At the release show for their excellent new album, 'Love Is Not Enough', we caught up with Welsh alternative band Casey to dig a little deeper into the background and conception of the LP.
Happy belated release day for ‘Love Is Not Enough’! How does it feel to finally get that labour of love out there?
TOM: “Relieved! It’s been an extensive process. We’ve had the record finished for about nine months, and it’s just been back and forward to get it sorted. It’s nice to finally have it out and to have such a positive response to it, which is great.”
LIAM: “Just to see people’s reactions to something we’ve been sitting on for so long…it’s a relief. I mean, we were expecting a mix of positive and negative reactions, but it’s all been positive so far.”
When listening to the album, it’s almost tiring and draining to listen to, in terms that it’s an emotionally heavy album, it makes you sit back and think about your own dealings with mental health, love, and other things. So, in that regard, was it a difficult album to write and record?
TOM: “Yeah, to an extent. We did all the recording ourselves. We rented out a studio and did all the drums, piano, and some other pieces, and then we rented a much smaller studio to do everything else. We were around each other a lot, so it was definitely a learning curve doing it that way, by being in each other’s space all the time. We also had high expectations of each other that we hadn’t had before.
“Everything I had written for [Love Is Not Enough] was written over… it wasn’t as if I’d gone away for a weekend and poured everything out, before coming back again the next weekend and recorded everything in one go. So, in a way, it was nicely spaced. It’s more draining live than anything – there are certain songs that we play and I think “I’m not in that frame of mind”. All the things that I’ve written are photographs of certain periods in my life, and I’m not necessarily going to be in the same mind-set singing them today that I was when I wrote it, when I felt it.”
Why the title ‘Love Is Not Enough’? What does it mean to you?
TOM: “The record comes from a few different places. Obviously, there’s the love between two partners; but there’s also a song in there about my brother, who’s severely handicapped, so it’s about the idea that my love is not enough to repay the debt of gratitude I have to him. There’s a song about my parents and how they’ve dealt with coming to terms with mental illness – they’ve never had an experience of it and they tend to stay away from the subject. Whilst I know that they’re completely respectful of it and they try to understand, they never have any meaningful discussions about it because they…intellectually naïve, I suppose. It again goes back to the idea that their love is not enough to make amends for things that they can’t help.
“It’s an all-encompassing subject and discusses the idea that love may not always be enough – obviously there are circumstances where it will be, but my experience of relationships falls onto two different levels: one is that love is solely apart of something much bigger and that alone can be detrimental in some situations, because you can love someone but hate them at the same time but because you love them, you try and stay around them for a long period of time and that’s when it starts to deteriorate. I do try and keep this [album] ambiguous, even right down to the artwork – it’s based on a sketch my friend Sophie did and one of the things I liked about it is that it’s quite neutral in terms of gender and identity. A lot of people look at it and think, “Oh, it’s a man and a woman kissing” but, more so to me, it’s of me and my brother.”
Is there a certain track that really speaks to you?
LIAM: “‘Doubt’ is the track that stands out the most for me; it speaks volumes to me. I think that, musically, it’s completely different and…I always say that I can’t relate to the songs as much as Tom, or Toby, or Max does. We all take completely different things from each song – so if you were to take a physical emotion away from the music, then ‘Doubt’ is something that I would listen to outside of the band as I like a lot of that style of music.
“I love the contrast between the different styles of music when you listen to the record, so I think that’s why it’s [‘Doubt’] so special to me. Every time that song comes on, be it I’m showing it to my girlfriend, or my parents, or my friends, then that’s the song that I think really sets us apart from a lot of other bands within the genre.”
TOM: “That’s the only song I show to my parents. ‘Doubt’ was the song that was written last and it’s the most recent of those “photographs” that are taken during various different periods of my life, and it’s also the most retrospective of them. It’s the song I currently relate to at the most; it’s about accepting the fact that, recently, I’ve been very selfish in the way that I treat people in my life and, when I listen back to it, it’s an apology to particular people. And like Liam said, it’s a song that I would happily show to other people.”
Your album came out via Hassle Records. How are you finding the Hassle Records experience?
LIAM: “We’ve all been in bands before and, without sounding really cliché, we’ve all been down that path where we’ve been offered contracts, nothing’s come of it, and then we end up losing money…it’s been awful. So we were really hesitant when people started expressing their interest in the band, but then Tom and Toby went to London to speak to the guys at Hassle HQ and everything that we wanted from the project, they were able to get on board with. They were in the exact same mind set as us – it’s very hard to find a label that you click with, so that helped us in deciding that we wanted to work with Hassle Records. They knew exactly what we wanted and there was no “You want this but we want this”, and they’re just very easy to work with and we all have the same end goals.”
What’s next after these release shows and your tour with Being As An Ocean?
TOM: “More touring. We’ve got some stuff lined up for next year which hasn’t been announced yet, so I can’t divulge full details. But we’ve become involved with SJM Concerts – one of the representatives has come on board with us and the team that works with Casey, which is really exciting. Their reach is far beyond anything we could do by ourselves, so we’re working with them. We’re also in discussions to go further afield, so maybe by the end of the year we can go further internationally.
“We’ve already started writing again; this record [Love Is Not Enough] has been so long in the making, it’s now the case that we’re itching to move on and we’ve already started putting ideas together, so we’ll be back in the studio at some point, hopefully by the end of next year or the beginning of 2018. The exciting thing for me is that I’ve never been in a band with this much foresight – everything that I’ve done previously is always along the lines of “What are we going next month?” or “We should be planning for six weeks down the line”, whereas, with Casey, it’s a case of we can plan for what’s going to happen within the next 18 months. It just moves so quickly.”
LIAM: “Like Tom said, I’ve been in bands before but it just seems like, from the get-go, it’s just been so full on, and we need to start prepping a year in advance. When I was in bands before, it would be a case of “Should we play this one-off show next month?” and that’s been our biggest thing. Now, we’re already thinking about locations, studios, engineers…it’s exciting and terrifying.”
‘Love Is Not Enough is available now via Hassle Records, and Casey will be on tour with Being As An Ocean through November, which you can see the dates for below.
NOVEMBER
07 SOUTHAMPTON The Social
08 LEEDS Key Club
09 BIRMINGHAM Rainbow
10 GLASGOW G2
11 MANCHESTER Sound Control
12 LONDON Tufnell Park Dome