“It’s all beginning now so this is the moment where I go from having finished the record to talking about it,” Bull says. “I think I’m starting a bit late though. If I take forever to answer anything it’s because I haven’t figured it all out myself yet.”
When asked what part of the album journey he’s on, he chuckles at the cliché, and rightly so. “The word ‘journey’ is, you know, used a lot, but making a record really is like that, it’s a series of shifts that you have to make intellectually,” he says. “Before you start the project, for instance, and where you end up and the end of it when you play it on stage, there’s like half a dozen shifts you need to make and it’s quiet challenging.
“To be perfectly frank, if I were to approach this part, this shift, while I was too caught up in the making of it, I wouldn’t engage very well. I’d be too focused on the small details and I’d be too critical which isn’t necessarily a compelling narrative to someone else. Because I work mostly alone, I’m forced to constantly analyse everything – I’m songwriter, I’m performer, I’m musician, I’m producer, I’m kinda manager, now I become, like, my hype man and underneath all that you’re also maybe a jaded artist.”
Despite this artistic isolation, his time on the road and pushing out of his comfort zone in collaboration provided a bridge of sorts between his first album and this latest release.
“I toured with Little Red and Lisa Mitchell and a few jangly, folky, indie bands and it was really fun so I think that EP was reconciling all those experiences of collaborating with people who were less musicians and more performers or something. That EP was about getting that energy in there and getting me to loosen up and loosen up how I do things and feeling like I can be a part of what was happening around me.”
Bull has appeared to be positively immersed in the local scene from an outsider’s perspective, but from the perspective of Bull, that is far from his experience. “On the subject of scenes I was talking to Kirin J. Callanan who, in his words, was front and centre in the scene when I was completely oblivious to it and completely on the outer,” he says. “Growing up I didn’t feel connected to the scene and I didn’t feel like I had a way into it but now I see tons of people doing amazing stuff that matters globally coming out of the scene all around me.
“The whole world was so foreign it was like I didn’t even know what I was missing out on but once I stepped in I realised it was accessible and it’s not nearly as inaccessible as I thought it would be. People are just so busy just trying to survive for themselves that generally speaking there isn’t any clickiness, not entirely, but for the most part everyone wants everyone else to do well.”
BY KRISSI WEISS
