The last time I spoke to singer, songwriter and co-founder of the Warumpi Band, Neil Murray, was back in 1996, when he released his third solo album, Dust, on the then new ABC Music Songwriter Series. The year before, he'd been showered with accolades courtesy Christine Anu's hit version of his song My Island Home, for which he received the APRA Award for Song of the Year - and he didn't even have a record deal.

To some extent, the situation hasn't changed. He might be on the line from rural Victoria talking about his fourth album, The Wondering Kind, released again by ABC Music, but they weren't in the picture when he was recording it.

"Really, they were songs that I felt were good enough to record. I just started laying the songs at Rondor, my publisher in Sydney who have a small writing studio, on acoustic guitar with click tracks and then I got people in to help fill it out - Bill Heckenberg on drums and Cotco Lovit on bass - and just asked various people. On the song Wings To Work for instance, that's a very long song with a lot of layers and we had to make it work over that distance, and Jim Moginie (of Midnight Oil) had this amazing array of organ and keyboard sounds and spacial effects on guitar that he layered in there that kept subtly changing over time to the point where the thing was a long, slow build all the way through. The thing about Jim is he's got an ear for a song and if a song grabs him he always wants to play on it, wants to do something on it and I love that about working with him.

"It was a very protracted process because I was basically doing it myself. At that stage, ABC weren't on board, so I virtually had to finish the thing myself, and because I was residing in Darwin most of the time, I just tried to find any time I could get down to Sydney. So the whole thing took over a year to record and complete. When you're having to finance the thing yourself, things take longer. Most of the songs are at least a year and a half old now."

Even after all these years and the substantial body of work Murray has created, whether as a member of the Warumpi Band, which he helped form in Papunya back in 1982, or a solo artist since 1987, the songwriting process can still be something of a mystery.

"Sometimes it's a very driven process and you're trying to get this thing out of it that you feel very strongly, hammer it out in the medium. So for me it can be very much an absorbing, obsessive sort of thing until I get the thing in shape and satisfied with it."

As with any real songwriter worth his salt, Murray explores all manner of aspects of the Human Condition on The Wondering Kind, from the politics of the personal, in the heartbreaking Empty House, which he wrote "for fathers and their children who find they are kept apart. May it address the bias in the Family Law system", to the politics of the public, in his tilt at the Liberal government, Sometimes I Feel, written in Dave Steel's backyard. There are songs that just reflect his love of this extraordinary country and it's characters, like the ones he writes about in Good Light In Broome, or the "wonderful phrase" he took from Kev Carmody as inspiration for Cooling Winds. And then of course, there are the songs about identity, what it means to be Australian. "Symbolically in a sense that's how I see, or it's recurred as a theme in a lot of writing in songs I've done over the years, the influence of the Aboriginal people in this country can be the most profound and saving grace that can happen to any person of another nationality in this country, in terms of really recognising a kind of spiritual sense of belonging."

On the other hand, the album finishes with a song called We'll No Return, which explores Murray's Scottish roots. Over the past five years he's made three trips to Scotland, either with the Warumpis or alone, performing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and taken time out when he could to see the places his family left five generations back.