The dust blows forward 'n the dust blows back - Captain Beefheart

One gets the feeling that it's just blown in. Arrived. Now it settles like it's always been there. Dust is Neil Murray's new solo album and it carries with it the scent of a lot of travel. The sounds, the images, the smell of the bush. From places where the roads are measured in hours. Soft sounds from the heart. Neil also has another new record, this one recorded with his mates in the legendary Warumpi Band. If Neil's performance on Dust is often soft and acoustic, the Warumpi's sound is plugged in and pumped up. These buggers are LOUD. You hear 'em coming a long time before they arrive. It's just a different way to travel.

Simultaneous releases. All this activity follows a lengthy silence. The new Warumpi album Too Much humbug and Neil's solo LP Dust are the first recorded musical outings since 1987 and 1993 resepctively. I wondered about the long silence and asked the man at the centre of all this if Dust deserves the subtitle, "the difficult third album"?
"No, not at all. In some ways it gets easier each time. You get to know what you're good at and you throw out the stuff that you've come to learn is a bit daggy. you do what you do best. In some ways it's good that I didn't have a budget. [With lots of money] you get distracted. You piss around. Sometimes it works; if you're very clear and you've got a good producer, but, recording most of the stuff myself it was better just to keep it fairly sparse and honest."

Long gestations usually beget grand visions. Neil laughs at the idea.
"I didn't really have a grand vision. The only vision there is, at any time, is the one found in the songs. As a writer, if you write anything, you want it to be read or heard by people. Basically, I had these songs which I felt were good songs, important songs, and they certainly moved me, so I wanted to get them recorded. And that's the sum of the mystery really. Sorry (laughs). That's all that matters. The other influence has been an economically driven thing. In recent years it's been very hard for me to tour and play live with the Rainmakers, for example, to put a tour together; costs prohibited it. That's thrown me back on playing acoustic guitar, which is first how I started to write songs anyway."

On stage, Neil's acoustic guitar playing is impressive. He incorporates a range of unusual rhythms and strumming techniques with his right hand. I asked him if he had 'borrowed' this style of playing from someone else.
"I'll say it's me unless there's someone else who wants to lay claim to it (laughs). It's not a conscious thing. I've always been very strong rhythmically with the right hand. I get a bit cackhanded with the left hand and it's not as fluid as my right hand. It may come from when I first got interested in music. I was playing drums, so maybe it comes from that.
"And I've always felt the rhythm in a song, in terms of the way the feel was. The feel of the song in terms of the rhythm and the way you hit the chords is just as important to me as the chords themselves. It's just something I've arrived at. I don't know whether you're supposed to play acoustic guitar like that. I do muffle the strings a lot because I want that percussive edge to the rhythm. I want a bit of chunk in there.
"I'm getting into more and more dynamics. I look for different ways of plucking the strings. I yank them or I hammer them. I've gone a long way towards actually discarding the pick. I like feathering the strings with my fingers. When I first started recording this way the engineers were going 'shock! horror! what's that?! Shouldn't you use a pick?' I said 'no, this is the way I hear it.' It's a little bit rough and ragged but it just gives a feel that I really like. I'm really not a guitarist's guitarist. I'm a hack guitar player like any singer songwriter. Bit of a rough diamond."

And his instrument of choice...
"The moment I've been using this Maton Australia custom that I got from the factory a couple of years ago. I wanted a guitar made with all Australian timber. So it's got King Billy pine from Tasmanina on top, Victorian blackwood and Queensland maple. As far as electric guitars, I've got a favourite Gibson Firebird 1966 model, which is a plank and I love it. I was running it with really heavy gauge strings like bits of railway track on it and tuning it down to D a few years ago but I've since put lighter strings on it and tuned it back up to standard pitch."

In his writing Neil often returns to a them of loneliness. He'll sing not only about the hollow pain of this state but also of the rare joy found only in the company of one. He has the uncanny ability to capture the space of these feelings in his music. I asked him if the songs that are inspired by Australia's expanse are written in situ or when he returns to the contrast of 'civilisation'.
"All and none of the above. I have written songs in the bush, but equally I've written songs about or inspired by the bush, in the city. It really doesn't matter where you are. I get a lot of ideas when I'm travelling. When I'm driving in the car I don't often listen to music, I just listen to things that are happening in my head. I find just travelling through the landscape and the way it changes, the clouds, the sky... all these sorts of things can just evoke stuff. It comes anywhere.
"I'm not good at following my own advice, but, my advice to anybody is if they get an idea to try and finish it there and then, as much as they can. But then again I've had stuff that I've kicked around and worked on and it's taken about a year before I've felt that it's all right. And other stuff's been really quick.
"There are guidelines. That's what you get to know. There are things to do. It's a process of selecting and rejecting stuff, based on what you know that works. The sum of the knowledge of what you know that works is the history of popular songs. They have a thing in common; the way they get your ear in. The basic principle of songwriting is a balance between things that repeat theselves and things that vary."