Jason Lytle

US indie rock cult hero Jason Lytle was last here in 2004 with his band Grandaddy, touring behind their shoulda-been-commercial-breakthrough album Sumday. A lot has happened since then: Grandaddy released two more discs, the patchy mini-album Excerpts from the Diary of Todd Zilla and the exhausted-sounding posthumous effort Just Like the Fambly Cat, by which stage Lytle had left Modesto, California for the mountains and forests of rural Montana where he created the low-stakes solo debut Yours Truly, the Commuter in 2009 before forming a part-time semi-supergroup in Admiral Radley (also featuring Grandaddy's skinsman Aaron Burtch) in 2010.

There’s no new album on the horizon, so it’s something of a shock that Lytle is touring at all, much less right now. “I can give you a brief idea of what happened,” he begins. “Basically I have a friend who works for the Fish and Game Department. He saves up money and takes vacations here and there and he was going to Australia, and he had just mentioned that maybe I should come. Then once I mentioned that to my management company of course they were like, ‘Well, you know, maybe we can turn this into something a little bit more.’”

The upshot is a tour that’s more of a working holiday than a rock’n’roll grind. “It’s turned into this pretty good blend of between me sightseeing and camping and whatnot, and also playing the occasional shows,” he chuckles. “The big selling point for me is February in Montana is pretty much the peak of the winter. It's right at that point where you’ve had just enough of being covered in snow and freezing your ass on a 24 hour basis, so I was thinking it would be a great opportunity for me to take a break from the weather as well.”

It’s pretty sweet timing, in terms of the likely weather situation (give or take the odd cyclone). “And I couldn’t think of a better place to do this too. People know how much I like to spend time outdoors, and how much incredible, interesting terrain there is, and how much time it obviously takes to factor in if you are going to see any of it."

Grandaddy's 2004 visit was brief and entirely metropolitan, neither of which are Lytle's ideal situation. "I really like just getting out into the outskirts as soon as I can. It’s for my own sanity. I can handle being in the city for a couple of days and then I start getting a bit frazzled.”

Well, if Australian touring agents can get more artists to come out here for a month and do a one night on/five nights off schedule, that should help revitalise our tourism industry.

“True! It really helped that I was telling myself ‘well, you know, this is kind of a vacation’; it’s not strictly me trying to return home with pockets full of cash,” he adds. “I mean obviously I’m going to do what I can do make a few extra bucks, but I think the fact that I’m placing a high emphasis on seeing the sights and getting the quality version of my visit rather than just, bing! You’re in! Bing! You’re out!” he laughs. “I think it’s that matter of perspective that’s going to save me.”

And what exactly constitutes the Lytle set these days? “At this point I’m totally comfortable playing any songs I’ve written,” he explains. “There’s some of the more familiar Grandaddy songs, songs that I know some of the fans are going to like, and some of the more obscure stuff that maybe we never quite got to do. Some of the stuff doesn’t always translate when you are playing in more of a stripped down fashion like I am and some of its works a lot better.”

So there’s no discomfort with playing Grandaddy material? It seemed like the end of the band was, well, messy…

“I think that the reason it ended like it did was to keep it from ending messily,” he interrupts. “I think it could’ve gotten a lot worse. See, I had seen that we had peaked. It’s funny: our big running joke in the band was that we were this band that was always on the verge of greatness, you know, and we had finally gotten to the point where it was just completely beyond our reach. And it was very instinctive; I just knew.

“Of course it wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t easy but it was what needed to happen. And we are all friends again and we’ve all moved on to our respective careers. I’m super-happy that it happened the way it did."