I promised a little something to mark ten years of Heartwood and now it is upon us. Heartwood (Solo) will come out on October 31st - you can use this link to pre-save/listen. I thought I’d share a few words about the making of these recordings ahead of the release - so read on if you’re curious.

It was in March of 2022, my brother was finishing up his studies at SAE in Byron Bay and had some free studio time, so he called me up and said I should come in and put something down. There was a Neve console, a grand piano and all the gear we could ever need. The only issue was; I didn’t really have any material ready. The preceding years had been so distracting and the constant cancellation of shows meant I was too preoccupied with survival to have much space for writing.

Broke as I was, free studio time was too good an opportunity to pass up so I decided to record solo versions of the songs from my first album ‘Heartwood’ as a bit of a sonic experiment - with no real intention of releasing them. We rolled back the carpet so I could tap my foot on the wooden floor as an ode to the old John Lee Hooker recordings, and used crazy big microphones on everything.

There’s a kind of studio blindness that happens. You need a little time to let the dust settle before you can listen to what you’ve made with any objectivity.

There have been many times when I’ve walked out of a session wondering if anything I did sounded even remotely like music. In this instance I was unsure if any of what we’d captured was really listenable so I more or less put it on the shelf and forgot about it.

Some time later my brother handed over some rough mixes and I was pleasantly surprised to find they actually sounded pretty good. A few cracks and wavers here and there but so it is to be human - and sonically pretty sweet. Given that the tenth anniversary of ‘Heartwood’ was coming up, I decided it would be the perfect time to share these recordings. After all, these songs were written and performed solo for many years. I even had the perfect artwork - a textile piece that Tal Fitzpatrick had given me based on a photograph from the ‘Heartwood’ album art.

The whole thing was done on a shoestring but finally in 2024 I had enough spare cash to finish the job. I called on my friend Paulie B to do a proper mix and King Willy mastered it in Tasmania. I’m very happy with the results and I hope you will enjoy them too. These recordings have special meaning to me because I made them with my brother but also because making them got me back on my instruments at a time when I was discouraged.

The heartwood is like the bones of the tree, the sturdy core, changed by time to become strong enough to reach further and further towards the light.

May these versions shed some new light on these songs that have been with us now for a decade.