For most musicians, there’s nothing scarier than the looming threat of writer’s block – that terrifying moment when your talents begin to seize up and crafting a song suddenly seems like an impossibility.
And yet while writing his most recent record, Home State, Australian indie popsmith Jack Carty found himself facing the opposite problem.
“I’d been writing songs while touring for a year,” the endlessly chipper Carty reveals. “I was touring pretty much non-stop and writing that whole time, but I didn’t have the chance to settle down and look at them for a while, because we were moving around so much – we did Europe in that time. It was really organic. I ended up with almost 30 songs that were in the running for the record.”
Such a creative spurt came at an interesting point of transition for Carty. Though the songwriter had spent a few happy years riding the wave of acclaim generated by his previous records, radio-ready works like One Thousand Origami Birds and Break Your Own Heart, last year he made the risky decision to leave behind the management team that had been with him from the beginning and strike out for new, less familiar territory.
“I wasn’t really sure what was coming next,” he says with a nervous laugh, perhaps reliving the uncertainty. “I had just stopped working with the label and manager that I had been working with since the beginning of my recording career. On top of that, I had gotten married and I was really enjoying being at home. For the first time in forever I wasn’t looking forward to this definite future of what I was going to do next.” He laughs again – it’s a dry, rueful sound. “That was both scary and liberating.”
Perhaps adding to Carty’s fear was the sheer volume of material that he suddenly had to whittle down. Though there are musicians out there who would kill to find themselves facing more than a double album’s worth of songs, for Carty it threw up a new, interesting problem – brevity is the soul of wit, after all, and Carty wasn’t interested in turning in a bloated or overlong record.
“I sort of demoed all of them, and of the 30 there were 20 that I started to properly work on in earnest,” he says. “Through the process of recording them, I got to the stage where there were 15 that I couldn’t pick between. And that’s when I really had to start showing what I had been working on to my friends and people I respect to get some perspective on where to take the record.”
Luckily, even though Carty might have lost some of his confidants in his period of change, some is not all, and he still found himself surrounded by people whose opinion he inherently trusted. “I wasn’t just sort of showing them willy-nilly to anybody,” he says. “I have some close friends who I have been working with for years. Like Angus Gardiner, he’s played bass on all my records. There is a lot of trust between him and I. So I wasn’t nervous about showing him – it was more that I was interested to see what he might make of it.”
Yet even with the support of his friends, Carty faced servings of self-doubt. But surprisingly, the fear he felt wasn’t crippling – it was almost galvanizing, and Carty seems to be one of those rare artists who embraces every single one of his false starts.
“The biggest challenge was just trying to figure out whether the line I was pursuing was actually the right one,” Carty says with another laugh. “And sometimes it wasn’t. But because I was working from home, I had so much time. Like, I could work on something and then the next day listen to it with a pair of fresh ears and realise that it didn’t work. So then I just had to scrap it and start again. Sometimes you’re scrapping days of work, which is never an easy thing to do, but if it’s not right for the record then it’s just not right for the record.”
Somewhat ironically, all that deletion seems only to have added to the album. Home State is a work with a startlingly strong central thread – it’s only a few named characters away from becoming a concept album, a fully formed piece that manages to somehow balance both polish and grit, setting it up perfectly to be blasted both at parties and in private.
For now, the new problem facing Carty is how to translate the songs into his live set: Home State isn’t proving as willing to be bitten down into set-ready chunks as his previous works. “With my other records I wrote the songs almost as solo songs and then built up the band around them,” he says. “But with this record I feel like it’s almost the opposite, which is ironic seeing as I made it myself. I’ve had to sit down and think about how to present the songs in a solo way.”
But no matter how many difficulties the album has thrown up, it’s still one that he gets an incredible jolt from sharing with people. “I definitely get a vibe when I play the audience new songs. It’s amazing how often people will respond really well to the new material. There’s something about playing a song live that you’ve never played before – a real excitement. Maybe the audience pick up on that.”
Jack Carty’sHome Stateis out now through The Curly Co. Catch him at Newtown Social ClubonSaturday August 20, with Emily Barker and Jordan Millar.
