Newton Faulkner chats to Beat ahead of his Prince Bandroom show in April.
In the early days of his career, nearly 20 years ago, British musician Newton Faulkner set himself a challenge. He calls it the Joni Mitchell challenge, named in honour of the legendary singer-songwriter’s unflagging commitment to excellence.
“[The challenge] was, can you keep your voice technically on the same level as the writing, which is also on the same level as the playing?” Faulkner says, chatting to Beat ahead of his Australian tour this April. “And every time one steps up, you’re like, OK, so my guitar is here and my voice is here so I need [my writing] to catch up with that.”
Newton Faulkner
- Prince Bandroom
- Sunday 19 April
- Tickets here
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Faulkner has since updated the challenge to include not just singing, playing and writing, but also engineering and production. His latest album, 2025’s Octopus, was recorded in his home studio. Faulkner’s first completely home-recorded album was 2012’s Studio Zoo, the title of which is a nod to the fact that the entire five-week recording process was captured on film and streamed online, 24 hours a day.
“Insane project, really. It was pretty nuts,” Faulkner says of Studio Zoo. “Five weeks in the grand scheme of things isn’t very long, but five weeks with cameras on you all the time is [a lot]. I still talk to myself about what I’m doing, which I didn’t do before. Like, ‘I’m going to edit the vocal now.’”
Faulkner’s command of the studio improved in increments through 2015’s Human Love and 2017’s Hit the Ground Running. But when COVID lockdown outright prevented him from working with outside collaborators, he took it as a sign to go deeper into the nuts and bolts of engineering and production.
“I was like, right, I need to be able to do the stuff that I would go to other people for,” he says. “So I was going to bed with manuals of the gear that I owned but didn’t have a full handle on. I was like, I will go to bed early and I will read the Pro Tools manual for two hours before I fall asleep. I’ll get up early and read more of it. And then I’ll go into the studio from nine to five and do a day’s work because I can’t not work. It makes me feel weird.
“I went into a totally obsessive [state]. I was reading manuals of all the synths, all the gear. I really wanted to understand what it was because there’s stuff that I’ve gathered and stuff I’ve been given that I’m like, ‘This definitely does cool stuff, but I don’t know what it does.’”
Faulkner put much of his technological miscellany to use on Octopus. The album includes several stylistic left turns – such as the garage rock “Alright, Alright, Alright,” the surf guitar tune “Hunting Season” and the Bruno Mars-y “Tic Tac Toe” – that would’ve been unimaginable around the time of his folky debut, 2007’s Hand Built by Robots.
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A segment of Faulkner’s fanbase will always be attached to Hand Built by Robots and its hit single, Dream Catch Me, but he is not interested in going over old ground.
“I used to not be able to do it album to album. I now can’t do it song to song,” he says. “I’m like, I’ve done that, OK, next – and then I have to go somewhere else.”
But despite Faulkner’s commitment to constant improvement – his sustained adherence to the Joni Mitchell challenge – perfectionism is not the goal, he says.
“I remember working with a writer really early on who, every single song he wrote, he was trying to write the perfect song. But I feel like if you’re trying to do it right all the time, you’ll just end up doing the same thing with such minor adjustments in it to try and get it to the right place. Whereas for me, the fun is the completely blank page.
“Like, someone asked me how to write a song the other day, and I was like, ‘I have no idea.’ I go into a room terrified and do some stuff and then something will drag me in one direction. And then I just kind of have to follow it where it goes.”
Newton Faulkner will be on tour around Australia from 10 to 26 April. Details here.
This article was made in partnership with Newton Faulkner.
