Check online for any performance by Steve Poltz and you will see one of the most expressive musicians around.

Eternally restless, Poltz is a man brimming with energy, both in life and in art, and as his reputation for storytelling suggests, he’s certainly not afraid to put himself in outlandish situations. Impromptu Columbian drug raids with former songwriting partner Jewel? Check. Pinwheeling drunk across the country in a cowpunk band? Check. Pretending to be Australian in the middle of soundchecks? Check. Or at least, that’s how our meandering conversation begins.

“G’day!” Poltz exclaims down the line, then pauses. “That confused you, right? You thought you were talking to someone in Australia! Here, listen to me do it again.”

He clears his throat. “G’day. Wait. G’day mate? Man, I should have said ‘cobber’. Nobody uses that over there anymore; it makes me mad. It’s such a good colloquialism, you guys need to get on that. Cobber. ‘G’day cobber.’ We don’t have anything like that. We only have ‘asshole’.”

I’m talking with Poltz, San Diego’s “Most Influential Artist of the Decade” on Super Bowl Sunday, when nobody in their right mind is performing as the entire country’s attention is fixed on sportsball. Still, there is clearly no rest for the wicked, since Poltz and his cohorts are waist-deep in prepping for their next gig. The sounds of squawking guitars and garbled, amplified voices wash away roughly one sentence in ten.

“You really gotta be consistent,” he is saying. “Keep going out there and playing, and you’ll build an audience. I always tell younger singer-songwriters, in some ways today it’s harder, in some ways it’s easier, because you can be whatever you want. You can put out whatever you want, while before there were gatekeepers telling us what we had to make. The key is, nobody is going to do it except you, so if you really want to do it, the audience will find you. I still believe that even now, and I’m still not sick of it. I still love what I get to do. I mean, if it wasn’t fun, I wouldn’t do it. Life is too short.”

Part of that fun is surely his knack for anecdotes and good old-fashioned, home-spun stories. Many of his songs are prefaced with his idiosyncratic observations on the world, and you can’t help but shake the impression that Poltz would be just at home sitting around a campfire swapping ghost stories as he is onstage before the faces of a thousand strangers.

“I love it. I love the art of storytelling. I like being able to take audiences on a journey and not having to rely on a light show or anything. Just to sing and tell a story, to be able to hold their attention. I think if you can learn to do that, and hopefully get better and better at it, you’ll find people really appreciate what you do, and…”

His voice is drowned out by the soundcheck. These odd interruptions actually aren’t all that frustrating, chiefly because with our time difference, finding an ideal time that suits us both is like juggling porridge. With the 50th anniversary of the National Folk Festival coming up, it seems fairly pertinent to get his thoughts on what this latest tour to Australia will entail, but Poltz has other ideas. He calls out to one of his bandmates.

“Do you know Australian colloquialisms? Colloquialisms! I’m talking to Australia! I’m trying to bring back the word ‘cobber’.

“OK, I’m back to you now,” he says. “I play a lot of festivals – they’re always fun. I enjoy them, because you get exposed to people who would never come to see you. They might never, ever have gone to see you, but they’re at the festival. It’s always a good way to let people discover you, to just stumble into some tent and hopefully you convert them. It’s almost like you’re selling brooms, you’re knocking on door to door and you’ve got one minute to tell them why your broom is better than the other one to keep the floor clean. I’m a broom salesman. That’s my gig now.”

However Poltz chooses to perform, broom or mic stand, his National Folk Festival set will likely be a festival highlight. His tangential musings, his clear sincerity in connecting with an audience, and above all else, his outstanding brace of songs are certain to entertain (and given he enters each gig without a setlist, each performance is pretty much guaranteed to be unique).

“I think after you do it long enough, hopefully you become more at home onstage. But there’s always something new happening, you always have something new to talk about and you’re always seeing all these new things. So hopefully you’re able to keep creating. One thing though is that as you create more and more, you get a bigger back catalogue that you’re dragging behind you [and] people want to hear certain songs. It’s about finding that fine balance of going way back into the well of early songs and playing those, but you also want to say, ‘Hey, I also wrote this,’ and hopefully nobody gets up to take a leak while you’re in the middle of it. With me, I’ve always been lucky in that I’ve always been able to play and create. I don’t think that’s going to stop.”

Steve Poltz‘sFolksingeris out now through98 Pounder. He plays the National Folk Festival 2016 happening in Canberra at Exhibition Park, Thursday March 24 – Monday March 28; and The Vanguard, Thursday March 31 and Friday April 1.

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