Interview with Alex Örn Númason from The Vintage Caravan
Conducted by Dave Smiles
The Vintage Caravan is a three piece classic rock inspired band from Alftanes, Iceland. After it’s early inception in 2006, the band started taking things seriously in 2009. After self-producing a debut self-titled album in 2011 they built a name for themselves with an awesome live show. Their second album, Voyage, was picked up by Nuclear Blast and re-released in 2014.
With their third album, Arrival, ready to be released the band show their development as song writers and performers with a collection of well-crafted and inspired songs that you’d expect would be from musicians twice the age of these three young guys who make up the band.
Consisting of front-man Óskar Logi Ágústsson on guitars and vocals, Guðjón Reynisson on Drums, and Alex Örn Númason on Bass. This is a band who are passionate about music and what they do. They’re happily putting in the work, writing the songs and playing the shows. If you’re a fan of Classic Rock bands like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Jimi Hendrix, Free and some Prog-Rock as well, but you don’t just want some cheap clones, then this is a band well worth your time.
First up, congratulations on the upcoming release of the new album Voyage. How did it feel when it was all done and ready for release?
Ah, you mean the album Arrival?
Ah, yeah. Arrival - Sorry.
(Laughs) Yeah, I’m feeling really good about it.
How did you guys come to the attention of Nuclear Blast?
That was actually through some journalist that we met who really loved out show at an Icelandic festival and from there on they just spread the word and it got the attention of Nuclear Blast at some point and they just loved it as well so from that point on we just negotiated a deal. It was pretty unreal actually.
What does being signed to Nuclear Blast mean to you guys as a band?
It means a whole lot to us. It gives us an opportunity to do the thing we love like tour. We can tour endlessly. It makes stuff possible for us that wouldn’t have been possible before. It’s really an interesting situation, you know. It’s just fantastic.
Is there a big music scene in Iceland?
Oh yeah, for sure. For sure. Definitely. There’s of course some bigger bands like pop bands like Bjork and Sigur Rós and Of Monsters and Men recently and stuff like that. Back home there’s a great metal scene with heavier stuff like Death Metal and Black Metal and defiantly great rock bands as well. It’s always been booming and it’s doing great things right now.
Some of your influences include sixties and seventies bands like Sabbath, Zeppelin, Stones, and Hendrix. How did you come to discover these bands at such a young age?
Basically it’s always been around us, you know. From the beginning. We come from very musical homes so stuff like that has always been around us. My dad is a huge Frank Zappa and King Crimson fan and Oscar’s father is a big Clapton and Cream fan and stuff like that, and then of course we grew up in the internet age so it’s really all available for us to read about and discover the music on the internet.
Lots of access to everything that came before. – There’s some really cool tempo changes and changes in feel within your songs. Are these planned out during the writing or does it occur more naturally?
It depends on what we think of as natural. I guess we really try to plan out the songs as best we can so they just flow mostly seamlessly. That’s kind of our biggest thing when it comes to writing songs, that the flow is good. There are definitely some parts where we have to sit down and try figure out exactly, but most of it just came out really naturally. You kind of know what comes next.
Is there a lot of room for improvisation when you guys are playing live?
Oh yeah, for sure. For sure. There’s definitely some parts where we just go all out with just jamming and stuff like that and then there’s always a certain part of improvising the parts you’re meant to be playing and that’s just us as players we like to shake things up and keep it interesting. We never want two shows to be exactly the same.
Have any songs morphed out of free form jamming on stage where you’ve come up with ideas you work on later?
Yeah, sometimes we take stuff from the jams and put it in the songs. I don’t know what it is, maybe we just don’t have that good a memory. Most of that stuff just evolves into some jamming and then it’s forgotten.
So what’s been the biggest challenge for you as a musician so far?
That’s a good question, it’s probably when we decided to go touring after the last album came out. It’s kind of impossible to try and tour from Iceland because you have to fly out to every gig. So we decided to move to Denmark and just leave everything behind, just moved to Denmark and stayed there and just toured fill time.
Was it difficult to leave family and friends when you decided to do this?
It wasn’t difficult for me. I know it wasn’t difficult for Oscar as well. Of course there’s always a certain thing like we’re leaving our friends and family and stuff like that behind but this is what we love to do. I didn’t even have to think about it when we were deciding. I really just wanted to go for it.
Follow your music, do what you want. – What was it about bass guitar that interested you in learning how to play it?
It’s actually a funny story. I made the choice between guitar and bass at a very early age and that was because I couldn’t decide so I asked my dad to put two notes, one with guitar written on it and one with bass and mix them up behind his back and then he put one in one knuckle and the other in another knuckle and I just picked random and I chose bass apparently, and right now in hindsight I’m really really happy that I made that choice and didn’t start playing guitar.
Wow, kind of left it to fate. That’s awesome. – Are there any songs on the album, Arrival, that you’re particularly proud of?
For me I’m really proud of how the song Carousel came out. It’s track number nine. I’m really proud of that because I didn’t expect that one to be as good as it was. Recording wise it’s just recorded perfectly for me. And then I think Winter Queen is one of all of our favourite tracks because we got to experiment with a lot of stuff and I’m really happy that we achieve this really epic kind of sound universe with that song. Yeah, I think that those are definitely two of my favourites.
It’s a really good album, mate. I’ve been listening to it most of the day.
Thanks man.
Is there any chance we’ll be seeing you guys down here in Australia any time soon?
Oh yeah, that’s definitely something we look forward to try doing cause we have tours lined up in Europe throughout this year but our next year we really want to check out some other territories and I think Australia is definitely going to be one of the first ones we try to get to so hopefully we’ll be touring in Australia by 2016.
That would be awesome. We’ve got a really big live music scene over here and there’s a lot of bands I think you’d fit in well with so it would be good to have you guys down here.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. I’ve heard a lot about the music scene over there. I’ve been listening to some Death Metal bands from Australia for quite some time like Psycroptic and stuff like that.
Oh ok, cool. – Have you guys ever considered rounding out the band out with an extra guitarist or are you just happy with the three piece?
We’re very happy with the three piece, especially when it comes to travelling actually cause it’s a lot cheaper to travel three people rather than four. But I think, guitar wise, I don’t think we’ll ever need a fourth member that’s a guitar player because Oskar has a big enough sound as it is. I think if there’s one thing we would add, for touring and stuff like that, that would just be a keyboard player. There’s a lot of keyboards on the new album and it’s not really necessary but it would be fun to have some keyboards at our live performances.
Yeah, adds an extra dynamic to it. Were the keyboards on the album performed by one of you guys or did you bring somebody in?
No, we got a friend of ours called Ben Muttons, he’s in a band called Electric Elephant. He’s just a fantastic, virtuosic Hammond player, and all around keyboard player. It was really fun, we just put him in the situation and said ‘just go for it,’ and he just did some amazing stuff.
What would you like to achieve as The Vintage Caravan?
World domination of course. (Laughs) I don’t know, the thing I really want to achieve is for us to just do this as long as we chose to want to do it. We want the band to get bigger and bigger, for sure, just like gradually climbing upwards would be the perfect thing for us, I think personally.
Mate, I wish you all the best with it. Your band is awesome. I look forward to hearing a lot more from you guys.
Thanks man. And thanks for the interview, man.