Loving And Leaving

Josh Pyke is in his creative element right now, if there's anything to be read into the super-quick turnaround between finishing up touring for his third album Only Sparrows in December and releasing his fourth album The Beginning And The End Of Everything this month.

”The last round of touring was just the best round of touring I've ever done. In terms of the band I had I just felt like we were totally killing it; I just felt like we'd really hit our stride. So that felt really inspiring as a musician,” Pyke admits, audibly chuffed. “I've never really thought of myself as a musician musician; I've thought of myself as a songwriter who can play instruments and tour, but I felt like a musician on the last round of touring and it was a good feeling.

“Then I did a long solo tour which in the past has always been really fun but quite draining, and it was definitely tiring but I just felt invigorated by meeting all these people all over the country in places like Darwin and places that I hadn't been before who knew all the words to every single song. It just felt inspiring to know that there were these people who really valued what I was doing. It just made me want to keep going. In the past I've felt like having a break after touring but this time I just felt like getting stuck straight back into doing another record.”

Pyke's method of songwriting means he's never fully clear on the theme of a record until it's done, though the significance of creation – whether his music or through recently becoming a father for the second time – is certainly making its presence felt across The Beginning And The End Of Everything.

“There's a lot about legacy and death really, and letting go – a lot of things about letting go of things that you love, and I guess that comes with being a dad but also [because] this is four albums in and you kind of have to think of every album as a project that you're so intimately close to and you have to let it go,” he ponders. “You have to learn to love that process in a way. There's a lot of that in there as well; it's a confronting feeling when it's related to anything whether or not it's your kid, or a project, or a friend, or your lover or whatever. That old thing if you love something let it go, it's actually true.”

Animals tend to be a recurring theme in Pyke's songwriting too, harking back to his 2005 breakthrough EP Feeding The Wolves. The toothy antagonist features again in the album's title track and Pyke even dresses up as one in the first single's film clip.

“The clip for Leeward Side is like a kind of fantasy, weird wonderland that the director created that I'm making my way though, and part of it is that I morph into a wolf… In terms of the imagery I've created over the years, wolves and birds are bad. Wolves and birds are kind of like negative influences, and foxes and rabbits are good, basically. I really don't know why,” he chuckles. “It just flows out – if I start to think too much about it, it becomes a bit contrived. Just let what happens happen, you know.”

Recording between a shed-based home studio in Sydney and with producer John Castle (The Bamboos, The Drones) in The Shed Studios in Melbourne, Pyke found a new energy in the method that allowed him to incorporate much of his home studio recordings into the final cut. Though the result is no great departure from the warmly-delivered pop hooks and heartfelt folk sensibility expected of Pyke, there are still a few surprises in store, including a co-write on All The Very Best Of Us with childhood friend Holly Throsby.

“When we were writing the song, she really pushed me to do stuff melodically that I wouldn't normally have done like leaving quite long gaps in between words, whereas my tendency would be to fill those gaps up with words,” he tells. “And then when we got into the studio I was really pushing her to sing full voice and she felt a bit uncomfortable with it but I was like, 'I'm telling you, it sounds awesome – you've got to sing like this'. So it was good – I felt like we pushed each other in different directions in two parts of the process of getting that song happening.”

Pyke admits that he's never felt more excited in his career than right now as he prepares to tour the new record nationally. As a songwriter who's recently come to think of himself as a musician, it doesn't cross his mind to strategise how to make each record different while still being uniquely Josh Pyke – he simply follows his instincts.

“That's a question that I never ask myself because… I basically just follow the songs,” he says simply. “The last album I felt like they needed a more full band arrangement and so I just followed the songs, and the right thing to do was to get a band together and record the album. And when I'd written all these songs and done the demos of them, it just felt like the way that they should be recorded was two guys in a room kind of hashing it out until it sounded right. I never really consciously go, 'Alright, I've got to now start to think of doing something different'. It does sound different and maybe a development, but it definitely sounds like me.

“I don't really feel a great desire to reinvent myself; I like what I do and I like what I'm trying to achieve – which is to do what I do but constantly develop – and that's how I want to be as a person as well as a musician. I don't want to reinvent myself as a person; I just want to be a better version of myself. So every song that I write and every album that I make, I just want it to be a better more developed version of what I've done before.

“I take that from artists that I admire like Neil Finn and Paul Kelly; everything they do, it's them. If you listen to Neil Finn's solo records versus Crowded House, they're quite different but it's unmistakably Finn. He's not a chameleon-type artist and I'm just not that type of guy. Luke Steele is an amazing artist but he has the capacity to do The Sleepy Jackson stuff and then slide seamlessly into Empire Of The Sun and it feels right, whereas for me, I'm just not that guy basically.”