With a strong stake in NZ music’s ’90s rock narrative and four subsequent solo alt-pop albums, his just released ‘Bright Side’ is hardly Damien Binder ’s first rodeo, as they say. It is however his first album recorded in Perth, one of the most isolated cities on the planet, and perhaps as a result is more openly philosophical than previous releases. Richard Thorne caught up with the one-time Second Child frontman over Zoom.

When Damien Binder made plans to step up his singer-songwriter game in the early 2000s it was Sydney that appealed as the place to build a future music career. The contemplative indie pop singer-songwriter had already released a couple of well-received solo albums, in 2000 and 2003, and admits he was pretty cocky on arrival there a year or so later, expecting that he was going to take the place by storm.

“Oh, yeah, absolutely,” he laughs. “But it was extremely difficult, and I put things to bed for a few years there. I’d raise myself up occasionally and get a bit of motivation and do a record, but it would just take a lot out of me. It’s a really hard town to live in and there was a big gulf between the likes of me and then the next level up.”

Once settled across the Tasman, ‘While The Wind’s At Your Back’ was released in 2009. It was another six or so years before ‘A New World’ arrived in 2016, and at that stage he was still making good use of his Kiwi contacts, most notably versatile musician Bob Shepheard as producer.

Another seven years after his April 2023 release, ‘Bright Side’ finds Binder living and making music in Perth, WA, an additional four hours by plane from his old stamping ground of Tāmaki Makaurau, and an environment quite different to the bustle and hustle of Sydney.

“My wife Nicole is from Perth, and living in Sydney was getting harder and harder – just the cost of living. It was a place that we really loved. We met in Sydney and we both worked for a wine business there, but we were never going to buy a house like it was just wasn’t going to happen! We’re both artistic and we weren’t bringing in the money to be able to do that, and Sydney became an ever-decreasing delight for us.

“In Sydney, I’d often be playing in a pub, with literally 10 screens with the league on! Like me – and a backdrop of TV screens! Here there’s no pokies, and there are environments like wine bars and small venues that are music-oriented, so music is at the forefront and everything else is kind of in the back. Which is really good.

“Perth has been so much easier to break into and I’ve been able to play originals regularly – and get paid for it. And I feel like I have a community around me now, a few other artists who’ve been doing it a while as well, and some younger artists too. I just feel really at home here.”

The music venues he plays typically hold between 100 – 200. Often sharing a bill, his performances have mostly been solo, just with the aid of his trusty Martin and Garrison acoustic guitars.

“They are kind of intimate performances, there’s a bit of banter with the crowd and it’s all really been back catalogue ’til now. I’ve got about 20 songs that I can play solo and go down pretty well.

“I’m trying to become a better player, so I can have the dynamics where I’m picking, and bringing it down then building it up again. My arrangements are quite strict, the silence is often the kind of the key bit – when I’m not playing!”

Current economics mean he still holds a 9-5 job, though this one in Perth is considerably less intense and stressful than his management role in the wine business – and importantly leaves a lot more time for music making.

“I really loved the job I had in Sydney, but it took more out of me than it gave, and I found that I was pushing music to the side – quite often it was second, third or fourth. And when I got here I sort of went on that path again, as a manager, or team leader or whatever, then just realised I can’t do that anymore. I’ve got to make music more at the forefront of what I do and have work to just support it.

“So I’ve got a job where I can work from home, or go into the office, and I actually can put music to the front of my mind all the time. It’s allowed me to have the balance that I’ve always wanted – so priorities have changed basically and that’s a good thing!”

Binder’s record-making MO is that when he feels he’s got enough good songs he’ll combine them into an album. ‘Bright Side’ is his fifth and songwriting for it began a few years ago, when he moved to Perth.

One Aussie music media has described the album as weaving ‘…the brilliant bright skies and rolling landscapes of Western Australia into every note: a wandering ambulant sound that seems to reflect the endless open horizons…’

The artist doesn’t necessarily agree that such geographical influence is so evident, but it has necessitated changes, and change in itself can be good.

“I don’t know that any of these songs are really about being in Perth. I think it’s more like the memories of life in Sydney, and a lot of those times while we were living in a ridiculously expensive small apartment there.

