Noah and the Whale channels its on-the-road experiences into Heart of Nowhere

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      To hear Noah and the Whale’s Tom Hobden describe things, there have been immense changes in his life over the course of the past few years—yet not much has changed at all.

      On the life-altering front, the chart-topping band in which he plays fiddle and keyboards has mushroomed into a legitimate heavyweight act at home in Great Britain and a solid folk-rock contender in the rest of the world. The group’s platinum breakout album, 2011’s Last Night on Earth, led to the kind of success that’s both a blessing and a careful-what-you-wish-for curse.

      “It was a very intensive year and a half of touring for Last Night on Earth,” the unfailingly polite and outgoing Englishman notes, on the line from his London home. “We were away for large chunks of time, and that really started to have an effect on us. There were some really crazy weeks, like the one where we did a gig in London, flew out to Australia to do a couple of shows, immediately went to Japan to do the Fuji Rock Festival, and then had to fly to Edmonton in Canada. That was all in the space of about eight days. It was just breakneck, to where you pretty quickly realize that it’s hard to keep that level of touring up.”

      Suggesting that he’s still pretty much the same person he was when he joined the group as a teenager, Hobden is taking a carefree attitude to what lies ahead. The band is getting set to tour North America for its critically lauded latest album, Heart of Nowhere. Forget stressing about a way of life that’s so insane it ended up colouring the creative process for the new songs; the only thing on Hobden’s mind at the moment is chilling with friends. He notes that being a bona fide pop star at home hasn’t led to him hanging with a new crowd.

      “I’ll definitely be hitting the pub later on when we’re done,” he says with a laugh. “Our local is called the Ship pub, in Kennington. It’s really good, not too far from my front door—I live with our drummer, Mike [Michael Petulla], and his girlfriend. Everything is centred around the pub, to where there’s really a community and you see the same people.

      “We’re friends with all the staff to where the other guys in the band have a cover band that plays there all the time,” Hobden continues. “The band is called No Underwear, after a rather amusing encounter we had in San Francisco. We got into a cab last February when we were on tour. The cab driver listened to us talking, looked at our big hair, and obviously figured we were musicians. He asked us what the name of our band was, and we said, ‘Noah and the Whale’. He said, ‘No Underwear? I love you guys.’ That was the start of our rock cover band.”

      On nights when Noah and the Whale isn’t jetting around the planet, the band’s members might be found on-stage at the Ship playing as No Underwear, cranking out songs by the classic-rock likes of Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Rolling Stones. That FM staples such as Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Neil Young (see the tribute “Silver and Gold”) also carry plenty of sway with the band is obvious on the crisply played Heart of Nowhere. Sonically speaking, the album picks up right where Last Night on Earth left off, with Noah and the Whale doing a seemingly effortless job of fusing fiery modern folk with revved-up pop. The quintet seems as comfortable gunning for the crown of modern roots kings Mumford & Sons (check out the barn-burning fiddling on “Heart of Nowhere” and the mournful strings of “Lifetime”) as it does firing up the synths and distortion pedals.

      Where the band mixes things up this time is the lyrical content. On Last Night on Earth, singer-lyricist Charlie Fink wove tales about fictional characters struggling to make sense of the fact that the world never stops changing around them. For Heart of Nowhere, the frontman found inspiration in the experience of spending month after month on the road in a rock band. On paper, that sounds like we’re getting a more polite version of the Mötley Crüe bio The Dirt. But instead, what Fink delivers is a beautifully rendered rumination on how touring is a crazy business, even if you aren’t throwing TVs into swimming pools.

      “It’s one of those things where being in a band is such a privilege,” Hobden says. “Being able to see the world while doing something that you love is amazing. But at the same time, there’s something that’s always in my mind when I’m visiting all these far-flung places. It all seems romantic, but when you do it the way that we’ve done it, it does strip some of the beauty away. I wish my first encounter with Japan had been a month in the beautiful countryside. Instead, most of it was us sitting in the airport.”

      Noah and the Whale’s big accomplishment with Heart of Nowhere, however, is turning that often grinding experience of being on the road into something that doesn’t sound like a bunch of lucky guys complaining about a life every struggling band dreams of leading. In many ways the record is about connections between people, and the way these links sometimes get broken. Songs are littered with little moments that anyone can relate to, even if they aren’t in a platinum-selling band. Take, for example, the drifting-synths number “One More Night”, where Fink sings, “I only left six months ago now, and you’re wearing his ring.”

      “ ‘One More Night’ is about a friend of Charlie getting engaged and married after he’d lost contact with her,” Hobden says. “It was only over the course of about a year. It’s a shock to see how people’s lives at home can change and step up a gear when you are on the road and totally left out of the loop. But this record isn’t about a band feeling sorry for itself out on the road—everyone has heard records like that. The theme is more about coming out of our teen years and into our 20s, when everything is changing, and us not being ready for it.”

      Sometimes, evidently, plenty changes, even when it seems like nothing has changed at all.

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