Personal Impersonal

The years since the release of 2009's Goodnight, Bull Creek! album have been busy ones for Kevin Mitchell, the man behind the Bob Evans persona, what with reconvening his original band Jebediah and then finding himself part of the highly successful one-off collective, Basement Birds, recording and touring with both. More recently, in his Bob Evans guise, Mitchell has even been a blog contributor to our own theMusic.com.au. The important news, though, is that, as Evans, he's finally got around to recording a new album, Familiar Stranger, his fourth and the first not to relate to his previous releases, the trilogy that began with 2003's Suburban Kid and 2006's Suburban Songbook. The man can't help himself, of course – once again he's channelling the inner Beatle in him, the album full of harmonies and lush string orchestrations.

“It's funny, I went into this record almost consciously wanting to, maybe not into the writing part of it, but in the recording part of it I wanted to do something that had a bit more of a modern feel and less retro,” he says. “I felt like the last two records, I was really indulging my love of '60s and '70s stuff. But I suppose the Beatles thing, I guess it's just in the DNA. It's gonna come out no matter what I do, you know. The Beatles comparison comes up every time I make a record, so maybe hopefully, if nothing else, I'm channelling a different era of Beatles than I've done before. Maybe in the past it was kind of older-style Beatles and maybe this one's later era… Abbey Road.

“I didn't want the record to be driven by the acoustic guitar. I didn't want to make a record that just sounded like an acoustic singer-songwriter strumming away. I wanted to try and take it out of that, away from that foundation 'cause I'd done it before and it feels like it's been overdone. There's so much of that stuff going around, so, I dunno, I wanted to try and create something that was, from a listening point of view, it might sound like it came from a different place.”

Returning to his alternative rock roots in Jebediah, who released the very successful Kosciuszko album in 2011, though recording for it had begun nearly four years before, Mitchell feels reinvigorated in an aspect of his songwriting that hadn't been attended to for a while. So there's an element of the fictional persona, Bob Evans, being addressed, at least musically, by Kevin Mitchell in his Jebediah persona.

“It's funny,” Mitchell admits, “originally, when I first started doing Bob Evans, Jebediah and Bob Evans were like chalk and cheese. There was such a big distance between the two of them and now it feels like they're coming closer together,” he chuckles, “because, with the last Jebediah record, I really wanted to, I don't know, make sure that we were a bit more adventurous and stuff, and with this last Bob Evans record I wanted to kind of move away from the acoustic side of things. So yeah, they're veering close together. I might have to address that problem.”

As for the Basement Birds experience, Mitchell doesn't feel that brought anything to the Bob Evans table, despite the fact that in that side project he was working with three other songwriters whose approaches to the craft weren't necessarily his own. “The Basement Birds thing in a way was unique. Stylistically it was very much in the Bob Evans realm. I mean I think for me and Josh [Pyke], we both felt like stylistically it wasn't a great stretch from what we'd been doing. For Kav [Temperley, Eskimo Joe] and Steve [Parkin] perhaps it was, especially for Kav. Writing so collaboratively with three other people was very different as well, even though with Jebediah, a lot of that is collaborative as well – it's unspoken, it's just jamming; it's not four individual songwriters, you know, all bringing in songs. So the Basement Birds thing was very unique in that respect. I don't think it really had any effect on this record, but certainly I think the Jebediah record did. The way that we recorded that last Jebediah record I really enjoyed. It was the first time I'd made a record where I really embraced the studio and modern technology and all that kind of stuff, and there was a sense of adventure in the studio that I really enjoyed, and I think that a little bit of that spirit may have kind of drifted over into the Bob Evans record.”

Mitchell pre-empted the release of Familiar Stranger late last year with The Double Life EP, which was produced by London-based American producer and bass player Dean Reid, whose CV includes records for Marina & The Diamonds, Ronan Keating and Mystery Jets among others, in Melbourne, who also produced the album.

As for the songs themselves, Mitchell/Evans sings of birth, death and everything in between, though he cautiously dismisses any grandiosity. “It probably does sound a little bit up my own arsehole, or indulgent, or, I don't know, something, but a lot of things happened in the last few years that sort of pushed me towards making a fairly introspective record, and maybe look, I guess, that is a little bit self-indulgent, but so is any kind of art isn't it, a little bit. I'm sure I'm guilty,” he says.

In the end, what you get on Familiar Stranger is just great pop, no grand artistic pretentions, and the universalised personal experience of a songwriter that is ultimately the experience of us all. “I guess what happened for me, as I experienced these situations, and you draw into yourself, you kind of, in a weird way, like, because you're sort of examining life and your position in the grander universe, you do end up, I guess, finding a universal kind of… You get drawn through it, like going through a vacuum or something, and when you come out the other end, your perspective becomes more universal rather than completely personal. 

“In some ways, the more personal you get the more universal the subject matter becomes, you know, and I suppose there are some songs where I was trying not to be gender-specific or leaving out maybe certain specifics that might lead the listener to go down too much of a narrow path. I hope there's a quality in the record that allows people to kind of draw their own conclusions and stuff. I guess whenever you're making a record you always want that, don't you? And that's why I suppose I feel a little stupid mentioning the whole life and death stuff without going into detail about exactly what those experiences were, although I have before about the fact that I had a baby recently, so most people probably already know that. I don't want to go too much into detail, not because I'm trying to be elusive but just because I don't want to inform people's reaction to the record too much.”

And of course the best art resonates with the audience rather than specifies, and “in a strange way,” Mitchell admits, “it's ended being a much more personal record… In some ways it feels more personal than the last couple of records, which I was worried about. I worried that it wasn't going to be that way, because, with Surburban Songbook particularly, and Goodnight, Bull Creek! as well to an extent, there were a lot of specifics and I was worried this time 'round that by leaving specifics out it may come across as less personal, but actually I feel really close to it, even though I'm not using as much specific kind of language as I may have used before.”

Joining Mitchell/Evans in translating an album he admits he approached very much as a studio project rather than with a guy with an acoustic guitar playing the corner pub approach, are You Am I's Davey Lane on guitar, the bass player on the album, Tony Buchan, and Mal Clarke on drums, from The Sleepy Jackson.

Bob Evans will be playing the following dates:

Thursday 9 May - Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle NSW
Friday 10 May - Oxford Art Factory, Sydney NSW
Saturday 11 May - Zierholz @ UC, Canberra ACT
Sunday 12 May - Heritage Hotel, Wollongong NSW
Thursday 16 May - Yarra Hotel Geelong VIC
Friday 17 May - Corner Hotel, Melbourne VIC
Saturday 18 May - Meeniyan Town Hall, Meeniyan VIC