Raised in the picturesque village of Bellingen on the Mid North Coast, wandering minstrel Jack Carty has always had a strong appreciation for place. His songs are often informed by his observations on the road, travelling across the breadth of Australia like a restless salesman toting music instead of dictionaries. Currently promoting his third album,Esk, with an exhaustive 32-gig tour, he certainly seems like a man driven to explore.
“It’s a big part of how I’ve been doing my music for the last four years, and I really love it,” Carty enthuses. ‘Enthuses’ is one of those strange words that tends to get dropped in description for lack of a better substitute, but in Carty’s case it is entirely fitting. When he speaks, his love of travel comes close to overshadowing his love of the music itself. “I genuinely think it’s the way for me, because it means if you’re going out, meeting people, seeing places, having these experiences, finding the connections that you make with people – ha, I was really going to try not using the word ‘connections’ – when you’re playing a gig in their hometown, it’s really solid. It’s not just a passing interest, but something tangible. You kind of become friends, in a way, with a whole bunch of people all over the place. It means that you’re interested in them, you get a sense of where and how they live, and they’re interested in what you’re doing. That way it becomes a nice, reciprocal relationship.”
Though he ostensibly lives in Brisbane, Carty is on the road more often than not. While it’s not quite a nomadic lifestyle – he’s also spent several years living in both Sydney and Melbourne – it comes close, and given the almost instinctual sense of freedom that the image of the open road can conjure, it’s not altogether surprising. But the life of a travelling musician has to be one of the most romanticised myths we have, fuelled by the adventure of travelling great distances in order to reach a summer festival, or by the iconic road trip exemplified in films like Almost Famous (“Hold me closer, Tony Danza…”). Suffice to say, it’s not all wine and golden gods.
“The highs are incredibly, incredibly high, and the lows,” Carty laughs, “the lows are very, very low. The main thing I’ve learnt is, because you’ve got such a huge continuum when you don’t have a fixed address, are constantly moving and literally singing for your supper, I’ve learnt that you’ve just got to duck your head in and keep working, no matter what happens. It’s about the music, about playing the songs, and that has to be the reason you’re doing it. For me, that’s the only way for it to all make sense. Otherwise, you’ll lose focus on what the point was to begin with.
“I think I write a lot about place. Either through travel, and how great that is, or what it’s like to be there in one place. I try to write from both sides. I end up travelling solo a fair bit, where you end up spending a lot of time by yourself. So I’m writing all the time on the road. It’s always been really important to me, that notion of home and the idea of seeing new things, staying open and interested in the world. That definitely informs how I feel and what I’m thinking about, which then informs the songs.”
Though a lot of the material was born on the road, the new album also features a collaboration with Josh Pyke, with whom Carty has been touring this year, as well as the inimitable Katie Noonan. It’s quite a shift from 2012’s Break Your Own Heart, an introspective and deeply personal album that saw Carty circle the wagons and produce something that was entirely his own vision.
“That record is 100 per cent me, so one of the reasons I wanted to be collaborative on this one was because I don’t want to keep making the same record over and over. I mean, I’m really proud of Break Your Own Heart, but it’s more a matter of evolution. It was such an amazing thing to be able to write a song with Josh, to write a song with Katie Noonan, work a bit more closely with members of my live band. That was all really fulfilling in a songwriting sense, but also to meet people and have nice interactions, being able to just hang out with friends, I think it really made the record a lot bigger. It has a wider scope, and I think it’s better for that.
“What I try and focus on is just getting the song across. Once the song’s out, you never know what people are going to do with it, what experiences they’ll have with it, where it might get played. The best you can do is try to get songs to a point where you feel proud of them, where they represent what it is you’re trying to say. I still very much feel that these are my songs, but they’re also not for me to control, or say what they should be once they’re out there. At the end of it all, at its most basic, the point is to get the songs across. That never really changes.”
Esk out now through Gigpiglet / Inertia. Catch Jack Carty alongsidePlaywriteatLizotte’s, Dee Why Thursday November 13 (tickets here),The Commons, Newcastle on Friday November 14 (tickets here),The Brass Monkeyon Thursday November 27 (tickets here).Also appearing at Mars Hill Cafe, Parramatta on Friday December 12 and Venue 505 on Saturday December 13 (tickets here).
