Troy Cassar-Daley: Home Boy.

Troy Cassar-Daley plays The Healer tonight. Long Way Home is in stores now.

From his first visit to the Tamworth country music festival at the grand old age of 11, Troy Cassar-Daley’s musical path was set. Four albums down the track, the now Brisbane based muso has made Australian country music his own, and even the most casual of listeners would be find it hard not to be impressed with his latest release Long Way Home.

“It was a really interesting process for me, because I had a change of record company and a change of management all at the same time,” he explains of the albums genesis. “For some artists it can be the cause of a big hiatus, but I used the time to sit down and get writing, so it turned out I had more time to put this together than any of the last three albums I’ve done.”

“You’ve got all that time to make your first record, and after that you want to make the next one just as good, but you don’t have time to sit around and write it. This time I had about 18 months to sit down and do some travelling, and write some songs. That’s where a lot of these songs have come from. It’s really good for the brain. I think it’s been the key to people appreciating it’s a different album to the ones I’ve done before. I didn’t want to make this the album everyone expected me to make. I could have gone through the motions, but I got to write with people like Paul Kelly and Ross Wilson. You raise the bar a bit.”

This time around, Troy also worked with producer Nash Chambers, elder brother of Kasey and the man responsible for the production of her massive selling second album Barricades & Brickwalls.

“He had a lot of say in regards to the songs,” Troy explains. “I’d just do these demos under the house with an acoustic guitar. It’s so nice to send things off and have the feedback come back. That helped me, and we all got what we wanted for the recordings. That was the way we started the recording. When he sent me the final tracklisting for the album, he just said, put it on, don’t look at the listing, and tell me what you think. It was just amazing. It was really great to all be on the same page with everything.”

Are you a prolific songwriter?

“I try to be mate, and at the moment I’ve got about another four on the boil. I want to turn around in a year and get into the studio again. I think the more you write, the better you get as well. You know, practice makes perfect. Well, you never get perfect, but there’s plenty of practice,” he laughs. “It’s nice turning point, especially with some of the folkier elements that there are on this album.”

Actually, I was wanting to ask about some of the folkier stuff. The album opener River Road almost has a kind of James Taylor feel to it.

“I know, we’ve had a lot of requests for shows for that before it was even released. A lot of people have compared it to James Taylor. I think to be able to get into a swampy blues kind of thing on a couple of tracks just breaks you away from the mould. It lets you introduce people, especially at some of the city gigs, to what we call country music. It’s getting really broad now.”

Do you just look at what you do as more roots based music now than as country?

“I think we’ve stripped it back to what you’d call roots based. It’s still country in a lot of ways, but it’s nice to have to the rootsy elements in there. That to me has been the most important progression in the music so far. In the first three albums I never really had a chance to get into the kind of music I sit under my house and play. It’s so nice to play stuff on an album that you’ve been mucking around with. It was very relaxed mate, it was very low stress, and that’s what I liked about it. It wasn’t too intense, you know.”

“It’s been so much fun to just delve into the kinds of things we’ve been listening too. I mean, of course there’s going to be some Merle Haggard kind of influences as well, but I really did try and use a lot of different things.”