After dodging the camera for the first leg
of his recording career, Vance Joy is
staring down the barrel for the cover of his
long-awaited debut Dream Your Life
Away.
No more arty blurs, or in the case of the
Riptide video, being totally MIA.
"You can see people's personalities in
their eyes," Vance Joy says. "You can tell
if someone is really feeling the song
they're singing. I wanted to have a straight
on direct `look into my eyes' moment for
this album cover. If I'm going to regret anything it's not going to be that my
face looks like my face. People can like it or not like it, but I won't look back
and go `I shouldn't have been wearing that hat' or anything."
Vance Joy has had an unexpectedly long time to finish his debut album.
There's a simple reason why - his first single “Riptide” kept charming the
world and its charming author followed it around the globe. Several times
over.
As well as selling out headline tours in Australia, Vance Joy performed at
South By South West, Glastonbury, Firefly and Boonaroo Festivals before
returning to Australia for Splendour In The Grass and then back to the UK,
Europe, US and Canada for headline tours and V Festival, Lollapalooza,
Outside Lands and Osheaga.
In Australia, Riptide moved from alternative to commercial radio, then
commercial TV and got a second wind after it became the first song to top
Triple J's Hottest 100 countdown without an album to call home. “Riptide”
went worldwide, hitting No.10 in the UK, and Top 10 in Austria, Belgium,
Germany, Ireland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. It has sold over a million
copies worldwide, is being streamed over three million times a week and has
cracked the American Top 100 after relentless touring. “Riptide” has gone four
times platinum in Australia, with its award victory lap including
the prestigious ARIA Song of the Year award.
"It's taken on its own life," the musician says of “Riptide.” "It's definitely been a
door opener. It's running its own race now."
Naturally “Riptide” surfaces on Dream Your Life Away, kept company by
another track from the “God Loves You When You're Dancing” EP, “From
Afar.”
"It's still one of my favorite songs," Vance Joy admits.
They're some of his earliest compositions. Back when Vance Joy was still
Melbourne boy James Keogh, he'd been in a "shamelessly" Bloc Party
inspired Uni band while he juggled footy with a law degree. Falling asleep in
most classes suggested that maybe law wasn't where his head was. Just prior
to a three-month vacation, he wrote a song called “Winds of Change.”
It contains the phrase "an errant finger pokes me in the eye" as well as
precisely zero obvious Bloc Party influence. Crucially, James Keogh had
found his sound, just before he found his pseudonym Vance Joy (a character
who likes to tell stories in Peter Carey's book Bliss)
"’Winds of Change’ is the first song I ever wrote that I thought was any good,"
Vance Joy says. "It was 2009. It was a breakthrough. It planted the seed in
my head of me being able to write good songs. So I went away and I had all
these ideas running through my head, I didn't take an instrument, I just made
notes in a book. When I came back I wrote ‘From Afar.’ ‘Winds of Change’
was the first coherent song I wrote that I wanted to show people. I'm glad that
song opens that album. It was the change in my songwriting, I discovered that
strumming rhythm. It started something."
Good things came fast. He pieced together “Riptide” on a dirt
cheap ukulele (he's since upgraded) from a few songs sitting on his cerebral
scrap heap. That area in the back of his head also gave rise to new single
“Mess is Mine,” a charming construct of good sections he managed to
shoehorn in one song.
"It's total cannibalization that song," Vance Joy explains. "There's so many
bits from other songs I had on the wreck heap. Some of the lyrics are from
conversations I had, like my friend who had a crush on two blonde guys in a
hostel in Byron Bay, so I got that line 'check me in and check me out' from
her. That stayed with me. ‘Riptide’ was pieced from a few songs I had lying
around. You do whatever works."
Books and films also provided plenty of inspiration. The movie in “Riptide”
was Midnight Cowboy, while on Dream Your Life Away the tune ”We All Die
Trying To Get It Right” started life when Vance Joy was watching the movie
Infamous about writer Truman Capote. ``With a line like `we all die trying to
get there', sometimes you hear something and you put it in your phone. Well,
you blatantly steal it. But rarely does something come to fit perfectly, even the
syllables, but it did in that case."
“Who Am I” parties like it's 1899 - the year poet W.B Yeats wrote “The Wind
Among the Reeds,” where Vance Joy saw the line about laying your dreams
down at someone's feet and asking them to be careful they don't crush them.
“Georgia,” one of singer/songwriter's personal favorites, was particularly
important. He wrote it on January 1 this year, right in the throes of “Riptide”
fever. "Hemingway says, ‘I have written well, I will write well again.’ The well
doesn't dry up. Before ‘Georgia,’ I wasn't feeling particularly inspired, then that
song came out of nowhere. I was on a high for five days. You can't force it,
but it's nice to know that now you recognise when a song is coming."
Hemingway's A Moveable Feast also provoked the “first cut is the deepest”
acknowledgement in “First Time,” the last song recorded for the album, again
salvaged from one from Vance Joy's “maybe” pile. "I'm glad we resurrected
it," he says. "It's turned out really well for a song I hadn't thought about for a
while."
“Red Eye” captures a pre-frequent flyer Vance Joy who didn't know the
phrase for the night flight, also with a few lyrical (and canine) nods to Al
Pacino in Scent of a Woman. "It's a tried and true story," Vance Joy says of
the geographical heartache in “Red Eye.” "You put two lovers in a song,
separate them, and you've got three minutes to reunite them. I suppose it’s a
story that has been told and re-told in different forms. It’s reliable.”
Dream Your Life Away was recorded mainly just outside of Seattle with
producer Ryan Hadlock (Lumineers, Gossip, Johnny Flynn) including a
handful of songs (“Mess is Mine,” “Winds of Change” and “Georgia”) being
finished off in a tree house on the studio grounds. "It was beautiful," Vance
Joy says of the gravity-defying recording sessions, "And it was cool being so
super close as we were recording."
With his debut album finally finished, Vance Joy is in the enviable position of
the entire world wanting to hear it all at the same time. He's already blacked
out the next year for touring, on the back of nearly two years of touring since
“Riptide” was a mere ripple.
The album title, Dream Your Life Away, came to him after hearing John
Lennon's 1981 classic “Watching the Wheels.”
"He has that line 'People say I'm crazy, dreaming my life away,' and I love that
idea. That title feels like a good reflection of my life recently. It’s still all totally
new to me. I still feel new as, which is good. I still feel like I'm just chipping
away."
- Cameron Adams
Dream Your Life Away is released on September 9.