About this concert
“It’s a rock album. That’s how I hear it, that’s what I was trying to make.”That’s the first surprise from ARIA-winning Bob Evans, the musical alter ego of Jebediah’s Kevin Mitchell for more than 20 years. But it’s not the last as he talks about his new record, the exuberant Tomorrowland.Over five albums, Bob Evans has been the acoustic melody king, the folk/rock alternative whose songs became favourites, then beloved and finally classics. Now, Mitchell says, “I think this is the most electric guitar I’ve played on a Bob record. I pretty much had an electric guitar in my hand for every song.”Not just an electric guitar but a band cutting the record while feeding off their collective energy and putting tracks down in a handful of takes. The result: songs that almost burst out of the speakers as if they’ve been freed from lockdown, like the sunshine jangle of Bad Mood and the punchy Falling with its rolling drums.“That’s what you get from putting a bunch of guys in a room and making a record live,” says a buzzed Mitchell.“Having the band in a room playing together – we did two nights of rehearsals leading up, so everyone was really fresh - there’s an electricity that is conjured. I wanted that to kind of give the songs that extra little something that I can’t do on my own. Fill them with a bit of personality or a bit of character. I think all the songs have a kind of vitality to them.”Another surprise is that Tomorrowland was spawned during one of the worst times for anyone, anywhere: the covid-cursed 2020, a period when initial recording was completed one day after all his gigs were cancelled, and two weeks before Mitchell and everyone else in his home state went into an agonisingly long lockdown.“My reaction coming out of the studio was I felt desperately unlucky. I’m self financing this album, for the first time since the first Bob record, and then this pandemic hit and I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to finish it.”But that mood didn’t last. “The interesting thing now, as I reflect back, is my attitude towards it has gone a complete 180. Now I feel incredibly lucky that I managed to finish this record before shit went down.”Nonetheless, Tomorrowland – whose title reflects Mitchell reassessing the past and looking into an uncertain future - doesn’t hide from difficult subjects. Luxury Car ponders a dystopian future almost here and resisting the voices which try to tell you everything is all right (“because it’s not”) while Concrete Heart jumps right into the way online culture can separate us, harden us and make a phrase like bleeding heart an insult.“It’s actually kind of funny because I see being a bleeding heart as being a badge of honour. How has that become such a bad thing?,” Mitchell asks. “If the opposite of that is a concrete heart, well I don’t want to be that.”Joining him on Concrete Heart is guest vocalist Stella Donnelly, who Mitchell saw at Laneway Festival and knew had to be part of this album. “Because it’s such a fun expression of something that isn’t exactly a fun topic, I wanted to do it as a duet and she was the first person I thought of. She just injects a lot of her personality into it.”Permanently by his side through the recording was the band Mitchell had taken on the road for some years now, establishing the trust and connection that enabled immediate results and spontaneous ideas: Ash Naylor on guitars; Lachlan O’Kane on drums; Richard Bradbeer on bass; and James Fleming on keys.“Not only did I really enjoy the time in the studio with everybody, I really like listening to it,” Mitchell says. “It’s one of the rare albums where it sounds like I hoped it would, or thought it would.”No wonder even dystopian futures can’t keep these new songs from holding some optimism about the world. The future may be as murky as the past, but that’s ok for Kevin Mitchell, and Bob Evans.“Tomorrow is a mysterious island yet to be explored,” he laughs. “And that’s where we are all headed.”
Show More
Find a place to stay
Bandsintown Merch
Circle Hat
$25.0 USD
Live Collage Sweatshirt
$45.0 USD
Rainbow T-Shirt
$30.0 USD
Circle Beanie
$20.0 USD
Live Photos
View All Photos
What fans are saying
Sarah
March 9th 2024
A thoroughly enjoyable evening, with the immensely talented Kevin Mitchell in fine form. The stripped back acoustic set, peppered with plenty of personal stories and witty banter, was an intimate delight. It’s not until you sit through a Bob Evans set that you appreciate what a solid back catalogue there is to draw from. Throw in a crowd pleasing Jebediah song (“Harpoon”, which had the whole place singing along), then a Nirvana cover (“Come as You Are”) and you have one hell of a fun night. Thank you Kevin, hope to see you another time with a full band behind you, not to mention the Jebs (on tour soon?). Shout out to the stunning Georgie Winchester as support, what a delight she is… definitely one to watch.
Mayfield, Australia@Stag & Hunter Hotel
Easily follow all your favorite artists by syncing your music
Sync Music
Share Event
Bob Evans Biography
Bob Evans is the charming alter-ego and solo project of Australian recording artist Kevin Mitchell who also fronts alternative rock band Jebediah.
