It’s been two years since Dustin Tebbutt’s acclaimed debut solo recording The Breach set blogs and Triple J alight. His story of creating the bleak epic during the depths of a Scandinavian winter – where he relocated to live and work for several years – captured imaginations everywhere.
Home now on the central coast for the past three years, Dustin laughs about the naivety of suddenly up and moving to northern Europe.
‘I ended up moving because of the group of friends I was working with and writing with. One was from Stockholm and he had to go back and the girl we were working with was in a relationship so we all went. We were a close group of friends.’
Eventually they all went their separate ways.
‘The outcome was I was over there and I had fallen in love with the country and with the band that had been a part of our lives, and it ended, and I had an opportunity to be on my own for the first time in my life and to work on my music, and I didn’t have any excuses not to do it. I had always been in bands playing guitar and this time I had no-one to hide behind. I had to bite the bullet!’
Tebbutt’s beautiful ne album is First Light, a glorious homage to love. In fact the relationship that he so passionately writes about blooms and falls away. Consequently there’s a mood of solitary contemplation in this album, captured in a dark bedroom during the wee small hours.
‘I am sharing a lot of myself . I never thought of that. I am giving a lot of myself. I am lucky in the way it is received. It doesn’t polarise anything, I am just talking about human stuff.
‘I wanted to learn to write about intimate things without it having to be so dark and fragile. I wanted to show that there isn’t just only one side of falling in love and becoming vulnerable – there is this fine line between sounding cheesy or bitter. You keep worrying that it doesn’t feel authentic. I hope that I have managed to get a balance of the lighter world into the album.’
As for his muse. Well, it has been a little odd for her.
‘She was well aware of the process; she knew when there was music when it involves her. It’s a bit of a process when we broke up. It’s a strange situation. When I send her a song she wants to know every lyric. I’ll say that one has nothing to do with you; it’s like having to decode it as it goes!
‘The vast majority of the stuff I recorded on my own. I didn’t’ have a direction when the song started, so after a while sitting in the studio things started to coalesce a bit. There are something like 50 or 60 songs at least. A lot of them were really bad, luckily, so the decision was easy… you never know which bit is going to turn into something good. Even in something bad you might get a good line out of it!
‘First Light, for example, came quickly. The song didn’t exist at 10 o’clock in the morning. By 6pm it was there, it was a pretty easy labour! And the vocal take that got done on the day was the one that was there. Here is a song, whereas some of the others such asWild Blood sat there, almost got finished, sat there, maybe two months. There was a lot more invested. It depends a lot on the day. I think you can always do more; the moment you think it is done, you are best to trust that initial instinctual reaction rather than the questioning brain that tells you it’s terrible. Yry not to listen to that guy!’
Triple J & Select Music present: Dustin Tebbutt First Light Album Tour with special guests Robbie Miller & Woodes.
Thursday at the Byron Theatre at the Community Centre 7.30–10.30pm. Tickets: Pre-sale $28 | Door sale $33.
