MY CARAVAN

During the course of last year, Australian music fans were treated to the joys of hearing Oscarlima's songs If You Wanna Be My Friend & Bare Hands. The band were treated to quite an amount of airplay, both by Triple J around the country as well as community radio.

Although it's been a while, the band are gearing up for the release of their new album Desert Caravan, which should see in some more airplay & quite a number of new fans brought into the fold. I recently spoke with Ellroy Falcon, vocalist & guitarist for the band, where we spoke about a number of different subjects, ranging from the new album itself, to airplay & of course, the ever increasing effects the Internet & digital music is having on the music industry in general.

First off, we talked at some length about the state of radio airplay.

"It's always very hard for bands to get airplay. Community radio is always supportive & I guess that's the job of community, to gain some 'grass roots' support for bands of all genres. Triple J is also something like being a community radio station to an extent too I guess, though because they're a national network, they've also got much more reach than community. But then you look at the commercial stations & mostly they just don't seem to care or they're too frightened to play anything that's new or even a little out of the ordinary. We've been a little more fortunate than most, but I don't know what the solution for this is. We're just happy that we're getting the support we've got."

As usual, one of the big questions for any band or artist is where they get their influences from & it was partially answered by Ellroy.

"That's always a hard question to answer, because it always depends on what you're listening t at the time. I listen to many different bands, so do the others in the band, so it's always going to depend on who you ask & I guess it's also going to depend on when you ask them. I think anyone who's been aware of music in general is going to say that they've been influenced by the music their parents listened to when they were growing up as well as what they listened to themselves."

Yet another long conversation ensued when the subject of the Internet came up, where we traversed the now well trodden paths of the effect of downloadable music & a website in general.

"We've gotten some good feedback from the Internet, though there are some problems with setting your music free on there. One of those problems is how you can retain control over your music. What we've done in the past is put samples of our music on in Real Audio, so people can download the music & hear what it sounds like. To give people a bit better quality, I think we'll be trying MP3, but we won't be putting whole songs on there, because you could never make sure you were going to get paid for your work & that's really like our job, so like everyone else, we want to be paid for our work."

Lastly, Ellroy was very firm about what the band want as things progress after the release of this new album.

"There's a lot we want to happen, but of course the most important thing would be that we're at least successful with this album & that it sells well because people like it. We've tried pretty hard to make our music to be about the music itself. We like music ourselves that holds our attention, so we hope people will like our music like that."

Check out Oscarlima's new album Desert Caravan out now through BMG.