By Steve Bell
Even for a craftsman as experienced and successful as Melbourne artist Peter Farnan, there’s still an intriguing aura of mystique surrounding the art of songwriting.
After more than 40 years honing his skills at assembling a song – from the outset of the ‘80s with esteemed post-punks Serious Young Insects, through a lengthy stint pumping out hits for multi-platinum ‘80s/‘90s outfit Boom Crash Opera and then into his ensuing solo career – he’s still never quite certain where his muse is going to take him.
His sterling new solo album, Home, for instance, ended up a beguiling batch of charmingly off-kilter art-pop, but Farnan happily attests that he’d approached the record with a totally different stylistic ambition altogether.
“You start a project with a kind of idea, and this time I thought I was going to start by building beats,” he laughs. “I’d been reading the Beastie Boys book and listening to Rick Rubin’s podcast and I thought, ‘Right, I’m going to build beats, do what Talking Heads did and kind of find the song later on’. I started like that but very quickly that went out the window, and I ended up holding a guitar and writing songs on a guitar.
“It ended up being very traditionally written, either on a guitar or on a piano, finding the chords, vocalising and finding an angle pretty quickly. I was working pretty quickly the whole time – that’s a great thing about getting older and being a little more confident, just getting the germ of an idea and running with it and then refining rather than second-guessing and questioning.
“It’s ultimately a balance between delivering a satisfying form to the listener, but also putting in surprises or the odd twist and turn. If you completely satisfy expectations it’s boring, and if you completely subvert expectations it becomes art music, something else that isn’t a song. That’s fine too, you can go either way.”
And after years of penning chart hits the singer-songwriter far prefers writing for art’s sake, with the aim being primarily to please himself.
“I found worrying about commercial considerations crippling back in the day, it was just awful,” he admits. “There was a later Boom Crash Opera record where I threw all of that out the window and it was liberating, it opened everything up again and I felt like I was back at the Crystal Ballroom where there was no commercial imperative. Of course, that record stiffed! But it was a real artistic turning point for me and for that band.
“I’m a lot better now because I’ve done so much composing for theatre where there’s a deadline and an opening night – I’ll often be required to come up with something at really short notice – and I’ve found writing really quickly and working to a brief really liberating. It’s actually easier to write that way than trying to write a megahit for some enormous corporate rock monster!
“Another challenge with this record has been trying to work out what I’m going to say and how I’m going to interface the broader world – which is really tilting on its axis at the moment – with the personal, and how do I make it moving without it starting to proselytise? How do I get those political and personal aspects working together?
“I look at those songs now and recognise that it’s very much what I think and feel about myself and the world at the moment. It’s all rolled into the title track ‘Home’, which is about domestically where I live but I’m also concerned about other people who don’t have a home, or who are trying to find a home or fleeing because they have to flee. Once again, it’s trying to weave what I think about politics with just the life I’m leading and the fact that I’m older and that time is constantly rushing ahead”.
Throughout Home Farnan achieves that wonderful dichotomy of broaching serious issues lyrically but framing them in fun, sometimes even whimsical, song structures and arrangements.
“I just have this feeling that good songs and good art has to have woven into it this sense of humour and playfulness as well,” he smiles. “There is heavy stuff on the record – that song ‘Holy Water Cross Myself’ doesn’t pull any punches, it’s not jokey – but I love humour and feel that there needs to be a sense of self-deprecation, that I’m aware of my own shortcomings.
“Like on the song ‘Asteroid’ I take the piss out of my own songs – “How many sins will you admit? Your feeble wit, your ‘80s hits?” – but I’m not trying to write novelty songs. The problem with novelty songs is that you hear them once and they’re hilarious, and then you don’t need to hear them again because it’s like knowing the punchline of a joke.
“One guy who does it really well, in my opinion, is Tom Waits. His funny songs I can listen to over and over again, like ‘I’ll Take New York’ from [1987 album] Franks Wild Years breaks me up every time, I think he’s a scream.”
Home is available now via Bandcamp.
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