In The House

Broomhall has been a stalwart on the south-east Queensland music scene for roughly a decade now, and on his fifth record Jangle House he's setting out to keep things interesting and fun, not only for the listeners but for himself too. More commonly associated with chilled out acoustic and relaxed electric fare, the Sunshine Coast native has tackled a variety of styles on his latest LP, offering up some gruff rock, a bit of full-blooded blues, some quiet, introspective moments; hell, there's even a bit of sexy, sexy sax for good measure.

“That was a bit of a flashback to the Kenny G era!” he cackles. “Most people that have heard [the album] are pretty surprised because it covers a lot of ground musically. A lot of people say, 'You're going for this or that', and I just say it's the way I want to write and I want to try styles that I haven't written before. There's rockabilly and Southern-influenced country rock and I've never written stuff in that vein. And I want to play it and sing it because you are doing it so many times that you'll get bored otherwise.

“I'm writing songs that I want to be a bit more third person in, in order to connect with the audience in a different way,” he carries on. “And I've tried to make the songs pretty light, not stuff that you have to listen to five or six times too really get into it – just something that people can get into straight away. [But] it's a bit like escapism for me this CD, because there's a lot of things that were close to me and meant a lot to me that I sung about, and there's other stuff that I just wanted to write, and vocal melodies that I just wanted to sing so that's why I wrote them. It seems a little selfish but I just wanted to write songs I'll enjoy playing.”

The songwriter put down the skeleton tracks for Jangle House with his established bandmates Zoltan Campbell (bass) and Chris O'Neill (drums) at The Guitar Shop, the iconic store in Paddington.

“It's been a music shop since the early-'80s,” Broomhall informs, “and like all the shops along that Latrobe Terrace there, they're all in rambling old houses. It's an iconic and charismatic place and somewhere that a lot of music has been made so it has a rich heritage, and we were lucky enough that it closed for five days over Easter 2011 so we could basically set up a temporary studio to bash out the base tracks.”

Broomhall says it was important for him to really get to know the songs and this raw approach – the three men facing each other in one room – was the truest way to do that. Honest is how this record was made, and because of this the Queenslander hopes that the songs will stand tall now and in the future.

“For me this album's going to creep into people's houses for years and creep into their lives, and it's cool to see it happen,” Broomhall concludes philosophically. “Sometimes you want to see it happen quicker but it slowly just trickles out there. Great songs don't go out of fashion like bands, great songs will be there forever, and I'd like to think I've written a couple of them hopefully that will see people's kids born and see people put to rest.”