Guitarist Scarlett McKahey had cut back her touring with Australian rockers Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers after a diagnosis of postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome in 2023. But the opportunity to open shows for Pearl Jam on their current Dark Matter tour was too good to pass up.
“I’ll just do as many as I can, but not heaps. If Pearl Jam says come to America, then you do it,” McKahey said with a laugh Wednesday from Nashville.
Spirits were high in the TJatJT camp the day after the band made their tour debut in Nashville, erasing any vestiges of jet lag from their Melbourne-to-San Francisco-to-Nashville flights.
“We had the first show (Tuesday) night, and it was insane,” McKahey said. “It was so fun. The crowd was so lovely. All the crew were amazing. It was just really, really great. So we had the best time.”
The indie rockers, blending pop and punk with catchy choruses, started in 2015 after the high school friends watched “School of Rock.” Now 10 years later, they’ve opened shows for Foo Fighters and Pearl Jam in Australia with their debut album, 2023’s “I Love You,” getting recognition at Australian awards shows. As part of the current Pearl Jam tour, they’ll be playing in a pair of sold-out shows at PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh on May 16 and 18.
The group — comprised of McKahey, singer Anna Ryan, bassist Jaida Stephenson and drummer Neve van Boxsel — just released a new single, “Balcony,” as their rise continues.
“I feel like I haven’t even looked past this (tour) because it’s such a big deal. This feels like a huge, huge deal,” McKahey said. “Last year was massive for us as well. It felt like that was gonna be the biggest year, but then now we’re here, so I don’t know. I guess only time will tell. We have many months left. I hope that it’s the biggest year yet. We can only pray.”
In a call from Nashville, McKahey discussed winning over crowds, their debut of “Balcony,” dream collaborations and more:
What’s the approach with a show knowing that you might be facing a crowd that’s unfamiliar with your music?
I think just try and win them over, because we know that of everybody there, no one is there to see us. These people don’t know who we are, so how are we gonna do this so that they can get on board as quickly as possible? So we’ve curated the setlist to be our most fun songs, the ones that we like playing the most and hope the energy will leak out into the crowd and they’ll like it, which I think it did work (Tuesday) night. It seemed by the end, they decided they were on board, which is awesome. (laughs) But it’s always funny with crowds like that when there’s so many people and they’re just not there for you at all, so it’s a challenge but a challenge that it’s an honor to do it, especially when the band’s Pearl Jam. So super fun and their fans are all lovely as well. It’s such a beautiful community that they have so it’s been really great getting to see that, and getting to be part of that in such a crazy way is amazing.
Did you grow up listening to Pearl Jam at all?
Oh, absolutely. When I was in high school, I had such a big grunge phase. I listened to Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Soundgarden and everything, so it was pretty crazy. So now we know Eddie (Vedder), and it’s very, very strange. (laughs) It feels really weird.
Is it hard to take that for granted, like, hey, I know the guys from Pearl Jam now? That has to be surreal a little bit.
Oh, absolutely, yeah. I think when you go home, it doesn’t feel like it happened. It doesn’t feel real. It’s very, very strange. I think the only time that feels like it’s actually happening is when you’re playing, and then everything apart from that feels like a weird dream.
You said that (Tuesday) night’s show went pretty well. Was that the first live performance of “Balcony?”
Yes, it was. We were so nervous to play it. We were really freaking out because we’d never played it before. We were like, God, probably shouldn’t debut a song in a stadium in America. But it went really well. We played it, sounded like the recording, played it well. It went as well as it could have considering how nervous we all were. We really love “Balcony.” It’s been so fun getting to see it go out in the world and playing it live was actually even better. It was so fun.
Besides the live performance, have you been pleased with the response that it’s gotten and what you’ve heard from your fans?
Yeah, definitely. I feel like everyone knows that we’re kind of cooking something in the background, which is nice. (laughs) So definitely I feel like everyone’s getting excited like we are, which is awesome. It feels like something’s happening, which is good if the fans feel the same as we do with that.
With the live shows, it seems like you’re playing “Treat Me Better,” that seems like that would be a pretty fun one, because that goes pretty hard.
Yeah, oh my god, that one’s so fun to play live. It’s just so big. It’s a lot heavier than some of our other songs, so it’s great. We actually play that second in the set, so it’s like grab them quickly (with a) big drop D song. (laughs) Yeah, hopefully that’ll bring people on our side quickly, which I think it did yesterday. I feel like that one, people were like, OK, cool, this a rock band. (laughs)
What else do you consider some of the fun songs to play?
