Sun, sadness, tattoos: Why Spacey Jane’s enduring Hottest 100 success matters

For the third year in a row, Spacey Jane have finished in the pointy end of triple j’s Hottest 100 and tied a couple of historic records in the process.

They landed three songs in the Top 10 – an achievement they share with Gang Of Youths (in 2017), Chet Faker (2014) and Powderfinger (2003).

They also scored a total six songs in the 2022 countdown – equalising a record long held by Wolfmother (who managed it back in 2005).

Spacey Jane’s Hottest 100 of 2022 entries

So how did an indie band from Fremantle go from organising local shows and studio time around part-time work and study, to record-breaking national darlings in just six years?

You only need to see the young, adoring crowds at their recent festival run (playing Spilt Milk, Falls Festival, Heaps Good in Adelaide, and Lost Paradise in NSW) singing along to every word for a metric of their popularity. And summer is where Spacey Jane truly thrive.

Sunny songs, sad situations

Spacey Jane’s beloved debut album Sunlight provided a much-needed ray of sunshine when it was released during Australia’s first COVID-impacted winter.

Frontman Caleb Harper’s earnest lyrics and sensitive croon tapped into feelings of frustration and anxiety shared by so many twenty-somethings locked inside and lamenting their youth was being snatched away.

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Released almost exactly two years later, second album Here Comes Everybody felt like a sequel on a bigger budget. It gave Spacey Jane their second #1 album, and sat just behind household names like Taylor Swift and Harry Styles as the third biggest seller of vinyl in Australia last year.

Here Comes Everybody cemented the group’s specialty in penning sad, intimate meditations disguised as welcoming, sun-kissed indie rock anthems. Balmy guitars and honeyed melodies alleviating hefty emotions – orbiting around romance, mental health, financial and climate crisis.

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‘It’s Been A Long Day’ describes that stagnant feeling of being ‘A little unhappy/and severely underpaid/Staring at stop signs/waiting for them to go’. On ‘Yet’, frontman Caleb Harper sings ‘I’ve got to tell my friends how I’m feeling / Let ’em know I’m sad when I see them.’

But reading a dour lyric like ‘Some people make me anxious, man/And you’re just one of them’ or ‘Dripping tears on pillows and an overwhelming sense of ‘f**k this’ is a very different experience to hearing how the bright, breezy backing elevates them.

Songs like ‘Haircut’, ‘Pulling Through’ and ‘Booster Seat’ (voted #2 in the Hottest 100 of 2020) make complex emotional metaphors easy to grasp with honeyed guitars and choruses.

On a deeper level, they express the collective angst and lingering uncertainty shared by many young Australians still struggling after some of the toughest, strangest years of their lives.

‘If you ever feel like laying down when you’re told to stand up, I’ll be the first to roll the bed out, turn the lights out,’ Harper offers on ‘Bothers Me’.

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It’s music that seems to reflect a generational malaise but also solace from it – buoyant yet poignant anthems that make listeners feel seen and heard.

It’s that quality audiences have connected so deeply with, and what sets Spacey Jane apart from Ocean Alley, DMA’S, Lime Cordiale and the other successful Aussie guitar bands they so often share line-ups with.

How Spacey Jane feels about their success

When I speak to Caleb, two weeks before triple j’s Hottest 100, he’s trying to organise a boat party for the big day – a gathering of his nearest and dearest to cruise down the Swan River while enjoying the annual countdown.

“You can get a 150-person boat, which is apparently good for 80 people. It’s not cheap. Or you can get a 50-person but really that’s only enough room for 30,” he says over Zoom. “You’ve got to talk to a boat guy and they’re like ‘this is the real numbers you want to have’.”

His phone is “blowing up” with hire quotes, and it’s a little overwhelming.

“There’s all these options. It’s a fuckin’ head spin.”

The same could be said for Spacey Jane’s ongoing success in the Hottest 100, which has become a bit of funny season for the frontman and his bandmates – guitarist Ashton Hardman-Le Cornu, bassist Peppa Lane and drummer/manager Kieran Lama.

In 2020, they were the underdogs. Their song ‘Booster Seat’ rocketed to #2, kept from the top spot by Glass Animals’ ‘Heat Waves’. “We were super nervous because it felt like a chance [we] could win,” Caleb reflects.

“It was just stressful, it’s like anything that’s a competition and you can’t do anything to control it, you have to twiddle your thumbs.”

“Last year, I remember thinking ‘oh we’re just going to put a record out’. I didn’t think ‘Lots of Nothing’ would go high and then it got to #3.” A confused and delighted Caleb received the news while overseas in Michigan. “It was 4am; I was whispering ‘Oh wow… I’m going back to bed,” he laughs.

