The album ‘Circles’ was recorded at The Bomb Shelter Studio in Nashville, Tennessee in early April of this year. Produced by Andrija Tokic (Alabama Shakes, Hurray for the Riff Raff, The Ettes) and Co-produced by musical virtuoso and multi-instrumentalist Jon Estes (Bela Fleck, Kesha, Steelism). The album is a songwriters collection of indie folk inspired sentiments of love, heartache and longing. Matt went back to the roots of his song writing and to the core of what it’s really all about. The instrumentation stretches itself from a minimalist view on tracks like ‘Sailing On’ and ‘New Love’, through to a fuller sound on numbers such as ‘Heaven Cares’ and ‘Sunday Morning’. Carefully engineered by Andrija and Jon the tones are pure and true, leaving room for Matt’s vocal timbre to breathe it’s life into every delicate moment.

G'day folks, this is my new EP. Recorded by Dan Carol at Rada Studios, Perth. It's basically recorded live with a minimal of overdubs...(a bit of harp here and a guitar fill there etc). We were often working out how the song goes while the tape was rolling. It kept a nice loose feel to the recordings. Jay Bales Jr on bass & Todd Picket on drums. Yours truly doing the rest.

Cheers

This was an album I wanted to record with some ol' friends.

We used to knock around in Perth together when we first started our music careers. We each toured in various bands, sometimes lived together, developed as musicians together, recorded the odd song together and got drunk together.

Brad and DJ played in many successful acts together around Perth while I did the solo thing and travelled around Australia chasing the dream.

Life took different directions for each of us and after an absence of many years, I returned to Perth and thought it a good idea to make a full album of music together while we still had the chance, the drive, the time and the money?

Whilst we seem to be in an era when making an album is a dying art form, we're still a bit old school and continue to enjoy an album of music in a quality format, and not some squashed up slither of audio that the billionaire nerds sell ya.

"Life's too short for shit music"

We hope you feel the same way, cheers!

The title and idea came about whilst living in Perth many years ago. I used to live alone in this big empty house and had plenty of time to play music into the early hours of the morning. I used to write all of these melancholic ol’ songs and never knew quite what to do with them. They didn’t seem the type of songs that you could play in the pubs or that would even be popular…. a little too mellow for the regular folks. In the corner of the front room of the house, I had a blue light set-up to give a bit of atmosphere. There was something about the blue light that seemed to accompany the feeling of the songs. To me they weren’t depressing or necessarily sad, but more along the lines of life, love, loss, beauty and hope.
Some of those songs went by the wayside and some remained.

“The Blue light Show” represents the songs from that time and some from the intervening years, through to a couple that just appeared during the process of making the record. 'I’m Comin’ Home', for instance came about one sleepless morning around 5am after a particularly hard time in the studio the day before. It seemed to sum up what we were trying to achieve with this record and became one of my favourite tracks.

The record was recorded at Woodstock Studios in Melbourne, Australia. Produced by Troy Trigwell and myself, it was Troy who really gave this record the direction it needed. When I first met Troy and went into the studio, I just had a collection of songs of various styles. While the songs were good, there was no real artistic direction. From an outside perspective, Troy saw my strengths and weaknesses and it was decided that a few months break and a more focused approach was the best way to go. We shared a lot of the same musical tastes and ideas about what making music should really be about. It should be about the song or an expression of a way of thinking, the basics of why people love music in the first place, a connection you feel with something that just seems to grab you and move you in a personal way. We decided, lets not just make another CD, lets make a cohesive record, with a certain sound and feeling, a certain mood, something we could listen to years down the track and say, “Hey, you know….that ain’t too bad”.