Matt Corby: “I'm Happy Having A Little Cottage Business And Playing To People That Like It”

Bryget Chrisfield

“Method acting” during songwriting sessions to keep things fresh and fun, dropping immaculately delivered lyrical f-bombs, channelling magpies carolling – Matt Corby scales new heights on his latest and fourth set, Tragic Magic.

Matt Corby(Credit: Maclay Heriot)

Matt Corby

When Matt Corby’s beaming face pops up on Zoom, we find him in his studio, Rainbow Valley, located in the Northern NSW hinterland near Byron Bay.

A guitar rests against an upright piano in the background, and Corby pans his device to show off a slew of consoles and display screens to one side. “I spend a lot of time in here, and I make records for other people, which I love doing,” Corby points out, before estimating “95 per cent” of his magnificent latest and fourth album, Tragic Magic, happened inside Rainbow Valley Studio.

We totally rated Corby’s previous record, 2023’s Everything’s Fine, but this one’s even better. Is it possible that Corby’s time spent in the producer’s chair (eg, Genesis Owusu, Budjerah, Tash Sultana) has further sharpened his melodic instinct and harmonic flair?

“It's a good way to be honing skills all the time and learning new tricks, and ways to make things fit together slightly better,” Corby offers, stroking his well-groomed beard. “I'm always learning. I feel like – with my ability to produce and record, and as a player – I'm always trying to improve.

“I mean, with this record, we just wanted each song to feel good. There was no, like, ‘The album has to be about this and sound like this.’ It was more a really weird mutant collection of genres and styles of writing and singing and stuff.”

He adds, “With the record before [Everything’s Fine], everything was in a big clump. We were like, ‘Let's start the writing and then after we feel like we've got enough songs, we'll start the recording,’ and that was all literally within six, seven weeks of going pretty hard at it.”

After his home was engulfed by flood waters in early 2022, Corby watched anxiously as his heavily pregnant partner and young son were rescued by a neighbour in a small inflatable dinghy. This occurred on the same day Corby had intended to start recording Everything’s Fine, but instead the whole family relocated to Rainbow Valley. Recorded a week later, that album’s lead single, Problems, contains flood-referencing chorus lyrics: “Just take all you can carry/ Take all you can hold.”

The core creative trio behind Everything’s Fine – Corby, Nat Dunn and Chris Collins – reconvened to create Tragic Magic, about which Corby reflects, “The songs were just written quite randomly, not in a clump. I hadn't really intended on putting these songs together on a record; they were just songs that were floating around from having people come into the studio and work with me, or me just mucking around on days that I had free to write and make tracks and beats and things.”

We read somewhere that when Corby was coming up with Big Ideas – Tragic Magic’s third single – he pictured “a cool guy in a skivvy, slightly gyrating but in a good way”. Would Corby care to elaborate on this particular style of gyrating?

“Slightly, in a non-offensive way – like 2026 male gyrating,” he clarifies, smiling. We would personally like to cap this imaginary gent off with a beret, because Big Ideas would sound right at home in a jazz club. “Yeah, and a very thin moustache,” Corby plays along. Slightly curled at the ends, perhaps? “Yeah, so French.”

When asked whether he often works visually like that during songwriting sessions, Corby contemplates, “Yeah, kind of – that's an instrument-by-instrument thing. If we're writing a song and it feels like something to me, then it'll be like, ‘Oh, the guy playing the bass has to be this kind of guy,’ you know?

“And he might be from a specific band, or…” he takes a laugh break. “I dunno, like a specific attitude to life. I do feel like it's a little bit of method acting or something that happens at this point. I mean, I feel like I've written a lotta songs in my life and you’ve gotta find ways to keep it fun and feel inspired and stuff. And that's been my method for the last little while.”

Tragic Magic’s strings-rich latest and fifth single, War To Love, opens with Corby dropping an f-bomb: “You’re FUCKING me UP!” – so delightfully unexpected and exasperated, yet still pitch-perfect.

