Trying To Espace The Corporate Machine

"I'm under no illusions about where the world's going," Ash Grunwald, shorn of his trademark dreadlocks, admits as he ponders his latest album, NOW. "This record just reflects where I'm at, you know? I've been on the road a long time, travelled really far and wide, I'm now a father, a family man - I dunno, just a whole lot of different things - and I just write really honestly on this album and everything was from the heart. It always is but I probably usually... I don't know, keep it a bit more polite."

Grunwald explores a number of levels of consciousness on the new album — earth consciousness, self-consciousness, higher consciousness.

"There are a lot of internal things," he explains, "where I'm at and things I've gone through with changing spiritual beliefs, some consciousness things... But at the same time I'm also looking at the outer world and almost giving that the same treatment as well. The more activism I get involved in and the more I talk to people, the more I see what's going on and I think, 'Oh my God!'"

A vocal supporter of the anti-coal seam gas campaign, Grunwald has performed at anti-fracking campaign events on both sides of the continent, and that's addressed in the song The Worst Crimes Are Legal (Revolution).

"What's really bizarre is that we're all... Australia and Canada for example, we're just suffering the same things. The way Canadians talk about their Prime Minister, they could be talking about Tony Abbott — he couldn't be as bad but, you know. I went to this beautiful place in northern British Columbia, quite isolated, lots of mainly indigenous people living up there and really alternative people, and it's so earthy and old school and really inspiring — these people are living outside of society — and then they go, 'It's great but where the salmon spawn they're about to put a gas pipeline through there.' I thought I'd found a little corner and yet that corporate machine, it's almost like it's attacking humanity."

Musically, NOW sonically references the power trios of the late '60s, from Hendrix to Led Zeppelin (yes, not strictly a trio but instrumentally...), but the soul/gospel man has also come further to the fore.

"With this album it was all about stepping it up and I just thought, especially now I'm starting to play the States more, I wanted to try and get the sound of a classic album. I know it's up to me to write the songs and perform them to try and make a classic album, but if you can make it sonically sound like a classic album, with a really good producer, then you're halfway there. And I'd never really had that treatment. It definitely is a luxury these days and this was my first and maybe my only time - considering it's not too easy to make money selling records - of doing it the old school way."