Lightspeed Champion needs a day off. When we talk, Devonte Hynes, the one man Champion, sounds weary and sick. Fair enough. He’s been working harder than you for the last year—he has practically been on tour for the entire 365 days. This might, on paper, sound like a riot, but until you’ve dealt with that many days of petrol station food and surly sound guys, you won’t know the depressing rigors of touring. These are rigors that Dev is only too open about on his blog.
When we talk, he’s at his parents’ place in London—as any 21 year old ought to be after such a juggernaut: enjoying home comforts, resting up, breathing deep. He’s there for two whole days before the next slog begins. Partway through that restive period, some idiot from Australia calls and asks about his last band, his future plans and other things he’s probably not particularly fussed about at that very moment. The riot continues.
Dev, nevertheless, is obliging and happy to talk. With the release of Falling off the Lavender Bridge early this year, Hynes began—or perhaps re-initiated—his rise to indie-scene consciousness. After an initial stint with the now defunct Test Icicles, Hynes put aside chaotic electro-punk madness and got to work on this solo record. Its popularity and widescreen sound has put an end to some of Dev’s less favourable on-stage moments.
“I’ve been playing with a band,” he says of the recent tour. “They used to make me do stuff on my own, the record company, when they couldn’t pay for the band. But I’ve never in my entire life wanted to play solo.”
So he’s playing with a band of three others, a series of collaborators fading in and out of this ‘group’. We’ll get to see some of their faces down here. “The band’s coming with me,” he says of the imminent Australian tour. “There’ll be four of us, but we all swap around.”
It ought to be a sweet introduction for all involved: “I haven’t been [to Australia] before, but I’m hearing from people that this (Splendour in the Grass) is the festival to play.” With the festival long sold out, it’s his sideline performances that will draw in many latecomers, including all those only recently exposed to his charms via increasing radio play and glowing album reviews.
Lavender Bridge is a suite of swaying, open-wound pop songs, seemingly a long way from the chaotic nuisance-making of Test Icicles. But “some chord progressions,” Hynes tells me, have been kicking around since then. The difference has been in the dressing they received. For Lavender Bridge, Hynes worked with Mike Mogis, a dab hand on many Bright Eyes recordings and a talented musician in his own right. This pairing worked, Hynes says, from the demo stages—when a mutual friend passed the disc on—through to the final product, a nine-month period of gestation. It was Mogis’ twisted attachment to Americana that gives the record its lush, keening usage of pedal steel, slide guitar and on-point bass playing. “Mike warned me that pedal steel would give it that sound,” Dev says of the unexpected Americana flavour, “but I went for it.”
It’s not all Mogis, though. Dev has some innate musical talents, all eyed enviously by others: he plays guitar, bass, piano, drums, cello and even scored many of the other bits recorded by the mini-orchestra for his debut LP. Prodigious and feverish with music, he undertook a challenge to write two songs a day for a year. He’s distributed free online releases stuffed with cover versions nutted out at home in front of his computer. He’s still involved in a range of kaleidoscopic side-projects, varying from one-off gigs to split 7” singles to unreleased recordings. It’s hard to follow all these paths outward from Hynes, so prolific and varied do they seem. As you can imagine, Hynes battles the “quantity versus quality” dilemma regularly. He has “scrapped what would’ve been the second record,” he says. It just didn’t come up to scratch.
There are hints of what happens next, though. As anyone who has watched his American tour videos on MySpace will know, he’s working with a regular soundtrack of Beach Boys and west coast harmony-laden pop. “It’s looking like it will be more percussive and more harmonic,” he tells me. Touring has inevitably stemmed the flow of new material, but Australian audiences might here a flourish or two of these new directions. What’s more, his blog shows him hamming it up on tour, so his spirit survives in the quest to make the most of regular bouts with boredom and obligations. The shows, needless to say, ought to be energetic and cathartic.
Lightspeed Champion - 'Galaxy of the Lost'