All the way from Brooklyn, NY, genre-crossing urban alterna-folkster Andrew Spencer Goldman – aka FULTON LIGHTS – is in the Land of Oz for a Lifted Brow-presented solo showcase and a few other things. DENIS SEMCHENKO hopes his Melbourne-roaming interview subject doesn’t get a heatstroke as they speak.

It’s somewhat hard for me to acknowledge, but I’m glad I’m not in my beloved Melbourne. For Andy Goldman, escaping the New York winter for the heatwave-scorched Victorian capital must have surely proved an equivalent of hopping straight into the frying pan from the freezer. So how has Australia been treating him so far? "Hot! Mostly VERY hot!" he laughs, his mobile phone (probably) melting in the arid air. "I’ve met some wonderful people and I’ve been producing an album by a band called Royalchord – I’m here for another three weeks and so far, everything’s been really good."

Having recently dropped an outstanding second Fulton Lights release The Way We Ride, Andy admits the crafting process wasn’t by any means an easy ride. "It was a lot of hard work and revision over a long period of time – I can tell you that the [self-titled] debut album was much more of a measured process and it actually took me about three years from start to finish," he confides. "For me, Fulton Lights was a shift away from my previous bands [John Guilt and Maestro Echoplex], which were more straightforward and maybe a little less adventurous; with The Way We Ride, I knew I wanted it to be the opposite [of the debut] in some respect, because spending so much time on a record is not the healthiest way to make art, and I wanted it to be a faster, less self-edited process."

Laced with sinister-sounding distortion, the primarily acoustic-based songs like I Love Your Point Of View and The Sin Makes The Man sound both delicate and edgy. "I don’t think it’s a fully aggressive album: there’s a lot of nuance, but the songs themselves reflect different states of mind and different themes than the first album," Andy says. "A lot of the themes are quite Old Testament: God, right and wrong, forgiveness, penitence, failures, things like that… I don’t know if that makes any sense!"

I reassure Andy that it does and compliment him on the well-judged use of overdrive in the arrangement. "Oh, thank you – there were some things that I specifically wanted to do with distortion, particularly on my voice," he continues. "One or two songs are almost completely distorted – I wanted to… completely throw this idea of what’s expected from a songwriter out the window [fair point – DS]. "I have often been pigeonholed as a singer-songwriter, a Dylan/Paul Simon-type guy with an acoustic guitar in the past, and while I love Dylan and Paul Simon, I also wanted to be free to work on the songs and be able to take them in whatever direction they want to go, to bring more of an overdriven sound to them and throw out the clean vocals – it was a lot of fun for me; I don’t know if I’ll do it again but I think it works."

Armed with his trusty distortion and looping pedals, Andy is keen to bring his one-man show to the River City: "I’ve never been to Brisbane, so I don’t know what to expect." I tell him he can expect to play at a landmark local venue called The Zoo and that I’m sure it will be a memorable experience. "That’s great – I hope so!"

FULTON LIGHTS performs at The Lifted Brow magazine launch on Thursday Feb 12 at The Zoo alongside Joel Saunders, Crazy Hearse and Mt Augustus. THE WAY WE RIDE is out now on Catbird Records and available for download at www.fultonlights.com.

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