Feels "Like A Bit Of A Phony, As An Australian, Playing Americana"

Around this time last year, LA-based Melbourne singer-songwriter Tim Wheatley released his first solo record, an EP titled Crooked Saint, in The House Of Blues on Sunset Boulevard. The lead track, Burning The Midnight Oil, had been lifted from an album he'd recorded before moving to LA but then had remixed in the US by Niko Bolas, whose credits include Neil Young and Johnny Cash. The plan was to follow the EP with the album. A year on and that album, Cast Of Yesterday, is finally being released, but in not quite the same form as when it left Australia.

"We'd decided to make this record ourselves and basically we hit every brick wall that you possibly could hit and some more," Wheatley admits, on the line from LA. "The move to America as well sort of put us backwards, which is why I released the Crooked Saint EP last year, so it could keep me working at least over here. So that served its purpose and d'you know what? Even after months of lugging this harddrive around with the entire album and bits and pieces on it, we literally only got it together two nights before the scheduled release. Just like my packing for our trip back to Australia!"

"I feel weird with that genre looming around."

"A few months before were mixed it, I was looking at the 20 songs that we'd recorded and I started to get worried. And of course I had a big artillery of new songs that I wanted to put on that I thought were potentially good for the record. But then we were listening to the record and the continuity of all those early songs sounded a hell of a lot better and made for a much more cohesive record.

"So I took it to Nik at Capitol Records and said, 'Will you help me piece this thing together? I don't know where I'm at'; I had no game plan."

There might be plenty of American references in his songs, whether to writers like Hemingway or places like New York, but there are just as many Australian references, and Wheatley delivers it all in a very obviously Australian accent.

"Everyone here seems determined to 'brand' my music," he laughs. "I've even heard people referring to it as Americana, and I feel weird with that genre looming around because I feel like a bit of a phony, as an Australian, playing Americana. I'm sticking with 'folk' at the moment. It's singer-songwriter. I toured with Ryan Bingham last year, who's a bit of an icon of Americana over here now, so I suppose they started associating the name with that as well — didn't make my life any easier, but that's alright," he chuckles.