From The Heart

There's a certain appropriateness to singer/songwriter Jack Carty naming his current run of intimate, stripped-back acoustic dates A Tale Of Two Cities. The dates are based around two residencies – one in Sydney, one in Melbourne. But when you consider that, for Carty, the past year or so has been, as he puts it in press release, “one of the best and worst of my life”, it's easy to equate it all to the opening lines of Charles Dickens' immortal novel A Tale Of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”

“That's true,” Carty admits, on his mobile on a wintery day in a Sydney park. “I hadn't thought of that. It was just something I scribbled down for the poster – I do all my own artwork, you know? But it was mostly the best of years; especially, like, when I look back on it now, I'm really stoked with how last year went, but while I was living it all, some of it got pretty intense. And it gave me an album that I'm pretty proud of.”

That album, Break Your Own Heart, is Carty's second and essentially charts the sacrifices made in order to follow your artistic dreams – particularly and perhaps inevitably the security of a stable relationship which, in his case, didn't survive the constant touring, both nationally and across North America, that's part and parcel of building a musical career.

“Certainly this album is very, very personal,” he explains. “The album before, One Thousand Origami Birds [his 2011 debut], had a lot of made-up tales on it. But I think they're pretty much the product of the point where I was writing the albums. The first album I wrote when I was in a pretty long-term, comfortable relationship and things were pretty stable, and the second album was in this kind of hugely tumultuous period of uncertainty and movement. I think, if nothing else, the first album had a lot of invented stories and invented characters just because my life sort of wasn't that interesting at the time,” Carty chuckles.

“I wrote about twenty-seven, twenty-eight songs for this record. It was an idea in the back of my head that whatever songs went on it, I wanted to try and put them on in the order that they were written if I could; if it worked. I didn't want to do it if it didn't work in terms of an arc – you know, it wasn't going to be a concept album or anything like that – but I arranged them that way and they seemed to work. So essentially it tells the story, the whole thing – the breakup, which was like my doing, and I just felt really confident about it – and then kind of like the fall from that and then, from talking to people the seemingly inevitable getting back together, then the second breakup, which was like her doing.

“So it kind of built the whole thing in order, which I don't think is that explicit if you don't necessarily know, but that was kind of the idea. It's kind of nice to be able to look into it and track exactly what happened,” he laughs. “Someone asked me the other day if I ever get nervous about putting this personal record all out there. The reason I don't really is 'cause everyone I talk to has a similar story to tell. It helps other people understand things, helps you understand it better. Now, I'm feeling really happy, so we'll see what happens next. I've been writing a lot. I mean, I'm still very much focused on the new record, but it's funny how you get it out of your system.”

In a sense, the whole cycle began with the success of that first album, One Thousand Origami Birds. Within days of releasing it, Carty headed off to play Canadian Music Week and South By South West and also some shows in New York, consolidating what he'd set up on a previous US trip that had seen him pick up gigs through people who contacted him on discovering his debut EP, 2010's Wine And Consequence, on the Internet.

He's travelled to the US three times now and has a booking agent over in New York, but it's been a year now since the last trip, which also gave him a very different song. Break Your Own Heart opens with a track titled The Length Of Canada, which Carty wrote with Grammy Award-winning American songwriter Dan Wilson, who has co-written with the Dixie Chicks, Adele, P!nk, Jason Mraz and, closer to home, Missy Higgins, Keith Urban and Gin Wigmore.

“The first time I went to America to play, I played in Los Angeles and my manager had met Dan previously. So he basically sent him a couple of links to my songs and said, 'This is my artist – do you wanna maybe get together and write a song or something?' And Dan wrote back saying that he'd love to do it and he would if he could. So I spent a couple of days in LA and it ended up not working out for us to catch up and write together, but I played this show and he came to the show.

“So the next time I came to LA, which was on the South By South West trip, we made a real effort to catch up,” Carty explains. “I had a song that wasn't written, but I had the guitar riff and kind of an idea for a lyric and was telling him about it over lunch. He invited me over to his house later that week, on the day that I was leaving – when you're flying back from America you fly out at, like, 11pm – so I just spent the whole day before the flight at his house and finished the song and had an amazing time. He's an amazing guy.”

Since then, Carty has found another person with whom he's just started doing a bit of song co-writing in Papa Vs Pretty singer/songwriter, guitarist and pianist Thomas Rawle, whom he met through Papa Vs Pretty's double bassist Gus Gardiner, who also plays in Carty's band and tracked all the string parts on the new album. Meanwhile, there's the current album to work on following the big album launch tour in May with the full band.

“So we didn't want to just go straight out again, just over a month later and do the same thing again,” he explains. “We wanted to change it up a bit I guess. So the whole idea behind this is to play smaller, more intimate shows that are free and play a couple of them [as residencies] and grow it organically and try and make it a bit of a night that hopefully people want to come back to.”