Sea Change

There's been a lot of change in the world of singer-songwriter Andrew Morris of late – nearly all of it resoundingly positive. He decamped from Brisbane to the relaxed climes of the Northern Rivers of NSW, bought an abandoned old church to renovate into a home, had his first child (a son, Banjo) and resurrected his old record label Soul Arch Recordings to release his sixth solo album, The Situationist. It's an accomplished, albeit stripped-back, collection of songs – and it's not even the album that he's been slaving over for the last couple of years.

“No, I've been working on one which I wrote the bulk of when I was in Berlin – so May and June last year,” the laidback Morris explains. “I got back in August and started recording that, because I'd written most of the songs over there or before I'd went and I'm really happy with it and everything. It's going to come out, but with all of this stuff happening in my life it feels like now's not the time. I want to do it properly and I haven't quite finished it either, so I just wanted to do something fresher too because I've been working on it for so long: engineering it, recording it, producing it, playing on it – it was pretty taxing.

“And I want to do something rootsy because [Morris' bluegrass outfit] The Wilson Pickers have been on a bit of a hiatus, so I decide to do something fun and acoustic and a bit rootsy. Also because I moved down here I've been playing lots of smaller cafe gigs or busking gigs at the markets and stuff and I often get asked – because I had five albums – 'Which one of your CDs sounds most like what you're playing now?' and it's, like, 'Umm, none of them really!' I thought I'd just make something that reflected that, so it's just a record to suit where I'm at really. It's songs that I've had floating around and covers that I've been playing in my live set that I've never recorded.”

Due to the relatively impromptu nature of The Situationist, Morris roped in some mates from Brisbane folk collective The Gin Club and the whole thing was laid down in a matter of days.

“We recorded it nice and quick – we did it in about a week, not mucking around and just getting it out there. It was turned around super-quick after I conceived the idea. I did have a brief idea about doing it a while back, but then I scrapped it and kept working on the Berlin-inspired record. And to be honest I had some songs saved up for the Pickers that are on this record – they were fucking around too long, so I went, 'Bugger it, time to look after me!'” he laughs heartily.

“So I grabbed a few of those and the covers and that made up the ten tracks. It all happened pretty quick. I wrote a few songs when I was in Vietnam on holiday and then I emailed [The Gin Club's] Scotty [Regan], Dan [Mansfield] and Conor [Macdonald] and they were down pretty much the next week and we did the beds of the band tracks in two days, while the rest I just sat around with a mic. It was easy because I play these songs so much anyway, so I just set up a vocal mic and a guitar mic and that was pretty much it. We were all on the same page due to shared experience so it was pretty straightforward.”