Pete Murray: Ten Years, Ten Tracks, and Total Creative Control

Decades into his career but more compelling than ever, beloved Australian singer-songwriter Pete Murray has released new album Longing which follows up his 2017 acclaimed album Camacho, Longing will also mark the first time in two decades that Pete has released a record independently.

Undisputedly one of Australia’s most successful singer-songwriters, Pete Murray has amassed over 1.2 million album sales, hundreds of millions of streams, three ARIA chart-topping albums, and seventeen ARIA Award nominations, while also continuously touring and releasing new material for over twenty years. Emerging with his debut full length album The Game in 2001, Murray’s breakout sophomore album Feeler in 2003 cemented his status as one of the all-time greats. With ongoing hits and fan-favourites along the way, including Better Days, Feeler, Opportunity and So Beautiful, Murray’s stirring and enduring blend of positivity with acoustic, rock and folk elements has only amplified his revered reputation, including via his most recent full length album Camacho in 2017. Now the spotlight is on his eighth studio album Longing. Pete talks to Hi Fi Way about the album.

It was a massive solo tour, how did it go?
Yeah, it’s been fantastic, mate, to be honest. I’ve loved the solo tour, it’s been really, really great. You know, doing those shows and telling the stories, my story, how it all happened, I’ve loved it. Really, it’s been really enjoyable.

Fifty-five dates is a massive undertaking. It shows how much potential there is touring around Australia, going beyond the major capital cities.
Oh, there’s lots. I’ve done the regional stuff for years, too. I think that’s kind of also helped me have a good following out there in those areas. So, sixty days in total if you include the four New Zealand shows, and we ended up adding another show in Port Lincoln, so fifty six around Australia. But yeah, definitely, I think if artists can get out and tour in the early days of their career, tour the regional areas, you get good supporters out there that seem to stick with you for a long time.

Were there been any places along the way that really surprised you?
It’s interesting, there’s a few places I’ve never been to before. Meriden was a place in Western Australia, like a little country town, and we had a good crew out there. Just sort of surprised how far the music goes. But look, it’s all been really great. Doing the regional areas has just been fun, the city shows were really great. Too many shows to mention even one. Probably the highlight was Sydney, if you look at the city shows, Sydney was probably the highlight, and Brisbane was amazing too. But the country areas have just got something different. There are some real characters out there, and the interaction between the crowd and myself was just good fun.

How is the comedown once a tour like that ends?
Oh, I’ll be fine, mate. We’re pretty much jumping straight back into another one. A few shows are setting up the new album, Then there’ll be another run later in the year over the summer with more band shows to support that album as well.

Album number eight, really exciting. Did you approach this one any differently than the last couple?
This one took about ten years to put together. It’s been a whole bunch of songs that I’ve done over the last ten years that haven’t quite been finished, and I keep putting them into an unfinished folder on my computer. I keep coming back to them at different times, working on them a little bit, then putting them away, sometimes for years. Then you get the songs out again and think, okay, that sounds good, let’s finish this one off. Having that ten years there to put this album together kind of gives it… I guess makes it an album that’s really solid from start to finish. It’s like a life lived in that time, so there’s lots of different songs that have some really meaningful stuff on it. You’ve got time to put it together, rather than sometimes you’re just doing an album in two years or a year. You’ve just got that quality of song writing there that can be strong enough to make an album really enjoyable for people.

Were those songs in the unfinished folder good enough, but just didn’t quite fit the previous albums?
Yeah, that’s right, exactly what happened. I think sometimes it takes you a while to get the hang of a song and believe that it’s good enough, too. Sometimes you’ll write a song and think, oh, it’s just not good enough, so you put it away. You forget about it, and then months later or years later, you’ll bring it out and go, actually, that’s a great song, got to finish it off. That was kind of what happened on this one. Not all are old. I did write, I’m trying to think of the new ones, the recent ones that I did, like I Am Fire was pretty recent. But like I said, it’s a span of ten years’ worth of song writing that has been sitting for a while, and then adding some other new ones to it that you just keep popping into that folder. Then at the end, you’ve got a really solid bunch of songs to choose from. I chose ten songs for the album, and finding those ten songs seemed to be a bit easier once you’ve got a whole bunch of solid songs in there.

I love what you say in the album bio, that you wanted to create something people would love from start to end. That complete album experience seems to get forgotten these days.
Absolutely, yeah. But a lot of albums don’t have that. A lot of albums aren’t great from start to finish. They’ve got a couple of big singles on there, but the rest is not great. So, for me, I don’t know if I’ve got any big songs on there. I tend to write better albums than big hit singles. But, like I said, I’d like this to be an album that people will listen to from start to finish and want to play again and again and again. It’ll mean something to them. They don’t want to skip tracks, they want to just keep listening to it and it has that powerful feeling that they can go back to, hopefully what Feeler it did for a lot of people years ago. You want that to be something that they love.

