Why He Wanted To Create A 'Cooking At Home' Record

When Danny Yau moved into the then-bohemian enclave of Sydney's inner west many moons ago to chase his musical ambitions, little did he realise the role that the region would eventually play in his adult life. Now, after years spent in numerous bands — most notably his tenure as frontman for rockers The Reservations — Yau is launching his debut solo album, Do You Think We'll Live Here Forever?, a well-crafted and poppy exploration of the trials and tribulations inherent in inner-city living. It's an endearingly affectionate collection, a tone that Yau explains he stumbled onto by happy happenstance.

"I just didn't really feel like making any 'oh you really hurt me' type songs, or 'damn the world is against us' songs."

"I'm the kind of guy who always has songs written — and I'm working on a new batch of songs now — but when I wanted to record something I didn't have much time; I realised that I was going to be a dad, and then halfway through the pregnancy I realised, 'Oh my God, if I don't record soon I won't be able to record these songs for a couple of years!'" he explains with a laugh. "So I booked a studio very quickly with [producer] Tim Kevin, and when we came down to choosing the songs we lost all the rock songs and we lost all the angry sort of heartbreak songs that every songwriter has, and we ended up with a really sweet record.

"And that was very interesting — there were some songs that the rest of the guys I played with really loved, but I just didn't really feel like making any 'oh you really hurt me' type songs, or 'damn the world is against us' songs, so it ended up being all of the sweet, sort of loving, tender songs. Maybe that's just what I was feeling. At the end of the record [when I listen] I look back and say, 'Oh, OK, I was actually quite positive for those six months.'"

There seems little point channeling manufactured outrage if you're not feeling it; that usually comes across to the listener as obvious and contrived anyway.

"Yeah, and we weren't feeling it live either," Yau continues. "It was just really nice to sing about something fun, and I always have those sort of songs and I really love bands like The Zombies or Jonathan Richman who have that sweetness — that was definitely on the mind, and that was definitely how we approached things when we recorded it as well. 'Nice' is not necessarily what people go in to make music for — they want to be rock or they want to be extreme — but I found myself going, 'No, I want things to be nice this time around. I want to make something that doesn't add to this fractured world.'

"There's a song in particular at the end of the record, that Unafraid Of The Dark song, and that started as a song about Scotland funnily enough, about that Scottish referendum and how hateful it was. They were trying to scare people with things like, 'If you don't vote to stay in Britain you'll lose your favourite TV shows!' and all of these scare tactics, and I just summed that up as being "afraid of the dark" — just people trying to get other people to be afraid of the dark. Obviously the verse specifically about Scotland got lost somewhere along the line but that feeling remains, just sort of going, 'Maybe there's something to be positive about.'"

The songs on Do You Think... are by nature quite personal from a lyrical perspective, and Yau tells that his past is a fertile ground for his songwriting.

"Yeah, they're definitely songs that come from me and where I've been in the last few years," he concedes. "There are characters, and I like writing about my friends and people that I meet — I find that really interesting — but there's definitely what I see in [the songs]. I've tried to talk myself into believing, 'These songs aren't about me', but they definitely are. Definitely. Like with Courtney's Moving To Newtown (To Start A Band), I'm not a 19-year-old girl anymore but I was that guy at one point moving to Newtown and living in share houses, going, 'This is my future and I'm going to do something different to all of my friends who are studying commerce at Sydney University.' I've never felt more free and I love that people are still doing that — it's not me anymore, but that was me and I still love that part of me and I still love that part of people."

"How do you age gracefully when your heroes are The Beach Boys who made music for 15-year-olds?"

This isn't your typical nostalgia where you assert that things were better in the good old days, instead it's almost a gentle reminiscing about a time remembered fondly.

"Yeah, I don't even know if things were better back then anyway," Yau chuckles. "I do teaching now so I meet a lot of 20-year-olds at universities and stuff like that and they're constantly inspiring. And I've had experiences where I get drunken, hungover kids turning up in my class and I'll have a chat with them in the break and they'll tell me about their big night and seeing some amazing band or they'd met some girl, and I'll go, 'Wow, you're having the time of your life!' I don't feel like I miss that, because I did that and I'm really quite happy to leave that behind, although I love revisiting it and seeing that it still exists.

"I don't know if anyone can do that forever, and I think it's about trying to age gracefully — especially aging gracefully when you love teenage pop music. How do you age gracefully when your heroes are The Beach Boys who made music for 15-year-olds? Or Jonathan Richman — he's so childish and sometimes he sings about washing machines and catching a bus, and that's sort of timeless too. But I'm not 20 anymore and I'm totally fine with that."

Yau has played recently in Adam Gibson's band The Ark-Ark Birds, and this sentiment is reminiscent of a line from their songs, Long Time Dead, where Gibson offers sagely, "They weren't better days, just younger ones".

"Yeah, definitely," Yau concurs." Knowing Adam who is such a great lyricist really lit a fire under me, and all of the different bands that I play in lit a fire under me, to make something lyrically strong — to try really, really hard with the lyrics and try to hit certain emotions. The influence of Adam is definitely the sense of place — I'm trying to really, really drill down and say, 'These songs live on a certain street' and how attractive that is. He writes a lot about Bondi where he's from — which is an area that I don't really know that well — so I just thought, 'What happens if I set these songs in my neighbourhood?'

"It's kinda funny, there's a song on the album called The Inner West Misses You that references a lot of places, and I'd get up in Newtown and sing it in a bar and the first few times people laughed — they just thought it was a funny song because 'He's mentioning pubs that I've been to!' — but now people in those venues aren't laughing, they realise that these places fit in [to the narrative] and there's not that weirdness. I love that. Then you play a venue where no one's heard that song before and they all laugh again — I love how that works, and how people react to things."

Yau recently spent a fairly lengthy sojourn overseas, and explains that this stint abroad eventually gave him a better perspective on his own relationship with the region that he calls home.

"I didn't know if I'd ever move back to the Inner West, but I did end up back here," he reflects. "All my friends were sort of still here so I got a flat, and then I thought, 'Well maybe I should move to the beach?', or 'Maybe I should move to Melbourne?' and I never did — I decided that this is my home. I actually said that line that's the title of the album to my partner: 'Do you think that we'll live here forever? Should we double down on this and buy a car and have a kid and grow old here?' It was a really, really conscious decision, and making that decision was part of making the record.

"In the era of Instagram and everyone taking photos of themselves overseas and trying to present this best version of their lives, there's this real call to go, 'No, we need to go and live a bigger life somewhere else', but this is my little 'cooking at home' record — it just wanted to be this little, intimate suburban record, this little thing about flats and staying home and bottles of wine. That was my life and I was really happy about it, and I know it's not 'cool', but I wanted to be able to mine that fertile ground of little suburban records."

We premiered Danny Yau's Do You Think We'll Live Here Forever? here, and he provided us a track-by-track.