The Tides Of Change

Andy Bull has been making music for more than a decade, but he decided recently that he wasn’t doing it right. With his 30s looming, Bull sat down for a radical rethink. “I’ve been doing music since I was 15,” he explains. “I think it’s natural to check in from time to time and say, ‘Am I doing the right thing? Am I being a bit frivolous? When I decided to do music I was a teenager and now I’ll be 30. Do the same goals apply?’”

Bull concluded that the only way to continue working as a musician was to work hard. To commit fully, if he was going to commit; to walk into the studio every morning and treat his art like a job. “It changed the architecture of my life,” Bull says. “The changes were not so much what I was doing but how I was thinking about what I was doing. No matter what goals or yardsticks I achieve, I need to know that I’m doing this music just because that’s what I want to do on a day-to-day level, just because I really enjoy it. I want to know that I’m living in accordance with my own values and not just pursuing goals.”

“You pick out the things you like, you forget about all the things you’re attached to and just make something that works.”

For Bull, taking charge of his destiny meant self-producing his latest album (Sea Of Approval) and accepting that, sink or swim, he was a professional musician. It took a lot of anxiety out of his career; he stopped worrying if what he was doing was legitimate. Ironically, in the year when Bull decided to let go of his expectations, his music career surged forward. Three singles have been released from Sea Of Approval – Keep On Running, Baby I Am Nobody Now and Talk Too Much – and each has had major radio support. The tracks reflect a whole-album shift towards glistening electronic pop – another brave new world for the journeyman artist, but one that feels like home. It all started at Cash Converters, Bull explains.

“The last record I did was an acoustic-based EP. I remember thinking at the time that it wasn’t the most interesting way to do it; there were more interesting ways to go about things. A friend found a synthesiser for a couple of hundred bucks at a Cash Converters so I went up there and bought it, and it almost felt fated it was so powerful. From there, I started moving to other instruments, drum machines, so when I went to record this album it was a no-brainer because that was my palette of sound.”

For his current tour, Bull is focused on pulling that sound apart. With two keyboardists, a drummer and guitarist, he likens what we can expect from his upcoming shows to a set of covers in which he interprets his own songs, transforming these bedroom creations into a “spirited and raucous” live set. “You pick out the things you like, you forget about all the things you’re attached to and just make something that works.”