Not Polite

"It's more honest. Lyrically it's way more honest. I've always written songs that are directly linked to my personal life, so I'm not making stories up, but the songs that were on the EP were pretty safe stories, y'know? I was never really giving up anything too personal, or maybe I was, but I never felt like I was.”

Chet Faker, aka Nicholas Murphy, is speaking about his debut LP Built On Glass, the follow-up to his first EP, Thinking In Textures, which went Gold earlier this year. On the album, the bearded man with the R&B-style voice, croons about self-awareness, drawing upon both mundane experiences and introspective moments, while also writing break-up songs, “blatant kind of sing-it-from-the-hill love songs”, and even sex songs.

It's an album that didn't come easy; he actually wrote and recorded two albums before even starting on what would become Built On Glass.

“The first album I did I was just trying to impress people,” says Murphy. “It was like an album for everyone, I was trying to be too intellectual about it; my ego was in the way. I was like, 'Yeah, I'm going to write the best fucking album ever.' And I wrote this album and there were some good songs on there, but I got to the end and I was like, 'What is this? This is not me, this isn't personal enough, it's not raw enough, it's too safe.' I remember sending it to someone at a record label, and they listened and they said it was 'very polite', which was the best fucking feedback ever.”

So Murphy started anew. “Then I was a man on a mission towards the other end of the spectrum. I was like, 'I have to reinvent music and get this new sound.' So then I started writing this second album which was all experimental and super lo-fi, which was fun and it was really cool, and that felt good, but I was also trying too hard to be this entity that I wasn't. Then I got to the end of that and I was like, 'This isn't right. It doesn't feel natural. I forced it too much.' So I kind of had to go through those two things to come to the final one where I finally came back to it and just relaxed and finally let myself write the songs without thinking about it too much.”

In the media, Murphy has been described as 'mysterious', and there's a certain fan-based mythos surrounding that beard. But he maintains that he's put no effort into creating such a persona.

”The beard was something that I never pushed, I just hadn't shaved… I've had mine for four years, they weren't in four years ago. I'd like to shave it off but I'm kind of stuck with it now.”

“And the mystery that people talk about, I actually think it's a natural byproduct of me not simplifying myself so people can understand me… They're all just kind of byproducts of the way I do things. I think people think I'm mysterious because they don't know anything about me, but that's because I don't go out of my way to tell everything about me because I'm a musician, I'm not a TV personality. I'm not writing my autobiography at 25. I think it can be hard to accurately depict a character in the media, and that's how most people know of me, through the media, and so I imagine they think I'm mysterious just because there's not a lot of bearded musicians, maybe. I just let people do whatever they want with my image. People are pretty funny, they kind of do their own thing, I just keep making music and go at my own pace.”

It's the music that matters the most to Murphy, not the accolades (and there have been accolades, from going Gold to winning AIR Awards to making it onto the Hottest 100.

“Awards are good, I'll try not to get too idealistic on you here, but I don't think they're important, do you know what I mean? And it's an award. Why would you need an award? If it means so much, wouldn't you be doing it anyway? I don't know. I would never hang my awards on my wall. The day I hang an award on my wall is the day I give up. Because it's irrelevant.”

Murphy concludes that over the course of the last two years, since the release of his EP, following his career success and collaborations with Flume and more, what stands out to him are the life lessons.

“Like just learning stuff about myself, learning to be more confident in my opinion, in the ways I think of things. I get so much more feedback from other people now, that you end up being way more confident in how you feel. I used to put a song out and depending on how people reacted I would decide whether that was a good song or a bad song, but now, I reach a larger audience. I can put out a song, like say Talk Is Cheap. People on the internet, I'm sure if you looked hard enough, I don't read it, but I'm sure there'd be someone that fucking hates it, and someone who's said that it changed their life, and there'd be everything in-between. But none of their opinions matters in my life, because at the end of the day it's me. I get to define my own value in things. So that was a big thing, that is a big ongoing lesson in my life, kind of dealing with people critiquing what they perceive as me and just kind of being cool with it.”