“This album has a lot of themes that are connected, sort of about time passing and getting older, and the power of human connection. When I was writing Don’t Know What it was during that whole pandemic period, and the world seemed particularly fraught.

“I realised that you’ve got all this chaos out there in the world, and a lot of it we can’t physically control or influence. All I can rely on is my own behaviour and what I am, what I say and what I do. Having some people in my life that I really care about and love – and the power of human connection, even strangers, is so real and so important.”

In Bright Side he identifies himself as ‘a glass half-full kind of guy’, the chorus lyrics talking about people being ‘brittle beneath the smile’.

“That’s about how people put on a brave face when there’s a lot of turbulence going on beneath. A lot of us are struggling with our own issues and the world around us, and we’re putting on a smile basically when there’s a lot of stuff going on behind. Everyone is walking around with their own stuff and we’re all trying to make it through the day.

“I’ve had my own ups and downs mentally, and have done a bit of work on myself over the last few years, but ultimately I’m a very optimistic kind of guy, and I really believe in the good in people. My songs have always had dark bits in them, but then have some sort of positive sense by the end!”

Production of the early ‘Bright Side’ tracks started again with his longtime producer/pal Bob Shepheard, but after a couple of trips to Auckland Binder realised that was a costly time zone difference too many, and that he needed to invest more locally. He took the bare-bones songs they’d started to producer/engineer Matt Gio, who co-owns Rada Studios in nearby Fremantle.

“He had produced a solo album for Katy Steele that I really liked the sound of, particularly as a departure from the bands that she was in for many years. I emailed him and sent a few recordings and he was keen to do something.

“So we met and hit it off, and he became my sort of musical mentor and arranger. He’s a multi-instrumentalist, so I was singing and playing the guitar but he played drums, bass and keys. He really gets where I’m coming from.

“Everything that was recorded that I brought to him was to strict time, so we could implement other things around it. I played a lot of electric guitar on this record because I was coming up with lots of little bits and so that was great. I probably hadn’t in the past taken as much of a role in that way and I had more of an input on this one, so I feel really good about it.

“There are some classic Damien Binder moments in there, my sense of melody or harmony or something means that can’t be changed! But it’s definitely a departure sound-wise and I’m pretty pleased with it.”

Matt Gio’s CV also includes Birds of Tokyo and Abbe May, among plenty of others. Binder laughs in describing him as ruthlessly taking a scalpel to his songs and ideas, sometimes completely cutting a verse or a bridge.

“A lot of the time he was just like an editor, cutting out bits, and that was always hard to swallow it for a bit. But it was always, always for the best. I’ve definitely learned to be less precious. What’s the phrase…‘ask for forgiveness, not for permission’? He didn’t ask my permission – and certainly didn’t ask for any forgiveness!”

Having been (self-described) a little alternative country-esque on his last album, Binder wanted ‘Bright Side’ to be more like Katy Steele’s ‘Human’ that Gio had produced. Cat Power’s ‘The Covers Record’ was another reference. Rather than relying on vocal melodies and guitar, he wanted more keyboards, more layers and dynamics.

The results of their union yielded four singles in ’21/22 – Here It Is, Everything But, Don’t Know What and Back To Me, each receiving a music video treatment by Kiwi director Jonathan King. The two are long-time friends and collaborators, Wellington-based King having made videos for Second Child back in the day.

Since then he has become a well-known screenwriter and director with credits as writer/director of 2007 black comedy Blacksheep, and writer/director/producer of Under The Mountain in 2009.

Working remotely their videos generally start with Binder filming himself singing the song. King messes with that footage, superimposing backgrounds and typically within little more than a month a video is completed.

The brilliant video to Back To Me stemmed from Binder’s suggestion of using a pixel dot-matrix effect. King expanded that idea to make fantastically creative use of a range of ASCII symbols, cleverly backing the self-exploratory (‘back to me, I’ve got to get back to me’) lyrics.

“I have always had a philosophical sort of search going on with my songs I feel. Seemingly a lot of them are personal, but if you draw back a bit you can see that there are actually multiple characters in there. I’m not just talking about me and my own experiences, I’m talking about experiences that people have. The power of connection with other people is kind of what I’m trying to get across.”