STACK March 2016 Issue 71

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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
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
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.”
Telluric by
Matt Corby is out
March 11 via Universal.
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
visit MUSIC FEATURE
20 MARCH 2016
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