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 Yearning to return to his own bed, WHITLEY has been leaving a trail of Dennis The Menace-like mischief behind him across North America. In between breaking the ‘bros before hoes’ rule and devouring diabetes-inducing delicacies, he calls up MITCH ALEXANDER to discuss involuntary facial reactions and inflicting harm on figurative genitalia. No, really.
Oh, what a conceited and done-to-death genre singer-songwriter is, right? Some frail, young adult gets dumped by their moderately attractive girlfriend, or sees a homeless person begging for change, or has a friend that attempts suicide and dutifully runs home to portray his inner-turmoil with some gentle fingerpicking and a non-threatening croon. Pffft, gimme a break. What does singer-songwriter even mean? Tom Araya and James Murphy sing the songs they write, how are they not entitled to the singer-songwriter label while James Taylor and Jack Johnson milk it for all it’s worth? Once again, we see a befuddled music industry that needs to label products, and rather than analyse a performer on its individual merits, he or she gets lumped into a massive genre due to the presence of a Epiphone Hummingbird, and a couple of multi-tracked harmonies. It happened to grunge and britpop, but the myth of what constitutes a singer-songwriter has journeyed around the Western world for a solid four decades, something that Whitley goes at lengths to distance himself from.
“I’m happy that I’m not seen as just this ‘dude with a guitar’, there are some other aspects in there as well, ” he explains. “A lot of guys do it really well … but I don’t think I could be lumped into that category and enjoy it.
“The Submarine has been really kind to me, it’s a nice way to enter into the scene as a debut. But I think the next album is really going to be the thing that separates me from the rest.
“It’s been a subtle little poke, this album, but I really wanna knee the next one in the balls”, he jokes, also taking home the award for best analogy of the day.
Aside from the fact that he trades an acoustic for a beautiful Fender Stratocaster for many of his live performances, Whitley is Australian, so as displayed masterfully on his 2007 debut album The Submarine, it’s never going to be your standard ‘handful of chords and misery’ stuff. Granted, on tracks like More Than Life and I Remember we hear some serene balladry and affecting boy-girl harmonies, but you don’t need to dig too far below the surface to find more. Lost In Time crescendos until a disco bass pattern surprisingly makes its arrival felt, while the military-style snare drums throughout All Is Whole provides ominous and brooding undertones that leaves Carole King in a pool of her own treacle.
Another character trait that pops up is a classic Australian wit, half English self-deprecation (although we refer to it as ‘taking the piss’) and half American cheekiness, with a slight inclination towards vulgarity. Whitley’s live shows are marked with amusing anecdotes, tales of drunken nights on the road and the odd mischievous joke.
His tour blogs, unsurprisingly, read like a manic teenager who is getting paid to travel around America and sings songs every night, taking in all the gaudy neon-lighted overblown sights, sounds and foodstuff that our friend to the far-north have to offer. Sentence structure and adherence to grammar regulations appear minimal, but there’s no denying the child-like wonder and humour that he displays, leaping from one topic to the next with absurdity, like if you asked a toddler what they did at the Ekka.
“I like to make people laugh … there’s always a limit to what you can do with people that you can potentially offend” he explains. “But, amongst my friends, definitely it gets pretty vulgar, that’s all part of the deal.
“Andy’s looking at me and nodding at the moment” he concludes. For those of you playing at home, Andy is Whitley’s drummer, pal and accompaniment for his most recent North American tour that has taken him from coast to coast, including the famed South By South West music conference.
“Sometimes, I reckon if you didn’t put something a bit light-hearted in there you’d get a bit down and sulk too much … like if I had to do that every night without throwing a few quips in there, I think I’d end up driving off a cliff,” he says, blasting the tortured-soul stereotype into pieces.
And apart from stating the physically obvious, Whitley has balls, evident by his YouTube-travelling covers of Bjork’s Hyperballad and Jeff Buckley’s Mojo Pin. If you wrote a list of musicians in the last decade who have managed to culminate the most rabid and overprotective of fanbases, surely Bjork and Buckley would slot somewhere in the top ten, probably somewhere between Radiohead and Ben Folds. So what compelled this diminutive Melbournite with boyish good looks to potentially open a Pandora’s Box of criticism?
“That recording of Mojo Pin was, I think, the second time we’d actually played it, just me and Nick [Huggins, banjo player] sitting opposite each other … it was intended as a muck-around or B-side, but I liked the banjo part so much that I kept it”.
“If people get uppity about that sort of stuff, us having a nudge at it, seeing if it can be presented at a different way,” he explains. “But I think music’s all about sharing, borrowing from other people, so if you can honestly show that someone’s influenced you without coming across as fake, then good on ya”.
His devilish charm and laddish enthusiasm also inform two highlights from the tour, both of which occurred at SxSW only weeks before this interview. As he speaks to me from a hotel in Somewheresville, USA, he spins tales of how he got to perform with one hero and steal a chick from another.
“Mason Jennings and I did this breakfast radio thing together that I didn’t know about … and he’s, like, my idol and I was freaking out,” he tells. “He came over and I got this face twitch and couldn’t talk, it was totally embarrassing.
“Then they put both of us on live television! … You couldn’t really pick a more confronting image for six in the morning; standing next to your hero with a twitch. But then he came to one of my shows and we hung out for a day and it was really nice.”
The next story involves Whitley, an English musical institution in the form of The Who’s Pete Townshend and the Australian sporting institution of winning against the English. Read on!
“He was buying a drink for this girl who was standing next to me, and I actually cut Pete Townshend’s grass, took the drink and chatted to the girl”, he explains, as I’m torn between disgracing a rock legend and loving a good pub story. “That same guy who’s smashing guitars in old photos is now this old dude who this smart-ass, semi-talented Australian cut-down”.
Reading his blog, the boy does sound slightly wistful, missing his friends and family and familiar locales that have been replaced with the biggest display of OTT ever to be found in one continent. He admits that it’s “pretty weak” to be homesick after being away from Australia for only a few weeks, but anyone who’s traveled to America knows the deep psychological damage that country and its products can inflict on you.
“Like, orange cheese?! Me and Andy both have started stacking on weight,” he admits sheepishly. “So we’ve had to hunt for a skipping rope in an attempt to make sure we don’t get fat. But when in Rome…”
A more trim and taut Whitley is soon on his way home, where he will join Andy and the full band as the prodigal son of young Australian talent. Keen to hear some more familiar Aussie accents (and possibly imbibe a few beers that, unlike their US counterparts, aren’t as weak as a new-born child), he enjoys putting pressure on himself to deliver the goods to a local audience.
“I just really wanna go home and play to the people that have supported me this year and made all this possible … give my best in the shows and do a good send-off of the album”, he says.
Paul Kelly should also keep an eye out; Whitley’s on the warpath: he wants your drink and your conversation partner.
WHITLEY will play at The Zoo on Friday May 9, with special guests Howie Day and Seagull. THE SUBMARINE is out now through Dew Process/ Universal. For more information check out www.whitleymusic.com
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