The Doctor Is In

Despite the arctic conditions brewing outside our interview space, Josh Pyke is glowing. And so he should be. Pyke has not only just welcomed his second child (another son) into the world, he's also fresh from putting the finishing touches on his latest album, The Beginning And The End Of Everything, his fourth solo studio effort since his debut, Memories And Dust, way back when in 2007.

“It's weird,” says Pyke, who's bundled up in black jeans and jacket, “I was talking to my wife about the whole musical journey this morning. What happened was, I was singing one of my own songs and she was like, 'Wow, you must really love this record, 'cause you don't sing your own stuff around the house' and I was like, 'I really do, this just seemed to happen so easily'. Then my wife looked at me and goes, 'This did not happen easily!' and in my mind I've just washed over the kind of effort and struggle that it took to write the record – and I think that's because I'm just so happy with it.”

In previous interviews, Pyke had called this album his “most personal to date”, one that explores those big themes. You know, desire, death and legacy. The final topic a particularly poignant one for the father of two, who reveals that his MO is centred on creating a legacy his children will be proud of. In the first single to be released from the album, Leeward Side, Pyke mulls “I wanna be someone worthy of a conversation” – a hope, perhaps, directed towards his children.

“I always look at a new record like starting at the very beginning,” says Pyke. “It's 'cause I always wanna do something that feels better than the last one and that's a lot of pressure. Then you go through this period where you're like, 'Why are you feeling pressured about this? You're being a self-indulgent wanker, just get on to it already.”

“Get on to it” he did. Recorded with the helping hand of John Castle (The Bamboos, Washington, The Drones), The Beginning And The End Of Everything harbours the same familiar folksy sounds that inhabited Pyke's earlier albums, while exploring a more tuned down sound – and even manages to sneak in a duet with All The Very Best Of Us, a haunting, guitar driven melody that saw Pyke team up with his “primary school” mate, Holly Throsby.

“We've known each other since we were like six or seven or whatever,” laughs Pyke. “We've followed each other's careers from the very beginning. I mean, I remember going to gigs of hers back in the day and I'm pretty sure we would've played together back then as well sometime, but we'd never written together.”

Pyke adds that Throsby was only called in to add her harmonies after he had already penned the 16 possible song selections for the album. “After that, I just thought it might be nice to throw the door open to some collaborations, which I had never done before,” says Pyke.

“Basically, I called her [Throsby] up and we spent a couple of days writing and the song just came about. It's very hard to write a song with somebody else and still maintain the integrity with your own songs. Holly really deserves credit because she came over to my side and tried to write from my perspective. She was really pushing me about things I was trying to say and things that were bugging me – almost like this weird kind of therapy session.”

Apart from Throsby, Pyke also credits the album's producer John Castle for his variable growth musically and lyrically on the album. “He's such a great dude,” stresses Pyke, now tucking into warmed banana bread.

“We're the same age and we have really similar sensibilities in terms of music and we're also both reasonably irreverent in the studio. The best thing about working with John is his studio. It's a shed. It's really great. It's entirely like a proper studio, but it's still a shed. He's got it in his parent's backyard and he's spent many years building it up and changing it into a recording studio. He doesn't live with his parents though!” laugh Pyke. “He would kill me if I made it seem like that!”

Pyke admits to 'studio envy' and says that he is using Castle's backyard creation as a kind of muse for his own studio space. “My studio at home is the same as John's; it's just a big shed with recording gear set-up,” says Pyke. “But I want to build it and develop it more like John's when I get the chance to get around to doing it.”

Recording in a shed, Pyke believes, renders a kind of authentic, organic quality to the sound. “I loved getting into that studio because everything was there, right there,” says Pyke.

“I could get in there with a song and start throwing everything at it and then slowly begin to strip it back. In places like that you get to get mad and create something that just makes you go, 'Oh my god, this is a giant mess', but then I'd start working on it with John and it somehow turns into a song.”

Despite Castle's shed refuge, Pyke still relied on his own set-up for the crux of the tracks. “A lot of the stuff that I recorded on The Beginning And The End Of Everything is the stuff I recorded at home,” explains Pyke.

“Like, in one of the songs, Haunt You Love, you can hear a plane take off in the distance during the last chorus. I recorded the song in one take and while it's not the most technically perfect performance, when I thought about doing it again I thought I am never going to be able to recreate that type of emotion that I had already done. So I just used that version and added some extra guitars later.”

Pyke adds that his quest to capture the emotion of a song nearly saw the album's opener Bug Eyed Beauty miss out on a spot in the track line-up. “I sort of wrote it on the way home from buying a guitar,” smiles Pyke. “I went home, recorded it that day and submitted it to the label saying that I thought it would make a really good album opener – and that's the version that ended up on the album, the one I wrote in my shed.”

What's that they say about blokes and their sheds?