Featured Local Businesses
Oh, I feel like the whole time we played last night, it was just so fun, just being up there was amazing, but definitely my favorite songs to play, “Balcony” now is massively up there. I love playing “Girl Sports,” and oh my goodness, I love playing “I Love You” as well. That one’s really fun. And we have a song called “I Don’t Want It” as well from our album, which I think that’s super fun to play. It’s kind of a bit more funky, and it’s really fast. But actually, the highlight of the whole set to me is when we played this song of ours called “Cayenne Pepper,” which is only 20 seconds long, but it’s so fun and silly, and it really feels rad.
You mentioned about “Balcony” being the precursor of something else. Do you see new music going in that direction too?
Yeah, definitely. I feel like there’s new things that we’ve been cooking up. We’ve been exploring and experimenting more with synths and like reverb-y stuff and just like different effects and those kind of things. Especially because our last album, “I Love You,” had songs from all throughout our lives so far, some from high school, and lots of older songs that we grew up. So now it’s really cool being able to start a new chapter and just see what we want to do with it. So I think “Balcony” definitely is a taste of what’s to come, like that’s the direction that we’re heading in now which is really exciting because it’s just super fun to play, so hopefully more like that will be revealed. (laughs)
In “Girl Sports,” there’s the lyric of “pretty good for a girl band” so have you heard that in real life and how easy is it to shrug off something like that?
Oh absolutely I’ve heard that in real life. All of the things that were in that song have been said to us in real life. Actually “Girl Sports” came because Jaida, our bass player, knocked her teeth out when she was skating and the dentist who replaced her teeth said that she should stick to girl sports because if she wasn’t skating then she wouldn’t have knocked out her teeth. So that song came from that because it was just unbelievably sexist and crazy. Definitely we’ve always had crazy comments like that, especially at our shows, being like, ‘Oh you guys aren’t too bad for girls.’ It’s just ridiculous so we wanted to really poke fun at those people and reclaim it and make them feel embarrassed about it by putting it in. (laughs) So I feel like that has worked. It is also easy to shrug it off just because we know that whoever is saying those things is just like absolute idiots, so it’s fine. But we definitely shouldn’t have to be dealing with it still, even though we’re happy to laugh about it, it’s still pretty ridiculous that people think that way.
It’s 2025. People should be more enlightened by now…
Absolutely, you’re preaching to the choir. (laughs) … It’s definitely annoying.
Related
• AC/DC thunders through classics in Power Up tour stop in Pittsburgh
• Singer Matt Andersen talks new 'The Hammer & The Rose' album before Pittsburgh concert
• 2025 Pittsburgh area concert calendar
That seems like a pretty angry song, so can you ever have enough angry songs like that?
Well I don’t think so. I feel like we have a nice mix of angry and fun songs, I would say. Some of them are really angry, but then I feel like our set isn’t necessarily all angry. Some of it is and some of it’s really fun. It’s hard to pinpoint. I like to think we give people a little bit of everything. It’s a journey.
There were also a few collaborations on the last album with The Linda Lindas and Softcult, so who else is on your bucket list for future collaborations?
Well, obviously Eddie Vedder would be No. 1, especially now that we have his contact details. (laughs) I think that there’s lots of amazing artists that we would love to collaborate with. Remy Wolf definitely is up there or Billie Eilish, we love her. Doechii is amazing. Obviously those are all insanely big artists that are probably pretty unachievable, but, you know, never say never. I didn’t think we’d be on tour with Pearl Jam a few years ago, and here we are, so I’m going to try and manifest the Doechii collab now.
What have been the most surprising things about America in your limited experience over here?
No. 1 is that everybody thinks that we’re British, which is funny, because I feel like we all sound really Australian, but I guess not to American people, which is funny. The tipping has been a crazy development that we don’t have in Australia. We don’t understand how it works, we’re about to do a lot of quick maths to try and figure out if we’re being terrible customers and not tipping enough, so that’s been crazy. But mainly I think that we weren’t sure how the Pearl Jam crowds would respond to us, so I think that’s been really great. Everyone’s been really nice. It’s been really, really cool, especially their fans. It’s been really lovely and very inclusive and just really welcomed us in with open arms. It’s been lovely.