If anyone can make the intimacy of a diary transform into an expansive sonic universe, it's singer-songwriter Lior.
Almost 20 years on from his phenomenal debut album, singer-songwriter Lior shows no sign of slowing down. The 2005 release of Autumn Flow propelled the Aussie musician to the forefront of the scene, cementing his status as a stalwart in the country’s indie music landscape.
Now, with two decades, a dynamic career, numerous accolades and a prolific body of work to his name, Lior is gearing up to bring his sixth studio album, The Blue Parade, to audiences at Melbourne Recital Centre on Saturday November 2.
Lior at Melbourne Recital Centre
- Saturday November 2
- Elisabeth Murdoch Hall
- Tickets here
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The Blue Parade marks a change in the sonic landscape that Lior has set out to explore. While it stays true to the treasured sincerity and raw honesty that has underlined the musician’s discography since Autumn Flow, The Blue Parade embraces a cinema of sound. It’s an intimate venture of an expansive nature, best experienced in a concert hall of your one thousand closest friends.
After performing a preview of The Blue Parade at Melbourne Recital Centre’s Primrose Potter Salon in April, it became clear that the album was meant to be heard live. “I always feel like those songs need to be played to come to life,” Lior says. After playing the Salon, the musician says, “I felt ready to take [it] to the big room next door.”
While big – as Lior points out – there perhaps isn’t a better venue to hear the warm intimacy of Lior’s music than the Elisabeth Murdoch Hall. Like a fateful collision of artist and venue, the acoustically superb design of the auditorium will no doubt pair perfectly with the cinematic scope in which The Blue Parade experiments with.
Lior describes this new sonic venture as the result of a cherished collaboration with bandmate Cameron Deyell. “[Cameron] comes from a different sonic place to a lot of that acoustic stuff that the previous records had,” Lior says. “I could collaborate with Cam and use some of his expertise in creating a really broad cinematic sonic palette.”
Music is like writing a diary
In the initial stages, Cameron and Lior decided to focus the album on the interplay of two guitars. This, Lior says, then opened up the door to “a new approach to the songwriting.”
What resulted was a collection of songs that, although have been borne out of the same universe of truth and sincerity that Lior’s previous works sit within, has surmounted to an album that undeniably treads new sonic ground for the artist.
The thing that has always grounded Lior’s music can still be found on The Blue Parade: the poetic intimacy of connecting with others. It may come as no surprise then that Lior likens writing songs to “a way of keeping a diary”.
“Lyrics are a form of self-expression,” he says. “My lyrics tend to be eclectic, but also they’re all common threads. They are very much a personal telling of life experience. It’s always personal.”
Bringing these diary entries to the stage in front of a hall full of people is no small feat. Lior says that in the early stages of his career the music’s emotional vulnerability sat not far below the surface. “It’s quite confronting,” he says. “It still comes and hits you in unexpected moments.” Now, after two decades of music, career and lived experience, Lior says he’s learnt to manage those emotional moments during performances.
“Albums are labours of love”
It’s not just the six albums that colour Lior’s discography. The musician has also undertaken a career that proves his talents stretch across a diverse array of pockets within the music industry.
“About 10 years ago, I did kind of decide to continue to write songs and make albums in parallel with doing collaborative work and side projects,” Lior says. He’s done everything from work in the orchestral world and in collaboration with a range of composers (including Nigel Westlake) to dabbling in the theatre world and writing songs for film and TV (most recently Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II). There’s few pies within the music industry that Lior doesn’t have a finger in.
This diversification of his career, Lior says, has allowed him to find projects that keep him artistically excited and stimulated. “It just means that I can write songs when I want to and not feel bound to it,” Lior says. “Albums have become labours of love.”
For a musician who cares so deeply about the art he is creating and the ways in which he can share it with people, it’s clear that all of Lior’s music comes from a place of love. The Blue Parade is setting up to be no different.
You can get tickets to see Lior perform at Melbourne Recital Centre here.
