Outing The Muso

Seeing the name of the artist, your first thought might very well reflect actor Guy Pearce’s own misgivings about pursuing his other lifelong passion: writing songs. “Oh no, not another actor wanting to play rock star!” Yet listen to his debut album, Broken Bones, and you’ll hear a thoughtful, mature, intelligent singer-songwriter working in a musical context not a million miles from, say, Tim Finn.

As it happens, there is a Finn connection. The core of the album was recorded at Neil Finn’s studio in New Zealand, while the players were pulled together by former Split Enz keyboards wizard Eddie Rayner. Even so, the whole idea of recording an album wasn’t something Pearce sought or rushed into.

“It was a great organic process,” Pearce explains, because, “having been working on music over the years and not doing anything with it because I didn’t want to inflict myself on, er, on everybody,” he chuckles, “really, in meeting (drummer) Michael Barker, when we were doing (Tim Finn musical) Poor Boy, he just came to me and said, ‘What do you do musically? Obviously you sing, what do you do?’ And I said, ‘Oh, I’ve got a studio at home and I make music but I don’t really do anything with it.’ And he said, ‘I’d love to hear it. Do you have a drummer? Do you want some drums on things?’ And I said, ‘ Sure, alright, I’d be happy to,’” he chuckles again. “I was thrilled, obviously.

“So he just came and started recording drums for me on a few different tracks while he was still here in Melbourne. Then he suggested that maybe we send some of the songs to Eddie Rayner, who he knew, and Eddie seemed keen enough to sort of follow it up as well and he was keen for me to come over to New Zealand and work over there. And I liked the idea of it, actually. My dad was from New Zealand. He didn’t work as a musician but he was quite musical, and I thought it was nice, that for my first record of my own stuff I was recording there in Auckland.”

Of the songs recorded with Rayner in 2011, only about half a dozen feature on the final album.

“After, I brought the songs back here. I was away for a lot of 2011, so I took the songs with me and while I was on different movie sets, I was doing rough mixes of things, pulling arrangements and reconstructing of things, because we’d done probably nine or ten takes of each song in New Zealand and so I was working out which of the takes I wanted to use and also working out what harmony vocals I wanted to do... I think it was during the first half of 2012, when I was doing a lot of harmony vocal work, there was something about doing that harmony vocal stuff that made me go, ‘Yeah, now I’m really feeling like this is my stuff – this is where I wanna go with it.’”