‘Don’t you think it’s time?’ Bob Evans opined on his 2006 breakout hit of the same name.
‘Time to start anew, time for changing views, time for making up your mind?’.
Some five albums down the track from Bob Evans’ modest beginnings, Full Circle – The Best Of most certainly arrives at an appropriate time, albeit one for reflection these many years later. Kevin Mitchell was already under the Australian music spotlight as singer/guitarist for indie-rock-darlings Jebediah when in 1998 he found a t-shirt in a Perth op-shop with the number 15 on the back, and the name ‘Bob Evans’ printed on the front. Coincidentally at this time he was embarking on his first solo shows in Perth and a random name on someone’s discarded basketball shirt took hold.
“There was never a plan,” he says. “It’s only in retrospect that I can make sense of a lot of stuff. I think what I was really doing with Bob Evans was just revisiting the way that I started writing music when I was 12 or 13, on an acoustic guitar, listening to folk stuff, like The Mamas & The Papas or Don McLean, just the sort of stuff that was playing around the house at my mum and dad’s place. I was doing that for about five years before Jebediah started and rock’n’roll took over. I guess it was always there; I just felt the urge or the calling to revisit it. “The circumstances were difficult, too, because Jebediah were quite successful and well-known and I think that’s why I went to such pains to give myself a name and do everything low-key and not go out as ‘Kevin Mitchell from Jebediah’. I did things in a way that maintained integrity for the band and for myself. I didn’t want to ride on the coattails of the band.” He may have grown out of the t-shirt, but the name fit and has stayed for an impressive solo career. Even, for the longest time, to seemingly under-researched interviewers unaware of Bob Evan’s real-life alias.
“This Bob Evans guy has been hitching a ride in my life for 20 years,” Mitchell laughs. “It’s an unusual relationship to have with something that isn’t real.” Five years into playing solo shows, the first Bob Evans album, Suburban Kid, emerged in 2003, released via Jebediah’s own Redline Records label. While it didn’t receive much attention outside of WA, it started a new momentum for Mitchell’s solo career, with EMI signing him up for his second LP, Suburban Songbook, recorded in Nashville. Led by the aforementioned single, Don’t You Think It’s Time?, it set a new career path in motion.
“When Suburban Songbook came out and it was embraced and was successful, I had this whole new kind of career,” Mitchell recalls. “It really saved my arse because at the time Jebediah were kind of just burnt out and taking a break, and I… can’t do anything else.
“If that record hadn’t done anything, I’m sure I would’ve kept writing and making music in some way, but that’s the closest I’ve ever come to quitting music as a career option. The success of that record gave me the life and the confidence and the means to continue. Everything I’ve done since then has kind of just been a product of that, which I’m incredibly grateful for.”
With Suburban Songbook winning Mitchell an ARIA Award for ‘Best Adult Contemporary Album’, 2009’s Goodnight, Bull Creek! saw him return to record the last of his ‘suburban trilogy’ in Nashville. He recalls moving on from Suburban Songbook being on par with Jebediah following up Slightly Odway, their smash hit 1997 debut LP. “It was an unexpected success, certainly more than I had expected,” he says. “It’s a strange mental game, making music after that and all of a sudden you’ve got this massive audience you’ve never had before.”
The audience stayed on and several ARIA Award nominations followed, but Mitchell from this point went on to collaborate with Kav Temperley, Josh Pyke and Steve Parkin on the eponymous 2010 Basement Birds LP. Jebediah’s Kosciuszko album was released in 2011, a year which also saw the start of his young family. 2013 saw the release of Familiar Stranger, with Mitchell wanting to make a record “that sounded nothing like any other Bob Evans record I’d made. I didn’t want to make an acoustic or singer/songwriter album, none of those labels. I felt creatively and artistically very confident in that record. I’m very proud of that record, but I had such a grand concept for it that I think I got a little bit lost in it and couldn’t quite deliver it the way that I imagined I would.”
As a result 2016’s Car Boot Sale was about going back to basics. “It was very much a return to the first couple of records that I made,” Mitchell notes, “digging into that singer/songwriter thing that I’d tried to get away from.”
In the same way that Mitchell’s Bob Evans life started as an acoustic return from the rock’n’roll of Jebediah, Car Boot Sale took him back, style-wise, to the start of that very solo career.
So what better time for changing views and, perhaps, to start anew?
“At this point in time it feels comfortable reflecting and looking back and taking stock of things,” Mitchell says, “because for a long time it doesn’t. You never stop to smell the roses because you’re always just trying to push ahead. It just feels like a good time to tie the last five records and the last 15 years of Bob Evans up in a little bow. I think the title, Full Circle, describes this very well.”
