lot of highly sort after support slots in the last few years, and the one that Matthew wants is “Radiohead. I can’t really imagine us fitting that bill, but to be able to play with someone like that, someone with a status like that would be incredible… they’ve always done the unexpected”.

So can we expect a Kid A from The Getaway Plan? “Maybe one day – it could happen.”

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