“This year it’s come back around in the same way. ‘Oh we have a chance at placing high. I don’t know how high… but it’s still so important.”

“It’s a good indicator of how many people liked your record this year, and who’s listening to it and what does it mean to the general Australian population and triple j listenership. It’s hard to not put a huge amount of weight on it, but at the same time there’s nothing I can do so I’m trying to not think about it.”

Even two weeks out, it’s no secret Spacey Jane were expected to rank high in the poll. After all, both Sunlight and Here Comes Everybody topped the triple j listener Album Poll in their respective years (putting them in the revered company of Tame Impala, Radiohead and Gotye).

“We’re trying to be someone’s favourite band. We’re trying to build a relationship with people so that you come to a show or you buy a record.”

“… And we’re really lucky to have is amazing fans. We put music out, they want to buy it, they want the merch, they come to the shows, they vote in the poll – whatever it might be. I think that’s what we’ve managed to foster and it’s not even on our own.”

“It’s 50% us, 50% the fans, that have managed to build this community.”

It sounds obvious – that’s been the pop music business model since time immemorial. But the proof is in the swarm of votes for not just one but multiple Spacey Jane songs in the 2022 countdown.

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Crafting a connection

In theory, any Spacey Jane song could be someone’s favourite Spacey Jane song. “For me, the best kind of music is something where I can sit inside a song that is meaningful to me,” says Caleb.

“I want people to connect to our songs — not just ‘I really like that melody. That hook’s really great. And it’s going to be my song for the next three weeks’. And once you get sick of the melody you move onto the next one.”

To craft something that lasts, Caleb puts an awful lot of himself into his confessional lyrics. He addresses distant friends, family members, and exes — though he’s learning to figure out how much to expose.

“I’m definitely more conscious of that. On Here Comes Everybody I definitely omitted things and tried to censor stuff a little bit so it felt it was more broad strokes here and there.”

‘Hardlight’ references “real specific moments in the breakdown of a relationship and anyone can hear that in the lyricism. But that’s not what I want to talk about, that’s not what the song is wholly about. And if you try and dig around and find out what actually happened, I’m just not going to say,” he chuckles.

That’s a lesson he learned in the wake of Sunlight – that his personal experiences could be collective as well. His music a prism for fans to project their own meanings and interpretations.

“There’s something that people connect with on a deeper level and it marks a moment in their lives. It marks a certain time or significant event in their life because they can find meaning and draw parallels to their own experience.”

“‘It’s Been A Long Day’ has had a special place for people. That’s the one where I see the tears and feel like crying myself. That song was about a real, serious despair and internal crisis and conflict. I think people feel that.”

Delivered with the mild, melancholy twang of country music, the bittersweet ‘It’s Been A Long Day’ tugs at the heartstrings by slowly wading through the unresolved regrets of a break-up, building to a final expansive chorus that contrasts Caleb declaring ’I’ve got something to say’  while bassist Peppa Lane expresses things left unsaid, ’I really loved you’.

“It was really fun to make that song but also painstaking and we really laboured over so many parts of it.”

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Fevered adoration has been with Spacey Jane since their earliest EPs, both in person and online. Created in January 2019, Facebook fan group Spacey Jane Thrillposting counts over 12,000 members.

“Even when we started out, the age of social media was well and truly underway but there’s definitely more visibility now and more transparency. We continue to become more connected and there are more avenues for bands to be active on social media and engage with fans.”

Spacey acolytes are so dedicated that multiple fans have had Caleb’s handwritten lyrics tattooed on their bodies. It’s nothing short of a “mindblowing”, says Caleb. “I’m very grateful… I think. It’s hard to get a handle on how I feel about that other than ‘how did I end up here!?'”

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The people’s choice

With the trophies and milestones piling up, Caleb says the most significant moments are always those tied closely to their followers.

“Anything that’s people going out of their way to buy our record, go out of their way to vote on something – the triple j Album Poll or Hottest 100 – those things mean so much to us because that’s the voice of our fans,” remarks Caleb.

The band’s exponential success and popularity remains surprising to the frontman – a former struggling Uni student (who was regularly ‘getting fucked up and kicked out’ as he resentfully sings about his 19-year-old self on ‘Not What You Paid For’).

“I think we have this idea of, at some point it’s going to stop – the relevancy or people get disinterested. But it seems like, as long as we keep giving ourselves over to this amazing thing, people just keep reciprocating that.”

Ultimately, there’s nothing else Spacey Jane would rather be doing.

“I can’t remember the first time specifically but when I started realising that people would sing our lyrics back to us at a show, I remember realising: ‘This is what I’m going to do this for.’ To connect with people in this way.

“…That’s enough to make me do this for the rest of my life.”