More than a decade into Vacations, Campbell Burns is finding that growing up doesn’t necessarily mean having everything figured out.
The frontman has entered his 30s, his bandmates are getting married and starting families, and the Newcastle indie favourites have spent much of the past few years scattered across different cities and countries. Instead of settling down, as he once believed people “magically” did at his age, Burns is discovering that everyone is still finding their way.
“I feel as if I’m going through my second coming of age,” he tells Rolling Stone AU/NZ in a new interview. “I’m seeing my friends take different paths with their own lives that are so different to my own, whether that is marriage or starting a family or different careers, moving to different cities across the world, and then I myself [am] doing my own thing.”
That period of change sits at the heart of Vacations’ fourth album, Pursuit of Anything, which arrives tomorrow (October 2nd) via Nettwerk. The follow-up to 2024’s No Place Like Home takes stock of growing older after over a decade together and the changes that have, inevitably, happened over those years – like Burns settling in New York after a stint in Los Angeles, bassist Jake Johnson and drummer Joseph Van Lier getting married – with the latter also welcoming his first child – and guitarist Nate Delizzotti relocating to Melbourne.
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The distance hasn’t pulled the four apart though, Burns insists. If anything, it has made the time they spend together more meaningful. “Being apart is more difficult than coming together,” he says. “Coming together is the fun part. Coming together is like an extended sleepover with my best friends.”
Those changes are woven throughout Pursuit of Anything, an album that came together almost as geographically scattered as the band themselves. Recorded across Los Angeles, New York and Sydney – including sessions at Marrickville’s Golden Retriever – it sees Vacations stretch their familiar guitar-pop sound with strings, horns and their largest cast of session musicians to date.
Interestingly, it’s an album Burns believes the Vacations of 10 years ago simply couldn’t have made. “The younger version of myself and us as a band simply didn’t have the life experience to say what is being said on this record,” he explains. “But then also the camaraderie and friendship that we have developed over all of these years going through so much in life, whether it’s as a band or within our own personal lives.”
Plus, he adds, there’s a confidence he has that comes after four albums and more than a decade spent learning how to make them. “I trust my intuition more, I don’t necessarily overthink as much. You know, you do four albums and after a certain point, you’re like, ‘Yeah, I’m going to put in that string arrangement and we’re going to have horns and this instrument called a flugelhorn, which I had never heard of before I’d done this album,’” he laughs. “‘We’ll figure it out later.’”
That makes itself known throughout the record – Pursuit of Anything feels and sounds more thoughtful and intentional than some of Vacations’ earlier work, and Burns agrees. He describes previous records as occasionally “haphazard” or experimental, whereas this time, every instrument and arrangement is there to serve a particular feeling.
“I just wanted this record to be the best representation of what emotional mood I’m trying to capture. Everything [has been] done with a certain intention because we’re trying to convey a certain mood or atmosphere. It’s very straight, up and down, you know.”
When I ask what music inspired Pursuit of Anything, Burns’ answer is one I find myself hearing often. For much of the writing process, he wasn’t really listening to anything at all. Instead, he says, he was informed by what was happening around him in real life. “Whether it was having a conversation with my parents or seeing my friends get married… Internally, I was like, ‘Oh, I know what I want this to sound like. So I’m just going to go write it,'” he says.
The album’s closing ballad, “Lucky Forever”, was inspired by the weddings of Johnson and Van Lier, for example, while “I See Myself in You” grew from a conversation Burns has with his parents in Sydney before flying back to New York.
Then there’s “Holy Grail”, which looks inward at Vacations itself – specifically, the never-ending cycle of making a record, touring it, then doing it all over again. “That really captures how I feel,” he says. “You could also take that with any kind of passion that you might have in life and kind of wonder, ‘Why am I still doing this? Maybe I could just pivot and do something else,’ which I feel like is a conversation I’ve had with almost everybody over the past year.
“But there’s this reason why I keep coming back to it. And I guess it’s ultimately because I love and care so much about what we do. I play music, that’s what I’m meant to be doing. Sure, I have other hobbies, but I can’t imagine them as full-time careers like music.”
In saying that, Burns wasn’t entirely cut off from outside musical influences. He points to Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On, the Beach Boys, Weyes Blood, and Beach Fossils’ Somersault among the records and artists that helped shape the album’s lush, orchestral leanings. He also says he found inspiration in the most unlikely of places and artists.
“I wouldn’t necessarily get any joy out of listening to things that sounded similar to what I was making during this album process, which helped so much,” Burns explains. He recalls hearing Kerry King play Slayer’s “Raining Blood” at a Melbourne festival a few years ago, as one example. “I was like, ‘This is so sick,’” he says. “The way he was playing the riffs and everything and how loud and aggressive it was and how it made me feel. I was like, ‘This is cool. I’m just having fun and I’m just enjoying it.’”
“Am I ever going to make something like that? Maybe, you know, for my own personal enjoyment. I’m not going to put it out under Vacations. That wouldn’t make any sense. But I think it’s easier than you think to find inspiration from things that aren’t anything like yourself. And I think it’s important to as well. I think you need to be outside of your bubble.
“I still love music, but I love it in a different way now,” he adds.
While Pursuit of Anything will keep Vacations busy for the next little while, Burns has already begun looking beyond it. “As soon as the album was done, I was like, ‘Okay, I just want to write more music,’” he says. “All I want to do is write music.”
So far, that amounts to a growing collection of minute-long ideas for what Burns is already calling the next Vacations album – even if, he jokes, the rest of the band might not be ready to call it that just yet. “I have no idea,” he says of where those ideas will lead. “I just want to keep writing.”
Vacations’ Pursuit of Anything is out tomorrow.
