Paul Dempsey is understated, enigmatic yet a powerfully poignant music maker. His work is like a modern great Australian songbook, full of tales of suburbia and heartbreak. He’s hitting Perth for three dates, and took some time to chat to OUTinPerth about his latest work – Everything Is True – plus the state of the Australian music industry.
For some of the readers who might not be familiar with your music, how would you describe your style and the sound of the new album? Well, you know, I also play in the band Something For Kate, which is a lot more, I guess, noisier and guitar driven. This album is a bit more laid-back, more acoustic; the songs kind of have a lot more faith. I don’t know, I guess faith is kind of the main thing I tend to describe it, it’s got a lot more of I guess a thematic quality for me. The songs are kind of folk-rock, I guess you can call it. It’s kind of visual; I try to write lyrics that invoke images.
How’s the reaction been to the new album? It’s been great. I’m really pleasantly surprised. I didn’t really know what to expect, but it’s been really well-received and it’s been great going out and playing shows and seeing people’s reactions to the songs. I’m really happy.
The album itself also has some really nostalgic moments on it as well and you mentioned that it’s quite ‘folk’, is that right? Yeah, I mean, I guess. I hate having to apply these sort of genre terms but yeah, I guess that’s kind of the best word for it; folk-rock, something like that.
And would that predominantly be because of the story-telling that goes on there? Yeah, that’s right. Every song does sort of have a story or like a dialogue and sort of characters in the songs that might be, you know, having some sort of conversation. And I guess the fact that it’s just sort of driven by acoustic guitar, as well, is sort of what gives it that kind of folky musical element.
What are some personal highlights on the album for you? That’s hard to answer. To be honest, I don’t really listen to it. Once I’ve made it and finished it I haven’t listened to it really since; I prefer to sort of go out and play live. So my relationship with the songs is really… it changes more as I play them night after night. But I was really pleased with the whole record; I made it myself with a friend in a house and it was sort of put together very simply so I kind of just felt happy with how it was very sort of home made and I like that quality in the sound. I think you can hear in the music that it’s sort of been home-made, if that makes sense.
What can you tell us about some of the stories that take place on the album as well? Because I mean, readers who listen to Triple J will undoubtedly be familiar with Ramona Was A Waitress which is one of my favourite songs of last year. But what are some of the other stories that have taken place on there? Well like I said, they kind of take the form of dialogues, so there one that’s kind of about a discussion about people who believe in this idea of ‘The Rapture’, you know; that the world’s going end and the chosen ones are going to be taken away to paradise. Basically the people who knock on your door on the weekends and stuff like that. So one of the songs is kind of a conversation about two people about one person who sort of loves the world and the planet earth and our natural surroundings, and another person who sort of can’t wait to get out of here and go to some other paradise that doesn’t exist here. Stuff like that, I guess just things that I find difficult to understand in daily life, I guess I put them into songs and try to sort of show two different sides.
Now that you’re doing a tour, how does that factor into it? Yeah, look I guess that’s… I just work really hard on making music that I feel good about and that I get to express something and music that I’m going to enjoy playing night after night and music that I want to share with people. So that’s kind of where I see my job ending and beyond that, there’s all these other… there’s this whole music industry that’s built around music and they then all have these various jobs of saying good things or bad things. It’s amazing to me that they’re kind of the gatekeepers or something of whether people get to hear your music and how they will think about it because of what other people write about it. It’s just a fact of life, people read music magazines or articles to find out about music and the stuff they read really influences how prejudiced – or not prejudiced – they’re going to be when they hear it. And I just find all of that stuff so completely unpredictable that I try not to even think about it, so when people say nice things it’s obviously great and I’m extremely flattered and happy because obviously it creates a good attitude with people towards what I’m doing. But you just can’t predict it, you just don’t know whether people are going to be nice or not. I feel good about every record I’ve ever made, but you know, people have said some horrible things in the past and I don’t know why; I don’t know why people say good things, I don’t know why they say bad things… I guess.
What are your overall opinions of the music industry itself? That’s a really good question. I don’t think that any opinion of mine really matters. I guess I look at the music industry and I just sort of see it as being a fact of life. I make music, lots of people make music and like I said before, this industry exists around that, but it’s made up of people who don’t make music themselves; they fulfill all these other roles of telling people about the music or putting on concerts or TV shows or radio shows or whatever to give people access to the music and that is just a fact of life. But I try not to think about how that bears on me as a writer, if you know what I mean.
Well it’s just that, I mean, like I’m extremely grateful to all – there are so many people in the music industry, and when I use the words “music industry†I sort of just imagine the inverted commas because it’s just this nebulous thing. We all talk about this “music industry†but it’s not like there’s a union. It’s not really an industry, it’s just a whole lot of people doing stuff and sometimes it seems to have some sort of cumulative effect and sometimes it just seems like it’s a whole lot of people doing stuff and you sort of don’t really know why it’s there. But the most important thing is that there have been so, so, so many people who have made it possible for me to just do my stuff that I’m extremely grateful for that. But yeah, occasionally there are also so many people who seem to just feed off it and not actually contribute anything positive to it.
Do you think the music industry should have a union? Well, I don’t know where you’d even start! You know? The music industry is like a human brain, it’s just made up of all these completely separate areas that are all responsible for completely separate functions and you actually can’t really tell how it comes together as a whole. You can’t point to it and go ‘That’s it!’ like, ‘That’s the thing!’ you know? You just, you don’t know.
I think that’s the best analogy I’ve heard to date. So what can people expect from the tour? Well, I’ve got three guys who play with me so it’s kind of different to the record because I played everything on the record myself. When we play live with my band, obviously they’re different players; it has a different kind of feel so it, so we kind of interpret the songs on the record and it’s quite loose. We change things from night to night just kind of depending on how we’re feeling and some songs can end up longer or shorter and we throw in a few different covers here and there, just different things we feel like playing and we just try and keep it very fluid. But beyond that, it’s just, we play the songs on the record.
Is it a very intimate show? It is, yeah. Definitely. I guess the reason I like playing live so much is because I don’t feel like a performer, in the respect that I don’t kind of get onstage to perform for people; it’s much more, to me, of like an interpersonal thing that happens. I like to play music and feel like I’m sharing it with the people in the room and I like to kind of feel like I’m as much a part of the audience of something as they are and that we’re all kind of there together experiencing something that isn’t just being created by the four people on the stage. That, to me, is a good show; where the line between the people on the stage and the people in the audience isn’t there. So I guess that what we kind of seek to create is a shared experience with music.
Paul Dempsey will be appearing at the Art Gallery of WA’s Artbar on April 8, Settlers Tavern in Margaret River on April 9 and Fly by Night Club on April 10. Everything Is True is available now through EMI.
Scott-Patrick Mitchell
