Songs From The Margin

Jeff Lang's 15th album, I Live In My Head A Lot These Days, is quite the curious collection of songs, at least lyrically, what with the opening cut, Watch Me Go, featuring a mugging, and closing track, The Promise Of New Year's Eve, a gentlemanly bit of break-and-enter.

“My basic latent criminality's the link – well spotted!” Lang chuckles before explaining how this batch of songs came together. “It was the usual accumulation process of songs written over the past two years. A song like Standing On The Shore is a good example. I actually wrote that song as scribblings in the margins of another song that I was sort of consciously trying to write from a particular point of view as an exercise. Halfway through I kind of knew it wasn't working – those things rarely do for me – but in the process I'd had these seemingly random things come to me that I'd scribbled in the margins, and I looked at them and realised that song was actually good. That's the way it works best; things just subconsciously come through and I'll sing it and hear it and go, 'Wow, okay, cool. So that's what that's about,' like a listener, as opposed to getting out your tool kit and hammering out songs. Petra Goes To The Movies; I just saw that line in a magazine article. It just sort of jumped out as kind of a cool line, and then I went out to the kitchen and just scribbled down a bunch of verses, picked up a guitar and that riff sort of fell out as I was reading the verses, 'cause they had a rhythm to 'em. I played it to Allison, my wife, and she said, 'Where'd that come from?' 'I dunno!' That one needed a little craftsmanship, had to pull out the hammer and the saw and kind of make a patio for it, 'cause it needed a middle section.”

While the overseas touring has essentially been solo, Lang put in a performance in Glasgow with his latest side project, Maru Tarang, featuring Sydney-based tabla master Bobby Singh along with north Indian musicians Asin Langa and Bhungar Manganivar. “And the good thing about that? No shortage of curry! I was in Glasgow for six days and I must have had ten curries – great!” he laughs. “Seriously though, those guys are tremendous. There's actually a record in the can that'll probably come out early next year.”