The Stories Behind Vance Joy's Debut Album

Recorded in the US with renowned producer Ryan Hadlock (Foo Fighters, Gossip, The Lumineers), Dream Your Life Away is the debut album from Vance Joy, aka James Keogh.

Among its 13 tracks is, of course, the one that broke the Melburnian not only nationally but internationally, Riptide topping the triple j Hottest 100, cracking the US Billboard Hot 100 and hitting number 10 in the UK, as well as going Top 10 in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Ireland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. So sit back and let Keogh walk you through his brand new pride and joy, five years in the making.

Winds Of Change

Actually, a couple of songs have their origins maybe seven years ago, in 2007, but I wrote this song at the end of 2009 and it was the first song that I’d written that I was really proud of and the first that was coherent and made sense. So it got me on the path of songwriting and that I guess was where the dream, to become a songwriter, began, to keep writing songs. I really think the heart of the song is in some of the details, like the grass in the backyard growing, and watching it grow over time, reaching over in the middle of the night and accidentally poking the other person in the eye. Those little bits, those are the flavoursome parts of the song.

Mess Is Mine

That was actually a line that my mum offered me when I was writing the song

I wrote this song in kind of two different chunks. The song started with the bridge, which I initially wrote on piano, and I think that’s the heart of the song as well, the idea that, “This still makes sense to me, your mess is mine.” That was actually a line that my mum offered me when I was writing the song, and I took it. It’s my attempt at something similar to [The Beatles’] Norwegian Wood, where you’re in her house and she shows you her room, and trying to create a feeling of the atmosphere of the place… Anyway, that’s what I was kind of shooting at. Then the riff of the verse came from another song and it was easy to write a melody over that riff, so it was kind of bringing those two things together. With me, it always starts with the melody – a guitar riff or a melody over a chord progression.

Wasted Time

I really like this song. It’s kind of been the one that we’ve most enjoyed playing live. I got the idea when I was at an open mic night and I saw a guy playing a cover of a Spencer P Jones song that was about a guy wondering why this girl is hanging around. He’s kind of like a loser and I really like that idea for a song of “Why are you wasting time on me?” It’s a good line and the producer made it better by adding a drum beat and this keyboard that kind of lifted it up and made it uplifting and epic.

Riptide

This song started in 2008 with a couple of lines that I didn’t think much of, the first two lines of the verse – the one about dentists in the dark – and then in 2012 I wrote a melody on the ukulele which ended up being the chorus melody. It’s a real patchwork, this song, of images and ideas. I met a magician’s assistant around the time I was writing the song and so she kind of found her way into the song. Michelle Pfeiffer, I don’t know where that came from – I was kind of envisaging a character that had ambitions of stardom or something like that. That’s the kind of character Michelle Pfeiffer was in The Fabulous Baker Boys and that’s what came to mind, so I used that reference to set it up. Once it all came together, it somehow made sense given it’s such an eclectic mix of bits.

Who Am I

I really like that line, “Lay my dreams at your feet.” That was the starting point for the song and I guess it’s a bit of a tamer version of a George Harrison song – “What is my life, without you” [What Is Life]. That must have been somewhere in my brain when I was writing the song so we went all out with the ukulele and African kind of drum-wailing, which my drummer Ed really likes to do, so we kind of let him go all out on this song. It’s a lighter song after a couple of heavy ones.

From Afar

This one I wrote in 2010 and wrote the outro in 2012, and it’s a been a song I’ve played regularly the last couple of years because I just think it’s a really universal theme of loving someone from a distance. It’s a sad kind of song though the outro is a bit more upbeat and slightly more epic. That was something that happened when we produced the song. It’s an old favourite of mine anyway.

We All Die Trying To Get It Right

There’s this movie called Infamous, which is about Truman Capote writing In Cold Blood, and there’s a character in it, a farmer who talks about the way life changes and he says that line, “We all die trying to get it right,” and I wrote that down at the time and that’s probably one of the few instances where I started with lyrics. I really wanted to put those lyrics into a song and, yeah, luckily I actually found a place.

"Dogs, for some reason are evocative – I can empathise with dogs; there’s some kind of connection there"

Georgia

This one is the song I was saying I started in 2007 with a guitar riff that sounded kind of groovy and had a cool vibe that the guitarist that I had when I was at St Kevin’s [College, Melbourne] could play, but I never found a place for it. I tried at different times to put it into a song but it never fitted comfortably, and then on New Year’s Day this year I was just mucking around and finally I just came up with a verse that sat nicely over the top of that guitar progression, and I had some more words that were kind of laying in wait from earlier that year – I wrote a chorus but I couldn’t find a place for it – and I stuck the two together and the song was done in, like, half an hour. It just needed that breakthrough moment.

Actually it’s one that we’ve been really enjoying playing. It was kind of a gift, you know, ‘cause we’d done all the recording basically and then that song arrived and I was excited to record it really sparkly. It’s a nice change on the album, ‘cause most of the album is me strumming away and this is more of a delicate thing, a different song.

Red Eye

I got a couple of ideas from this film, Scent Of A Woman. Al Pacino has a bit of a rant and talks about even a dog gets a warm bit of pavement to lie down and bask in the sun, and I really like that image. Dogs, for some reason are evocative – I can empathise with dogs; there’s some kind of connection there – so I kind of created a situation where there’s a relationship where someone comes home to see someone and they’re trying to fix the relationship or overcome a challenge or the obstacle they’re facing, I guess a bit like Paul Kelly’s song, To Your Door, the idea of wanting to give it another go but not sure how it’s going to turn out right or not.

First Time

It was a song I started writing in 2012 and I didn’t think much of it and put it away and I was reading A Moveable Feast, a Hemingway novel, and he refers to a friend hearing a story for the first time and hearing it having an impact on him, totally getting into the story, and then hearing that same story told a bunch of times afterwards but though the telling gets better and better the feeling is never the same, and I like that idea, so I pinched that idea for the song.

Then it was a phone recording I had lying around. I needed something extra for it and I liked the idea of the first cut is the deepest. I used it to write a chorus that had some bite.

All I Ever Wanted

This one started after a coffee with my bass player Jono. He showed me some cool music with strange lyrics – I can’t remember the songs, but I got home inspired to write. My friend Dan told me about a film where a child is christened and gets holy water in his eye.

Best That I Can

I wrote this a week before we turned the album in – I needed to get it down. It was inspired by a short story by John Steinbeck called The Chrysanthemums, and the song was produced by me and my drummer, Edwin White, in a couple of half-days. Very proud of this one.

My Kind Of Man

It was inspired by a Facebook post from my uncle about being a simple kind of man (Lynyrd Skynyrd lyrics). I like the electric stuff softly in the background and the voice right up close.

Vance Joy's Dream Your Life Away is out this Friday 5 September.