Singer-songwriter James Keogh, better known as Vance Joy, is a whip-smart, measured and thoroughly pleasant dude. Keogh’s had a wild flurry of success with his beautiful brand of folk-pop since ‘Riptide’ found fame, and his debut albumDream Your Life Away, released this month, shot straight to the top of the ARIA charts.
Couple all that with the fact that fans are mad for him and you might expect some ego, but there’s absolutely none. He’s also quite physically imposing and his hair makes him seem even bigger, but he’s got that air of gentleness about him that big fellas sometimes emanate. Basically, he’s the sort of bloke you’d want as a mate and you could totally take him home to visit your mum.
The moniker Vance Joy is an amalgam of names from one of his favourite novels, Bliss by Peter Carey. Keogh likes the freedom that comes with operating behind it, and although he’s committed to it for the foreseeable future, he doesn’t necessarily intend for it to be his identity for all eternity. “Vance Joy’s a musical project,” he explains. “If you have an alias then you can float into something else one day. Idols of mine are like Damon Albarn who’s done all of this solo stuff, but he’s also done Gorillaz and Blur amongst other projects … Gotye as well. It’s almost like a self-effacing approach that they have. I really admire that. They let the music do the talking.”
Given that he’s taken his name from a novel, it’s safe to say Keogh is a little bookish, and it shapes his music. “I really do enjoy reading, it’s like a vacation, but I’m not a super-voracious reader,” he says. “I don’t chow down books really easily, but I feel like what I read stays read. You can get a lot of good lines or ideas or a general feeling or atmosphere from a book and you can channel that into a song. I feel like it’s good mental exercise. I read something really beautiful recently. I was reading the new Tim Winton book, Eyrie, and he says, ‘It’s easier to fill a void than contemplate it,’ and I was like, ‘That’s awesome.’ I feel like there are those little nuggets of gold that you can get from a book. Whether or not I ever try and build on the concept or use it for a song, they all go on the scrapheap, those kind of nice ideas and thoughts.”
It’s as if Keogh has already had a couple of different lifetimes already. He used to play footy for Coburg in suburban Melbourne and was well on the path to being a lawyer. Luckily for us, he’s given those careers a swerve and he says he feels more relaxed as a consequence.
“It’s a work in progress, but I’m doing something I really love and I feel like I’m expressing myself,” he says. “The goal eventually is to become a fully realised person. I know it comes with maturity: you grow into your skin and you also accept what you are and your limitations and you work with what you’ve got. At the point in my life where I was playing footy and at uni, I was still trying to find my path, but I had an instinct that it wasn’t for me. I had a dream in my heart about playing music. So, settling into myself and being able to follow my dream has allowed me to be more relaxed.”
He’s said that he’s inspired by a love of Jeff Buckley, Paul Kelly and The Pogues. Buckley and Kelly you can see, but aren’t The Pogues kind of a curious influence? “You know how you have that catalogue of songs that you always go back to?” Keogh asks. “There are these songs that I smashed and loved, that cut me to the core or that I had a really powerful experience listening to. That list includes songs like ‘A Rainy Night In Soho’ where [Shane MacGowan] says that line about, ‘All your funny little ways’. I really love that intimacy. There’s something about the way he’s describing his relationship and the person that he loves. You see a window into their world with that line and there’s something humble and melancholy about it. They’re the kind of lines that tug at my heart and I feel like I want to emulate that kind of thing.”
Keogh can rest easy because that’s something he does very well – his songs turn the minutiae of relationships into something beautiful. While he’s not preoccupied with romance, it definitely provides grist for his creative mill. Take the song ‘Emmylou’, where he affectionately talks about a partner wearing socks to bed. However, Keogh’s songs are not strictly autobiographical. He describes it as a careful balance, and you get the impression that he remains a bit private. In a world where social media makes it easy to overshare, Keogh’s got a quiet word for us on the beauty of circumspection.
“Woody Allen would say that we create these little relationship pickles to entertain ourselves,” he laughs. “But if you’re writing entirely from your own personal experience, you’re not going to appeal to everyone; some things are not going to be universal. I do want to have that personal thing, but there’s a fine line between saying something that’s completely specific to you and something that can be shared with people.”
Dream Your Life Away out now through Liberation. Catch Vance Joy with#1 Dads and Airling atEnmore Theatre onFriday March 27, (tickets online)/ Civic Theatre, Newcastle onSaturday March 28, tickets online.
