1.The First Song I Wrote

It was definitely a love letter to a teenage girl. It was so bad that she never heard it and I never played it again. I was about 13 years of age at the time – ‘Your Body Is A Wonderland’ by John Mayer was an inspiration at the time I think, so yeah, that song never left the bedroom.

2.The Last Song I Released

I just released my debut album Outlier. It’s a self-produced record that was recorded at Alberts Studios in Sydney.

3.Songwriting Secrets

I sort of treat songwriting as a bit of a journal for myself. I tend to play around with something every day and make sure even if it’s bad I get something out; there may be a good hook or riff that I can use for something else. It seems to always come more naturally the next day if I repeat this process, and then sometimes you’ve just got nothing.

4.The Song That Makes Me Proud

That kind of changes each time I go out on tour and reshape a song, as I pretty much never listen to my recordings once it’s released. I think at the moment it’s a song called ‘Burn Away’ from my All About To Change EP. This is a song that just has so much space and keeps sort of transforming with each new approach, probably because it’s very repetitive and just loops around a key lyrical idea, but the backing instruments have a layering role that is quite open-ended when it comes to playing live. It’s also had a few placements on television, which gives a whole new visual representation of the song for me.

5.The Song That Changed My Life

The song that made me want to learn guitar was ‘Tears In Heaven’ by Eric Clapton. I loved the sound of that nylon string guitar on that record and then obviously the story behind it instantly had me hooked onto singer-songwriters. From there I really started to learn and play and then write my own music. When I listen to a track it’s always the melody that I’m searching for first – this one got me and always does.

Outlier by Patrick James is outnow through Create/Control, and he appears at The Basement, with Hein Cooper, Friday March 4.

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