I approached my 2017 residency with an unclear agenda except for a desire to experiment with a batch of songs. The only real thing I had planned was stopping at the fish market in Nowra before climbing the hill, and at that coffee joint for fresh beans. You see, the Musician’s Cottage is one of my favourite places in the world (easily top 3), and once I’m in there I don’t like leaving or returning to ‘civilisation’ for groceries. It’s a bit like going camping – and you’ve been given the blessed gift of switching off. Solitude, space and quiet can sharpen purpose – with or without an agenda. For me, the cottage is like an active meditation machine which welcomes the deepest part of me. Which is probably why I love it so much.
The only equipment I brought this time, in addition to my laptop and some butcher’s paper, was a handheld mic, a classical guitar and a borrowed mandolin. Recording a song into multi-track recording software for the first time is always a life-changing moment for that song. This thing that has lived only through your head and hands and voice is now suddenly and completely open for a journey of finding itself. It’s like meeting someone truly for the first time, and seeing what they’re made of, and how they transform in shape, texture and meaning when you add appendages and organs and breath.
The first song I wanted to meet, without a doubt, was Post-Inauguration Blues. I had written it about six months earlier – on Jan 21, 2017 to be exact – the day after I watched Trump’s first inauguration. In a way, it became the thematic anchor for the rest of the residency. There was something about recording a sort of extended lament, a prophecy of collapse, in one of the most still places in Australia. The cottage, the bush, the ancient kangaroos became an emotional container for the rest of the songs: mini dramas of a lone wayfarer moving through a broken world. The future, following that inauguration, clearly filled me with unease, but it couldn’t touch me for seven days – held as I was by a place. At a kitchen table in a cottage on Dharawal and Dhurga land.
The songs were minimal experiments, initially intended as demos, mostly overlaying guitar parts to see how they transformed. It was a gorgeously joyous week, for my guitar is an old friend. I realised months later that the time, place, and spirit of the cottage were so integral to the identity of these songs that I left the original recordings intact as foundations – then later shaped what eventually would become the album Animals and Spirits (2026) over several years, arranging sparse synth and additional vocals around the original cottage demos.
My previous album of songs, Tunnel, experimented with fuller production, and drew field recordings from three continents – horse hooves from Virginia, crows from the Western Australian outback, schoolchildren in France, scenes from Union Square during the week of 9/11. I wanted to use sound and place as a way of connecting my life with the listener, bringing them on a journey through the medium of song. On Animals and Spirits, that impulse was the same – but this time collapsed into a single place. Bundanon held everything.
