A Quick Chat with Sturt Avenue

Who is Sturt Avenue?

Sturt Avenue is an indie-folk-rock collective lead by myself and supported by a cherished band of family and long-time friends. My sister and dad both sing and play on the new record, as well as some people I’ve been playing with in different projects for years now.

How would you describe your music to someone who has never heard it?

That’s a tough one – it’s folk at its heart but we took it to a lot of different places with this new record. I’d recommend it for people who like their indie folk with a bit of rock and a lot of heart, for fans of bands like Big Thief, Phoebe Bridgers, Bright Eyes.

What have been your biggest inspirations as a band?

I started writing songs after getting into the Mountain Goats, All Hail West Texas in particular really showed me the value of songwriting as a medium. It doesn’t have to be about the production quality, you can make incredibly moving music with only the simplest equipment if you learn how to navigate the interplay between narrative and the melody, and the way these two tools can so profoundly alter each other and birth something much greater than the sum of its parts.

What is your favourite track on the album?

Bit of a Sophie’s choice, this question! Talk is the most fun to play live, Bury Me in the Garden might be one of the prettiest things we’ve recorded production-wise, but I think the song I take the most pride in having written is After Midnight. Took a lot of effort to get a really sweet nostalgic love song out of a story about the night I lost my virginity.

What's the creative process for you, from writing through to recording?

It’s a different journey every time – sometimes a new song is right there the moment I pick up a guitar, sometimes it’s agonising work to finish off a half-written song that I just can’t let go of, and sometimes I get so attached to one part of a song that everything I try to write around it just doesn’t sound as good in comparison. Recording and production is a bit of a nightmare because I’m too much of a control freak and I’ve given myself too much access to tools to facilitate this.

The process of recording this album involved tracking foundations for a lot of the songs in a studio here in Adelaide, and then sorting overdubs in our in-house recording space in the hills. If I ever had a new idea for a song, I could sit down and try it out whenever I wanted, so obviously I spent more than a year doing exactly that. Very happy with where that process has led us to, though! Also, fun fact, my sister Tarn started doing the van life thing before we started tracking these songs, so to record her vocal tracks I had to drive 30 hours with my recording gear and track her vocals in a van parked by the ocean on the beautiful South coast of WA.

If you could collaborate with any artist, who would it be and why?

It would be a dream to do something with Big Thief, they’re an insanely talented creative team and I’d love to find out more about their process – also they seem like they’d be wonderful people to hang out with and just shoot the breeze.

What's next on the cards for Sturt Avenue?

I’m already writing a bunch of new songs, closing in on another album’s worth of new content. Got some fun irons in the fire for 2024 too, going to have to give us a follow to find out more though!