Solo, With Friends

18 June 2013 | 5:45 am | Michael Smith

"I wanted with this record to really get back to ‘I’m David Bridie, the singer and the songwriter’. That’s what I do best, that’s what I love doing best – I couldn’t do the other stuff if I wasn’t doing that."

Sometimes, when you decide you're going to record an album, if it's not just going to be a collection of potential singles you have some idea about what you want it to say, artistically. For seven-time ARIA Award-winner David Bridie, who has successfully fronted two of Australia's most treasured acts – Not Drowning Waving and My Friend The Chocolate Cake – as well as recorded and produced albums for PNG's Telek and Pitjantjatjara man Frank Yamma among others, what he wanted to 'say' with his fourth solo album, Wake, came well into its making.

“Until the second half of the recording process,” he suggests, “I was very much focused on the overall artistic statement and process. Maybe I'm a dinosaur but I still think of a record as like a book of short stories – the whole collection rather than the individual song – even to the point that I think you make some decisions for individual songs based on what the other songs are that are sitting beside it. And that makes sense to me, 'cause when you do a live gig you do, you know, sixteen songs, so how an audience will listen to one song will be affected by what songs are sitting around it, and the lyric idea in one song works on the same basis, and it wasn't until the end, when you're going in a bit closer with a microscope that you'd start seeing that song as an entity in itself.

“At the beginning of it all, I sort of got myself involved in a whole lot of other projects, and not to suggest that the other things I'm involved in aren't important because they are, but what I started doing when Not Drowning Waving started and why I wanted to get in the music industry is I'd sit in my room and play these songs on piano, and I'd kind of lost that a bit over the years – I'd taken the focus onto all these other things – and then as I was doing Not Drowning Waving and beginning Chocolate Cake I was doing film soundtracks and work with Telek, and I've been very fortunate to have had all these projects, but these projects began to become the main thing, and writing songs and performing less so, and I wanted with this record to really get back to 'I'm David Bridie, the singer and the songwriter'. That's what I do best, that's what I love doing best – I couldn't do the other stuff if I wasn't doing that.”

So the initial idea for Bridie was to record an album, five years on from his last solo release, Succumb, that was just voice and piano, returning the emphasis to the songs. While the first few songs to make it to the album had been written in a Taralga farmhouse near Goulburn in NSW, they reflected that quiet intimacy, and as the recording evolved Bridie started hearing where his musical friends could add something to the next batch of songs.

Don't miss a beat with our FREE daily newsletter

“I guess partly because I was doing this with this new set-up of not having a record company, it became a process where I really felt that some of the musicians that came in and played – John Phillips, Phil Wales [both from Not Drowning Waving], Marita Dyson [The Orbweavers], Rob Snarski [The Blackeyed Susans] – myself along with these musicians became the producers, and became the A&R people. Which wasn't the reason why they were there, because they're all amazing musicians, but the record got layered out more than what I'd originally planned.”