Does being independent this time around create a whole new level of satisfaction?
I think the thing that a lot of people don’t understand is the songs that they all know and love and have been singing along to for years, I don’t own those masters. The masters belong to whoever paid for the recording. The record label had paid for those recordings, so I don’t own them, even though I’ve paid them back over time. I guess those deals were never really in favour of the artist to make money out of the masters. For me, I think it’s important that artists should own their masters. In the case of the record label, if you’ve paid them back, then you should own them. But that’s just a deal that I’ve done, I’m not sitting here complaining about it, that’s the way it is. So, for me, owning these songs now, yeah, I feel great about that. I’ve re-recorded a bunch of my old songs so that I can own those versions now. People are super supportive of that once they know that the artist has re-recorded these songs. They understand how this works, that artists don’t make very much money, if anything at all, off these masters because the record label owns them. The small portion that the artist earns goes toward paying that debt off, which is sometimes impossible to pay off.

Is it hard to listen to it like a fan would, without critiquing what you’ve done or wishing you’d made little adjustments?
That’s all the problem you have with those albums. When you’re recording it, when you’re doing the mixes, you really pull it apart because you’ve got to get it to sound right, all aspects of the song. But I got to the point where I thought, okay, all songs are done now, and I’m fine. I can’t change them anymore, that’s what they are. Listening to it as an album without pulling it apart was kind of nice to just do that.

How do you think your music has evolved since Feeler?
I’ve tried not to make the same album. Definitely tried to keep things a little bit different, a little bit fresher every time we do something. Every album’s got its own flavor, I think that’s important. I’ve tried to make this have its own flavour as well. The challenge or the difficulty is to have songs that were written ten years ago to the ones that are now and have them feel like the same body of work. I guess the connection is having those songs, they weren’t quite finished, we just put them into that folder. That’s the connection I have: all these songs that I felt weren’t ready for other albums or weren’t quite finished. That was like, okay, let’s just keep putting these together until I’ve got a bunch of songs that I feel there’s an album’s worth of material there that I can pick and choose the songs, and they’re the best ones that are working and put that out as an album that you can listen to from start to finish.

I’ve been listening to it for a long time now, from the recording process, to the mixing process, to the mastering process. You’re listening to this album for a long time. I feel like I’ve got it in the best arrangement that flows from start to finish. I’m interested to see what people think, what their thoughts are. I made that comment about creating an album that’s really solid from start to finish, that people want to play all the way through. But I also made the comment that it’s really up to the punters to see what they think, and that’s what I’m kind of interested in, whether they feel that or not.

Amy is an amazing single. What’s the story behind that one?
I’m not actually telling the meaning of that song at this stage, because I want people to get their own thoughts for it and have their own meaning to it themselves. But it is a different-flavoured song to what I’ve done before. Normally, I don’t have a four-on-the-floor beat to a song, but this song’s also got a different way I play the acoustic, a real backbeat to it, which gives it a real sort of hypnotic feel on the acoustic. Then adding that four-on-the-floor synth bass and some beautiful keys in it just gives it a real mood. Production-wise, it’s a little different to what I’ve done before. It feels fresh.

How exciting was it to see songs go from unfinished to finished in the studio, and then hear the final version once you got your masters back?
Yeah, it’s been great. It’s been a really enjoyable process. Finishing the songs, for one, was good, just finally getting them done after some had been sitting for a very long time, years. Getting them out, working on them, putting them away again, then getting them out again… just to have that body of work there that you can go back on and reflect on and piece together and try and finish has been a really kind of interesting way for me. I haven’t done an album like this before, unless you look at Feeler.

Feeler is probably the album that has a little similarity, because I did an independent album beforehand called The Game. Then I got signed to a major label. We re-recorded Feeler but took five songs off The Game and re-recorded them again. So it gave me time to do a lot of writing, to do The Game, and then another year or two to record Feeler. That has a similarity in the way that the songs on that have great dynamics, but also a feeling from start to finish that the body of work really works together well. You get that from, I guess, a lifetime of work and ten years is a pretty long time to be working on stuff, so it feels like that’s the only thing I could relate to other albums. It has that similarity to Feeler in that way, it was kind of written the same way.

What’s next for you? Another Australian tour later in the year, but is going overseas part of the thought process as well?
Not too much overseas stuff, bits and pieces, but that’s probably one issue I’ve had with the label over the years. The Australian companies have been great for me, but internationally, the company hasn’t done anything, and so it’s kind of almost shelved you. You can’t do anything, you can’t go with anyone else, and you can’t do other things. This was before streaming, so your music couldn’t be heard, which was very frustrating for me. Internationally, I do a little bit of stuff, but I wasn’t able to do that years ago, so that’s been difficult. Whether I want to do that now at that major scale, it seems to get a bit hard. The older you get, you’ve got kids, I’ve got four kids now, so to be away so long and building that… I should have been doing that years ago, and I should have had the support for that, but I didn’t. That’s just, unfortunately, the way it rolled. But there are still some territories overseas that I go to and still have some success and enjoy going there, so it’s good fun still.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Longing is out now STREAM HERE BUY HERE

On Tour