“I didn’t decide to fall in love and I didn’t decide to write music about it. It just was something that happened,” says the New South Wales singer/songwriter. “That’s always the role music has played in my life – it’s my way of expressing what’s happening to me.”
The album wanders through little memories and feelings of his time with a nameless partner, from the first moments of real love to discovering the best parts of someone’s personality in a relationship, and even sex. While there are lots of vignettes speckled throughout the album, Tebbutt recalls one memory that inspired some of the lyrics in the title track.
“I remember walking out onto the beach one night, and there was a full moon, and being out there after having a conversation with my partner at the time, wondering if they were looking at the same thing,” he says. “At that point you are often looking at the same view, even if you are in different places. There’s a nice beauty there.”
Throughout his time writing music, Tebbutt has always been drawn to using metaphors inspired by the natural world, and fascinated by their power to bring perspective to human experiences. As with his memory of gazing up at the moon, the nature of this particular relationship drew him to images of outer space. The songwriter in Tebbutt loves that idea of something so vast being beyond our atmosphere and control.
“I’ve always had that relationship with the natural world, and more and more over the years it seems to be the trigger for me looking at things this way. By taking those bigger timescales, like the formation of mountains or rivers or whatever and applying them to one lifetime, over 70 or 80 years, that’s quite a powerful perspective to bring down to this human level.”
In fact, scale is something that Tebbutt has thought about a lot, recalling his time living in Sydney as quite a shock after growing up on a large property in the country. In rural high school he used to work on large-scale paintings with drop sheets and oil paints, but all of a sudden he simply didn’t have the room for them, and his brain didn’t know how to respond.
“What I found really worked for me was polarising. I went and found a little notebook and felt-tipped pen and started doing these very minute, highly detailed little sketchy drawings, it was like my perspective had to change. Because I couldn’t see the horizon and didn’t have that space, it was like my brain had to reassimilate and go inside of itself. Once I got through that, I didn’t struggle anymore with the concept of small spaces.”
Tebbutt is headed for the stage again, touring around Australia to celebrate the release of First Light. While he finds performing to large audiences at festivals like Splendour In The Grass exhilarating, he’s excited to be playing on smaller stages, thriving in the intimacy of a smaller space and creating a shared experience.
“That’s the best thing about playing live, and when you go to a gig as well, when there’s this joint connection. It’s not just you and the song, it’s like that person and that person, everyone around you is in the music and the artist is in there and the moment. They’re not just regurgitating a song they know, they’re in there. You’ve got to chase that thing.”
BY ERIN ROONEY