“That's actually the demo vocal, which is hilarious,” Corby reveals. “I was gonna recut them and make them less pitchy and bad, and then everyone was like, ‘Nah, that's a really good vocal. Just leave it.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, okay.’ I still cringe a little at the vocal – I can just sing it so much better. I mean, I'll do it live. It's fine. Everyone’ll go, ‘It's so much better live!’ And I’ll go, ‘Yeah’.”

It has to be said, Corby’s vocals sound better than ever on album number five. On whether he’s learned how to look after his spectacular God-given instrument over the years, Corby discloses, “I've been very, very careful.

“I did a lotta training as a kid. I've been to ENT [Ear, Nose, and Throat] specialists a lot throughout my life. I actually have a dislocated vocal fold, which – actually, I haven't really told anyone that. I did it a long time ago, I think maybe around when Brother had just come out, and I was playing shows back to back every night.

“I think it was [during] the ninth or tenth show in a row that I went way too hard one day. I remember I was in Adelaide, and it was a venue on Hindley Street, just a small one. And I just felt something in my throat go [makes a popping sound].

“I immediately freaked out, finished the set and then lost my voice the next day. And I was like, ‘I've fucked my voice, here.’ And that's when I fully started the journey of, ‘I need to figure out exactly what to do pre-show, post-show,’ you know? ‘If I'm on tour, I won't drink, I won't eat certain foods.’

“There's a very standard routine that happens around each gig. And I won't play more than four shows in a row now, because you need a vocal rest day. I barely talk when I'm on the road, which goes into the whole drinking thing; I can't go out after a gig and go and play pool with the band or something. I'm just straight in bed, smashing water, you know? Gotta keep it healthy.

“A lotta younger artists, when I'm working with them in the studio, I try to help them with that, too. I’m like, ‘You gotta treat this like – you know, it is an instrument that is inside you. So you have to be healthy, and you have to treat it with respect, or else you're gonna damage it or lose it.’”

When asked to single out a couple of his own all-time favourite singers, Corby responds immediately, “D'Angelo. RIP,” before adding, “I fucking love Thom Yorke as a vocalist – someone that can get away with doing shit that no one else can get away with. And being wrong, but still perfect. I really admire that, because I'm the opposite: I want everything to be sung super-well. Then you hear someone like Thom do something odd, and you're like, ‘Why is that so good?’ It's so considered, and he's just so connected to the source of how music should feel. Yeah, it's amazing.

“There’s a lot of really great singers out there. Actually, there's a guy that tours with Teddy Swims – ‘cause I just did the run with Teddy – Dev [Devin Velez], his name is; he could be the best singer I've ever heard in my life. I mean, Teddy's probably one of the best singers I've ever heard in my life, too. But Dev is the cleanest, most technically amazing singer.

“Anyone that's got the flexibility and the tone, I'm super into. And something that feels a little bit different, like that Aaron Frazer guy [co-lead vocalist for Durand Jones & The Indications]. He sings so high. Anyone that hears his music for the first time is like, ‘That's a woman.’ And it’s like, ‘No, he's just got this crazy, beautiful, high soul voice.”

To this scribe, Corby’s heart-hurting vocal capabilities bring Daniel Merriweather to mind. Corby accepts this compliment graciously: “Oh, that's nice. I appreciate that, that's awesome. I listened to a lot of Daniel Merriweather when I was younger, for sure. Very good.”

Tragic Magic features soulful brass, heart-rending strings, cymbal swells, hand claps, deft drumming, sultry bass, layered harmonies, and so much more. Corby has played nearly all of the instruments on his records since album number two, 2018’s Rainbow Valley.

So, are there any instruments he doesn't play on Tragic Magic? “The trumpet and the strings. I can't play strings – violin's so hard!” he bemoans. “We did get string arrangers in for War To Love and Maker. On Burn It Down, we had arranged them ourselves. We use a Mellotron, which just has string samples on it, and then the strings players just played it.

