Exploring The Many Facets Of Love On Their New Album

"Like any record that I work on, whether it's solo or with the band, I don't have a beginning and end to the dedicated period of songwriting," begins Thirsty Merc frontman Rai Thistlethwayte. It's been more than five years since the band cut a new studio album, and this time around, Shifting Gears was recorded completely independently and crowdfunded. They achieved their funding goal within 48 hours and promptly returned to the studio with Lindsay Gravina, who produced the first three Thirsty Merc albums.

"It did come together quickly actually," Thistlethwayte admits. "We had a lot of exuberance for the whole process. I think we were really missing the studio 'hang', and missing the studio 'hang' with new material. I get the feeling Lindsay missed us - we missed him, his mixing board, his amps and the way he tweaks the mids and the presence knob on an amplifier.

"It's talking about the love for your work, it's talking about the love for your bandmates..."

"Plus we had this guitar that apparently Gotye took on the road on his world tour and was sort of left to us, I don't know how, but it just sounds great and we kept on picking up and recording with it. So it made it's way onto the album."

Inevitably, like all classic pop-rock albums, there's a lot about love - seeking it, finding it, losing it - on Shifting Gears.

"Understanding Love, the opening track, was kind of in a way the song that broke it all open for me to realise that there's a new record here, and that song in particular, the fact that it's in a way autobiographical but showcases a slightly more adult version of what love is. You know, that love is more than just a romantic crush. It's talking about the love for your work, it's talking about the love for your bandmates, it's talking about the love for someone who's your romantic love interest, and then on the third verse it talks about the complexity of love in your family, which is the most deep and complex relationship you might actually have and how everything affects everything, and that at the end of the day everyone's trying to get a good understanding of what love is but it is bigger than all of us and is always that elusive thing.

"In the end it doesn't matter if we don't know what it is, what we've got to do is just realise that the love we have we've got to cherish. That's really what I was trying to go for in that song and each verse showcases the different types of love that you can have, I guess. And yeah, it's all told through the eyes of a travelling musician," he chuckles. "The older I get the less I understand about how all of this works because it keeps getting more and more dimensional. That's one of the reasons I thought that it might be a good opening track."