Read More‘Don’t you think it’s time?’ Bob Evans opined on his 2006 breakout hit of the same name.
‘Time to start anew, time for changing views, time for making up your mind?’.
Some five albums down the track from Bob Evans’ modest beginnings, Full Circle – The Best Of most certainly arrives at an appropriate time, albeit one for reflection these many years later. Kevin Mitchell was already under the Australian music spotlight as singer/guitarist for indie-rock-darlings Jebediah when in 1998 he found a t-shirt in a Perth op-shop with the number 15 on the back, and the name ‘Bob Evans’ printed on the front. Coincidentally at this time he was embarking on his first solo shows in Perth and a random name on someone’s discarded basketball shirt took hold.
“There was never a plan,” he says. “It’s only in retrospect that I can make sense of a lot of stuff. I think what I was really doing with Bob Evans was just revisiting the way that I started writing music when I was 12 or 13, on an acoustic guitar, listening to folk stuff, like The Mamas & The Papas or Don McLean, just the sort of stuff that was playing around the house at my mum and dad’s place. I was doing that for about five years before Jebediah started and rock’n’roll took over. I guess it was always there; I just felt the urge or the calling to revisit it. “The circumstances were difficult, too, because Jebediah were quite successful and well-known and I think that’s why I went to such pains to give myself a name and do everything low-key and not go out as ‘Kevin Mitchell from Jebediah’. I did things in a way that maintained integrity for the band and for myself. I didn’t want to ride on the coattails of the band.” He may have grown out of the t-shirt, but the name fit and has stayed for an impressive solo career. Even, for the longest time, to seemingly under-researched interviewers unaware of Bob Evan’s real-life alias.
“This Bob Evans guy has been hitching a ride in my life for 20 years,” Mitchell laughs. “It’s an unusual relationship to have with something that isn’t real.” Five years into playing solo shows, the first Bob Evans album, Suburban Kid, emerged in 2003, released via Jebediah’s own Redline Records label. While it didn’t receive much attention outside of WA, it started a new momentum for Mitchell’s solo career, with EMI signing him up for his second LP, Suburban Songbook, recorded in Nashville. Led by the aforementioned single, Don’t You Think It’s Time?, it set a new career path in motion.
“When Suburban Songbook came out and it was embraced and was successful, I had this whole new kind of career,” Mitchell recalls. “It really saved my arse because at the time Jebediah were kind of just burnt out and taking a break, and I… can’t do anything else.
“If that record hadn’t done anything, I’m sure I would’ve kept writing and making music in some way, but that’s the closest I’ve ever come to quitting music as a career option. The success of that record gave me the life and the confidence and the means to continue. Everything I’ve done since then has kind of just been a product of that, which I’m incredibly grateful for.”
With Suburban Songbook winning Mitchell an ARIA Award for ‘Best Adult Contemporary Album’, 2009’s Goodnight, Bull Creek! saw him return to record the last of his ‘suburban trilogy’ in Nashville. He recalls moving on from Suburban Songbook being on par with Jebediah following up Slightly Odway, their smash hit 1997 debut LP. “It was an unexpected success, certainly more than I had expected,” he says. “It’s a strange mental game, making music after that and all of a sudden you’ve got this massive audience you’ve never had before.”
The audience stayed on and several ARIA Award nominations followed, but Mitchell from this point went on to collaborate with Kav Temperley, Josh Pyke and Steve Parkin on the eponymous 2010 Basement Birds LP. Jebediah’s Kosciuszko album was released in 2011, a year which also saw the start of his young family. 2013 saw the release of Familiar Stranger, with Mitchell wanting to make a record “that sounded nothing like any other Bob Evans record I’d made. I didn’t want to make an acoustic or singer/songwriter album, none of those labels. I felt creatively and artistically very confident in that record. I’m very proud of that record, but I had such a grand concept for it that I think I got a little bit lost in it and couldn’t quite deliver it the way that I imagined I would.”
As a result 2016’s Car Boot Sale was about going back to basics. “It was very much a return to the first couple of records that I made,” Mitchell notes, “digging into that singer/songwriter thing that I’d tried to get away from.”
In the same way that Mitchell’s Bob Evans life started as an acoustic return from the rock’n’roll of Jebediah, Car Boot Sale took him back, style-wise, to the start of that very solo career.
So what better time for changing views and, perhaps, to start anew?
“At this point in time it feels comfortable reflecting and looking back and taking stock of things,” Mitchell says, “because for a long time it doesn’t. You never stop to smell the roses because you’re always just trying to push ahead. It just feels like a good time to tie the last five records and the last 15 years of Bob Evans up in a little bow. I think the title, Full Circle, describes this very well.”
Song & Dance Man
Follow artist