“I never actually had a string arranger work with me before, on a record. And even when I would be recording horns, my good friend Dane [Laboyrie] – who is just an unbelievable horn player – he'll come into the studio, and I'll just sing him bits, and then he'll riff on those. And it's a nice little back and forward, but I'm actually in the room. I wasn't in the room for the string arrangers; they were sending me stuff back and forth.

“And there were some things where I'm like, ‘Honestly, free rein here – just do something really beautiful there… I don't wanna give you any direction, because I feel like you've got this.’ Which was kinda nice – not controlling it and just letting someone else be really clever, you know? And the players did such a good job, and they recorded them super-well. I shed a little tear when I got them back. I was like, ‘Oh, they made it really nice’...” he trails off laughing.

A magpie’s expressive carolling embellishes the appropriately titled Tragic Magic highlight, Maggie. “That was one song we were at Chris's studio for, down the road, and this bloody magpie started singing,” Corby recalls of the songwriting session that spawned Maggie. “And I swear, I never hear – magpies have a few songs, and one is like, three tones happening at once, going [demonstrates, while drawing the melody in the air] – like that one, which is the famous one.

“And then, for some weird reason, I dunno if was fucking mating season or something, but it's literally gone [bom-bom-badum’s a complex ditty]. And we were all like, ‘That's such a cool melody!’ And as soon as I heard it, I started recording it on my phone – just so I would remember it. And then that intro is me sitting at the piano and going, ‘What would the chords be?’ I'm working out the chords on the spot. What would be the best supporting chords for that melody? How could that feel really cool?’ And so you just hear me, like, maybe finding the right chords.

“And then the fucking magpie comes and sings on the last chord with me! And I was just like, ‘Oh my God, that's so good!’ And you can hear Chris making a coffee in the background, and everyone just sort of like – we weren't in songwriting mode yet, we all just got to the studio kind of thing.” Happy accident, then? “SUPER-happy accident, yeah. And then we sorta based the whole verse melody off that. The song came out quite quick, which was kinda nice.”

If you’re yet to see Corby’s standout Live From Sydney ABC NYE 2025 performance – or listen to the EP version, which dropped in February – we recommend you do so sharpish.

Was releasing Corby’s set as an EP the plan all along? “Well, no, ABC hit me up afterwards, and they were like, ‘Oh, we're getting a big response from this. Would you want to release the recordings?’ And I was like, ‘Sure’ – it didn't really bother me. I actually didn't wanna hear them.

“I don't like hearing my live shows back, because I get annoyed and I go, ‘Oh, I fucked that up. That was shit.’ I get really hard on myself. And my manager was like, ‘Just listen to the INXS one’ [Corby covered Never Tear Us Apart]. Then I was like, ‘Oh, okay.’ And I heard it back, and I was like, ‘Oh, that's actually – it's alright!’ It kinda surprised me; I was happy with it,” Corby admits.

“I mean, it was hard for me to do. I don't like being on TV. I think after [Australian] Idol, I was done. I don't like not being able to control the narrative, and I didn't like being too exposed. I'm happy just having a little cottage business and playing to people that like it, and not overreaching for anything or trying to get anyone's attention – I always fear that those things are perceived that way. And you really open yourself up for criticism if you fucking don't get it really right. And I was nervous – very nervous – about doing that show, but I'm glad I did. I faced some fears that night, which was good.”

As a mad INXS fan, this scribe usually cannot cope with hearing covers of their songs. But I wasn’t even tempted to change the channel when Corby tackled Never Tear Us Apart. “Well, that's good,” Corby acknowledges with a chuckle. “I mean, no doubt I didn't get all the INXS fans, but I'm glad that you didn't hate it.”

Tragic Magic drops on 16 April via Island Records Australia. He tours across Australia in June - tickets can be found here.

Presented by Frontier Touring and triple j