August Rush
Formed against a backdrop of intense tragedy We Are Augustines are the Springsteen-sound-alikes you don’t want to slap in the face. Singer Billy McCarthy talks frankly about the family death that inspired the group’s extraordinary debut.
Ed Power, 17 Jan 2012
If Billy McCarthy wasn’t fronting a band right now, he’d probably be sitting in his New York apartment crying his eyes out. “I sustained a heavy blow – I lost my little brother,” says McCarthy, leader of heavily touted Brooklyn rockers We Are Augustines. “Writing has helped me deal with it. There’s been a lot of catharsis.”
In 2009 Billy’s younger sibling James took his own life. He’d suffered bipolar disorder and had spent time in institutions and behind bars. For Billy, his death was a horrible case of history repeating itself. The boys’ mother was a schizophrenic alcoholic who’d put her family in foster care when she could no longer cope. It’s hard to talk with McCarthy about any of this without feeling hopelessly glib.
He takes the tension out of the conversation by bringing the subject up himself. McCarthy isn’t picking at scabs or looking for attention. His brother’s suicide has had a direct bearing on his work. The stand-out track on We Are Augustines’ Springseen-esque debut – the song that forces you to sit up and take notice – is called ‘Book Of James’. It straightforwardly addresses his bereavement. Until the moment he wrote it, McCarthy, who’d previously sang with zeitgeisty mid noughties crew Pela, wasn’t sure he even wanted to be in a band again.
“Honestly dude, if I didn’t have a new record to talk about I’d be at home grieving,” he admits. “This has allowed me to champion my brother – to champion people who don’t have it good and come from a hard place. It has turned it into an empowering thing.”
You are likely sick to the eyeballs of self-proclaimed ‘blue collar’ American bands and their half-assed ‘Born To Run’ pastiches by now. We Are Augustines are different. Even if you’re immune to the charms of chest-beating man-rawk, chances are you’ll find something in their songbook that, if only for a fleeting moment, makes you glad to be alive.
‘Book Of James’ came together on a sojourn in Canada, where McCarthy and former Pela bassist Eric Sanderson had gone to lay down demos with Broken Social Scene producer Dave Newfield. The end of Pela was drawn out and painful and the pair weren’t sure if they needed to go through that kind of shit again.
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