It starts, like a lot of good conversations do, with a pet pooch – Winnie the greyhound – making herself comfortable in the studio, and a humble, half-finished sentence that hints at just how big a phenomenon the interviewee is involved in by the high-profile names he drops when talking about them sharing their love for his work.
“I mean, yeah. It’s been pretty nice,” says Joff Bush, leaning back at this console, surrounded by instruments, knick-knacks, merchandise and awards. “People reach out. Or you meet them and they’re like, ‘Oh, hey, I’ve been listening to your stuff with my kids’. And you’re like ‘What?’”
The Brisbane-based composer is referencing direct praise from Hamilton’s Lin-Manuel Miranda, the Jonas Brothers, and film composer and pianist Kris Bowers. No small names in the world they all reside in.
For someone whose music is tied so closely to Bluey – a show about a cartoon Heeler family that has steadily gone beyond the confines of TV screens and uniquely Australian themes to embed itself into homes across the world – recognition snuck up on Bush in conversations, in offhand comments alluding to something grand he has played a key part in, in these random collisions where someone he admires already knows his work.
“Like, you don’t expect it,” he says. “That’s the best part. It’s just a lovely surprise.”
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And he’s careful with that word, “surprise”. Because there is a sense with Bush, who admits to first and foremost being excited to elevate a project but not claim entitlement to one, that once the moment stops being surprising is when things calcify.
That’s when the piano lid closes, and he’s not interested in doing that at this point in his career.
There’s a version of this story where everything makes perfect sense from the beginning – Bush as something of a childhood musical prodigy, a straight line from childhood to career; but this is not that version.
“I found this old book of mine from when I was like six,” he recounts. “It’s all these compositions I wrote; none of it made any musical sense. There were like 20 lines for each stave, the notes don’t have lines, there’s a picture of a hand playing the piano.
“It's me imitating what music looks like. But obviously I was into the process of writing music.”
Not that he speaks highly of his playing.
“I wanted to be a pianist but I was terrible,” he says, laughing. “Like, genuinely not one of those kids who just picks it up.
“But I think I just never had a problem being bad at it. You know that stage where people realise they’re not good, and they stop? I didn’t really hit that.”
By his teenage years, the edges started to sharpen. A piano teacher introduced him to jazz, and then came Claude Debussy, the 19th-century posterchild for dreamy, sweet piano tunes, and he “couldn’t imagine doing anything else”.
Not performing, at least, but composing and constructing something emotional, textured, and, like all good music, endured.
It was while a student at the Queensland Conservatorium – known more affectionately as The Con – that the shift to create became more obvious and supported.
“I was doing jazz piano,” he says. “But I was always hanging out with the film students and just writing, constantly writing all the time.”
Eventually, someone spoke out loud: you should probably switch to composition.
That’s when the building blocks of his philosophy for music, built around the clarity of ideas, took shape. This early deciphering of what Bush’s music said with every note was how the iconic and off-kilter Bluey theme song – which took on seven other forms before it became the tune that opens each episode – came to be.
“With something like Bluey, clarity is everything,” he says. “Kids need to understand what they’re feeling. It helps them feel safe.”
Meanwhile, the scale of the work has grown. From those early days – calling in his musical friends, scraping together live recordings, running through different motifs with creator Joe Brumm to soundtrack episodes in his cosy, eclectic South Brisbane studio – Bush’s working life has grown to something much bigger.
In 2021, Bluey: The Album made history as the first Australian children’s album to top the ARIA Albums Chart and reach #1 on the US Billboard Kids Albums Chart. Follow-ups Dance Mode! and Bluey: Rug Island repeated that success globally.
And now, Bush’s newest and most ambitious iteration in the Bluey discography yet: Bluey: Up Here.
Featuring 17 new orchestral recordings that keep the local setting and creation of Bluey alive by partnering with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra and its chamber orchestra Camerata, and conducted by Joseph Twist, this latest sonic journey into the world of Bluey is the one closest to Bush’s heart.
The theme for Bluey: Up Here is simple but expansive: growing up. Tracks from episodes much-loved episodes like Sleepytime, Flat Pack, and The Sign are reimagined in full symphonic format, including the incredibly precise and “old school” process of film scoring where vast pages of music were taped together by the team, while laughing and chatting away on the floor with many cups of tea.
There’s a surreal moment he recalls from the orchestral recording, watching the musicians warming up, hearing fragments of all his Bluey soundscapes collide with one another.
“A complete cacophony,” he says. “Like ten of my tracks all happening at once.”
Through the way Bush builds emotion – planting musical ideas early, letting them seed, sprinkle and bloom throughout the song – episodes like Sleepytime – steeped in references to Gustav Holst’s The Planets but thematically are all about a child’s sense of independence and resilience, are where his music and story bind together so tightly that one can’t be whole without the other.
It’s because of this indefatigable goal to bridge stories with sounds to elevate them even higher that has brought the accolades – multiple ARIA Awards, AACTA Awards, APRA Screen Music Awards. They haven’t really given Bush, architect of one of the most recognisable sounds in modern children’s television, that artistic sense of “arrival”; just momentum.
“I love the buzz I get from elevating a show, a film, a ballet, and I can feel that it's doing something for it,” he admits.
“I think I’ll always be chasing that, that buzz. Elevating shows that I love and to be whatever they can be, the artists around me, or under-represented voices – it’s an immaterial goal that I’m kind of addicted to.”
Joff Bush’s Bluey: Up Here is out now.
This piece of content has been assisted by the Australian Government through Music Australia and Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body
