Guy’s now back living in Melbourne, and finding himself in the unusual position of releasing Dreaming Of A Night Mango as his first album in his home country. Finding success in New Zealand, Guy says he was overseas for long enough to feel lonely upon return to the city he had always called home. “That’s what Many People I Know was trying to get at,” he says, referring to his current single. “A lot of my friends and some of my family had moved away since I was last here, so I’m getting to know the town again as a stranger. It’s bittersweet, but I’m finding parts of the city that I love, that I never knew about when I had a bigger network.”
Dreaming Of A Night Mango is a dusty, minimalist album; you often need to listen closely to hear more than one man’s voice and his acoustic strumming. Guy says his albums haven’t always been so wilfully sparse. “My previous record was recorded with high fidelity sound and big choruses, and probably 12 or 13 different people. This record was the complete opposite,” he says. “I wanted to do as many things as possible myself. There’s a core group of guys that play [who are] sprinkled over the record, but the majority of it was just myself in the bedroom.”
The album’s obscure title was also inspired by members of Guy’s family moving away from Melbourne, though a generation earlier. “My family was part of the ‘gold rush’ of the early ’80s, when there felt like there was a big push to get people to move up from Melbourne to the Gold Coast, to build it up,” he says. “The album title just stems from touching on my family line, because it’s tropical up there and in summer there are mangoes everywhere.”
The theme of family runs deep through the entire record. “I had people like my father and grandfather in mind. They both served in the military in wartime,” he says. “They weren’t career soldiers, they just put their hand up when they were needed. It got me thinking – soldiers get trained, then they go into battle. But when they come back, they’re not trained to be a civilian again, so it’s obviously difficult for them. I had that in mind with this album, hoping it might touch on the minds of ex-soldiers everywhere. I just wanted to have a feeling where they would be quite calmed by the music.”
“My dad’s seen the video [for Many People I Know] that we just made and he really loved it, which is amazing,” he says. “He gave me a call the other day, and I know for a fact that it’s the first time any of my music has connected with him. He’s very straight down the line with music, and he knows what he likes – real old genuine country music guys like Merle Haggard or bush balladeers. Even Johnny Cash is too commercial for him. It’s been something I’ve been working towards forever, to make music that my Dad enjoys, so yeah, it was fantastic.”
BY SIMON TOPPER
