Sydney based indie folk legend Josh Pyke is no stranger to success. After a long running career, Pyke has earned himself a slew of awards and has received international acclaim. However, a decade on from the release of his first album Feeding The Wolves, it is only now with the unveiling of But For All These Shrinking Hearts set to be released July 31st, that he is beginning to feel as though his place in the Australian music scene is solidified.
“For the first time in my career, as much as it’s been almost ten years, I only just now am starting to feel established… In the past I’ve always had a fear that this could end, this could be the last song I ever write or this could be the last album. And I had that fear up until the last album, and from releasing the last album onwards I just felt like there doesn’t need to be an end to it.”
After finishing up with Ivy League Records in 2013 after the release of his fourth record, The Beginning And The End of Everything, Pyke signed up with Wonderlick Recording, a joint venture with Sony Music Entertainment Australia, in what he sees as the beginning of the next chapter in his career.
“I kind of felt like I was starting again in a way. I was really experimenting and following my instincts. So it felt like quite a liberating and inspired time. I was experimenting with what I had lying around like synths and instruments and playing drums and things like that.”
With this renewed sense of freedom and creativity, in conjunction with the completion of his own backyard-recording studio, But For All These Shrinking Hearts is the artist’s most polished work to date.
“The more creative you are, the more creative you feel because you’re getting into a zone – you’re honing your skills and your instincts to recognise what’s stewing.”
Following his creative calling, the writing process for But For All These Shrinking Hearts saw Pyke pursue a variety of new experimental methods which he says helped to produce the range and depth of the record, a feat which undoubtedly paid off in the long run.
[include_post id=”427125″]One such example of this is what Pyke warmly refers to as “singing gibberish” – a technique he used while writing “Be Your Boy”, “Songlines” and “Momentary Glow”, where he would record a track and sing the vocals in a form of mumbled nonsense, and let the magic happen.
“It almost feels like you’re translating your subconscious… I’ve read a bunch of songwriters have done it but in particular an interview with Jeff Tweedy from Wilco and he did it, but he’ll do a whole track, mix the vocals down low and go away and reinterpret his gibberish.”
“It’s actually quite natural because it’s what I do anyway, when I’m writing songs not in that process I’ll just sort of sing gibberish until something pops up anyway. I’ll usually make guitar and vocal lines and sing the vocal lines in gibberish – that’s how I’ve always written songs but this is just a more structured way of doing this so I’ll just record it and then take it away and refine it, whereas in the past I would just keep playing the songs over and over again until it kind of evolved.”
“The challenge was tying together all the things so that they had an overall meaning, which was relevant to me, which is bizarre because it just happens. It’s something that I choose not to try to explain, because it was just such a nice thing, I don’t really wanna know how.”
The track ‘There’s A Line’ was written with the help of the iPhone app Garage Band as a method of increasing the variation of sounds between tracks, and adding some diversity to his habitual and well recognised guitar melodies.
“I was really enjoying the idea of not playing guitar because I’ve played for so many years that when I play guitar I just tend to return to the same thing unless I’m giving myself a break… I was mucking around on these little apps and making these little sounds and it just lead me to chord progressions that I wouldn’t normally do because they’re just outside of the patterns that I would play on a guitar. I found it really liberating and it opened up a few different melodic ideas that were quite new to me, which was good.”
[include_post id=”426301″]As well as these, But For All These Shrinking Hearts features co-writes with Dustin Tebbutt, Patrick James and Marcus Azon from Jinja Safari, and was produced by John Castle, who has worked with Megan Washington and Vance Joy.
“[Co writing] revitalizes your sense of creativity, seeing how other creative people work and what their process is… I’m very glad I did because they’re some of my favorite tracks on the record.”
As is now tradition with each of his new record releases, Pyke will be playing a series of ‘Fans First’ shows across Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide throughout July and August, in what is both a celebration to the release of But For All These Shrinking Hearts and an expression of gratitude to the fans who made it possible.
“[The Fans First shows] are always really casual and intimate and you know, they’re always a chance to play the songs live for the first time…At the end of the day I owe everything to my core supporters and I really never forget that…So it’s just a way to thank them first and to give them something a bit different and extra because I pretty much owe it to them.”
Tickets are strictly limited and can be purchased here.
But For All These Shrinking Hearts is out July 31. For more info visit www.joshpyke.com.
