STACK NZ Mar #71

MUSIC FEATURE

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Matt Corby’s Telluric is a subtle tumult of glimmering guitar, kooky jazz rhythms and beautiful, absorbing harmonies. Corby spoke to STACK about finding the courage to break his own rules. By Zoë Radas

natural range. Both Oh Oh Oh and Wrong Man display this deep voice that is a little gobsmacking to hear after the whoops of 2012’s Brother . Corby says as a child he excelled at singing (“It was the one thing that I really cared about”), and was trained by an opera vocalist. “I’ve always been a really low singer as a matter of fact, but was insecure about how high I could sing,” he explains. “So I continually pushed it, in order to write a ‘good’ song. I thought for it to be good, and for me to be operating at a really high capacity, I had to sing up high, to prove myself. Which is stupid. It’s just an ego thing that I’m getting over. But the moment that you do, you’re liberated and it’s kind of nice.” These personal insights of Corby's reflect off a little story he tells towards the end of our conversation, about the first time he ever recorded himself singing. He was ten years old, and did a version of Amazing Grace on an eight-track he bought with his dad. “I still listen to it to this day, and I tear up in a weird way! Because it’s like, ‘Aw man, I was so good back then.’ As my voice broke, it became a bit of a problem. But then you’re given a new voice. Once you do, you have a whole new set of rules, and a whole new way of manipulating it. It’s the weirdest thing.”

into that spout shape, and for a guitarist, a wind instrument must be a challenge. “Well, being a singer – [voice] is a wind instrument, in a strange way,” he says. “You already know half the dynamic process of pushing out tones, you just have to find a way to get the tone to work. But I think the drums have been the most interesting thing for me. I’ve just completely fallen in love with them.” The drums and percussion do constitute a gorgeous component of the record; on We Could Be Friends , Corby uses little crushed rolls and a crisp hi-hat, leaving gaps in the beat in odd places. “It’s so left and right brain at the same time,” he says. This new-found confidence with instrumentation led him to question some of the dictums he’d long held for himself when it came to his voice. Particularly on the fantastic Knife Edge , it’s clear he’s become far more confident with falling back on the beat, just like those rubato-happy jazz singers. The possibility was opened up to him through his decade-long friendship with alt-pop singer Jarryd James. “He’s a really good buddy of mine, we used to live together actually, he’s a mad dog,” Corby chuckles. “He has always sung behind the beat, and I never understood it because I’m so on the beat, in the way that I feel like that’s how you drive a song. Once I started playing all the other instruments I was like, ‘Oh cool, I can do that Jarryd method; I know where the tempo is and I can just fill in all the space behind it and create this drag.’” Corby’s courage also led to a change in pitch – or rather, an embracing of his

Y ou’re sitting in label headquarters with a room full of honchos, after a frenetic period of writing and multi- angled pressure, and the first pressing of your debut album begins to play. And you hate what you’re hearing. What do you do? “Do I just scrap this thing, and I’ve wasted everyone’s time, or do I go ‘Well, that’s just my first album and I’ll do better next time?’ I don’t want to put anything out there that misrepresents what I think I can do,” Matt Corby explains earnestly. The singer- songwriter decided he couldn’t betray his heart, and hurled the whole thing to the dogs. He began afresh on something unapologetically himself, learning several new instruments and doing all the demos homebrew, and 24 months later Telluric was completed. “What I wanted to accomplish by learning how to play [new instruments] was, I wanted to learn them to the standard that I hear, when I hear music in my head,” he says. “Every songwriter walks around hearing full compositions all the time: the guitar part there, the horns there. And if you don’t have the technical capacity to play that sh-t, that song goes unheard. I wanted to get to a point where I could sit down and go [mimicking drums]: ‘chak-ah-dff-dff- kah -ah-chak-ah’, and that’s sweet, I can play that, I can put that down. It’s instantaneous, almost a flow of consciousness.” Of all the instruments he learned to play, you’d have guessed the flute would be the most difficult – you’ve got to get your mouth

MUSIC

Telluric by Matt Corby is out March 11 via Universal.

MARCH 2016

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