If I was the gambling type, odds are that my bet would be on this guy. Word is he’s the frontrunner in this year’s Cleo Bachelor of the Year award – but more importantly, Vance Joy is a strong contender to take out the title of Forte’s favourite interviewee of 2014.
We caught up with Joy in Canada ahead of the imminent release of his debut album Dreaming Your Life Away and his highly anticipated one-off gig at the Athenaeum Theatre in Melbourne. Our chat covered all the essential topics: stopping to smell the roses; stealing Lynyrd Skynyrd lyrics; his dreams of being a chilled-out lecturer; and how sometimes Vance Joy hates the sound of his own voice.
“I felt drained by the recording experience. As fun as it is, and amazing as it was, by the end I was sick of my voice. I was a little snappy and after a while I was like ‘get me outta here,’” he laughed. “Seriously though,” Joy added, “I can’t wait. I’m looking forward to getting it out into the world.”
Dreaming Your Life Away is a thirteen-track journey into the mind of one of the best young songwriters of our generation. Inspired by books, film, poetry and singer-songwriters of all eras, Vance Joy (the raconteur-type character in Peter Carey’s 1981 novel Bliss) is the perfect pseudonym for the one-time law student James Keogh. “I took the title of the album from the John Lennon song ‘Watching the Wheels’,” Joy freely admits.
Opening the album is the aptly named track ‘Winds of Change’. “That was the first song that I ever wrote where I thought maybe I could do this for a living. I felt a change, so it felt like a good place to start off.”
Holding its own at number three in the tracklisting (one before the blisteringly perfect pop tune ‘Riptide’) is ‘Wasted Time’, a song with a story behind it. “I saw a solo singer at an open mic night in Richmond about four years ago. He was playing a cover of a Spencer P. Jones song. The theme of the song was ‘Why are you wasting your time on me?’ It reminded me of a character in a Paul Kelly song … I liked the idea of a guy just trying to keep it together.”
Joy concedes that he finds ideas for lyrics everywhere, including social media! “For the last song on the album, ‘My Kind of Man’, I got the theme after reading lyrics written on my Facebook wall. I thought they were so beautiful, something like ‘Be a simple kind of man, find what you love’. But when I showed them to my mum and dad like I always do, dad said, ‘What? You’re ripping off a Lynyrd Skynyrd song!’
“It’s going to be so cool to have people hearing stuff that I’ve secretly held onto for a while. Now I’d like to stop and smell the roses for a while and bask in the afterglow of a good show. I love what I’m doing but if I decided I was done and wanted to step away for a while, I’d be keen on maybe doing some teaching – being a chilled-out lecturer at Uni or maybe tutor a couple of classes.
“I wouldn’t want to teach music, though. I don’t know theoretical music and I don’t think you can teach songwriting. I’d like to teach film classes but I’d have to do a bloody Masters or something though, wouldn’t I? Oh it sounds pretty bad – the more I talk about it the more I’m talking myself out of it!” he grinned.
When&Where: Athenaeum Theatre – September 5
By Natalie Rogers