Surround yourself with the sound of Husky when they present songs from their new album at Tivoli In The Round as part of Brisbane Festival.
Husky have spent most of the year working on their brand-new album and their show at The Tivoli Theatre will be the first time the songs will be performed live. “We've been quite selective about the shows we're playing at the moment because we're not doing very many,” main man Husky Gawenda says.
“We're going to play some of the new album for the first time, so it was important to us that when we did that the environment would be favourable to it, and I think the intimacy and closeness and the access that the audience will have in this setting at The Tivoli, in-the-round, will be perfect for us to play some of these songs for the first time and for the audience to hear them for the first time.”
The forthcoming album from Husky has been, in part, inspired by James Joyce's immense literary work 'Ulysses'. Just as Joyce's story paralleled that of Homer's 'The Odyssey', so too does Husky's new album partially mirror the tale of Leopold Bloom in its telling of one man's 24-hour journey through Melbourne.
A complex weaving of intertextual referencing, Husky explains how the overarching concept for the album came about.
“Jules Pascoe, who plays bass in the band, and Gideon Preiss, who plays keys and has been my long-time collaborator, the three of us got together in our home studio and over a few months we put down some ideas and created these detailed musical canvasses that were not exactly songs yet but they were still quite fleshed-out,” he says.
Husky then took those canvasses away and began writing lyrics informed by the sketches he and the band had made. “At the same time I was reading 'Ulysses', which is a huge work, and I was going deep into that as you have to to read it, and that rubbed off on what I was doing in my writing,” he explains.
“Because I was living the world of 'Ulysses' for hours each day, that was part of my inner world. All these things mingled together and what came out were these 13 songs that make up this album, and not totally intentionally informed this narrative in which there's a character who spends a night and a day on a mini odyssey throughout Melbourne, having all sorts of different experiences and meeting different people.”
The fourth album from Husky, it's unlike anything the band has produced to date. “I think the people who listen to the album and don't know anything about it, they won't necessarily recognise any of this stuff and that's OK too because once it's out in the world it's for the listener to take what they want from it,” Husky says.
“It's interesting when art informs other art and I think it's often the case, but 'Ulysses' by James Joyce was a parallel, or inspired by, 'The Odyssey' by Homer. . . I like the idea that art keeps informing art.”
