The first Kiwi artist to grace a cover of NZM, talking up ‘Loyal’ back in October 1988, Dave Dobbyn returned to help celebrate the magazine’s 10th birthday in ’98 with ‘The Islander’, his fifth solo album imminent. The mid-June launch date of his latest album ‘Available Light’ all-but coincided with NZM’s recent 100th issue. We have all, this magazine included it seems, grown up with Dobbyn – or at least with his national conscience-defining songs like Be Mine Tonight, Outlook for Thursday, Slice of Heaven and Loyal.

‘Available Light’ has already rendered a new Dave Dobbyn classic with its opening track and first single Welcome Home. More will almost certainly follow from the dozen other straight-ahead three minute servings of lyrical precision, heavily laced with Christian imagery and enhanced by some of our most respected pop musicians.

Ever voluble in front of a microphone, when we meet Dobbyn is irrepressible – his eighth album due in three weeks and only days away from departure on his own Intrepid Journey – to Morocco. Oh the perils of fame. Without a guitar or piano for three weeks he will have just his cameras and a journal for company. Photography it turns out is another of his passions, the photo at right a self portrait, by way of proof that he’s not without talent.

“I’m just going with my two still cameras and a day pack – we’re doing it guerilla style,” he laughs. “I like getting out of my comfort zone a bit now and again. Then I will come back, release this record, and go on tour with a band!”

Actually it’s more like a trio of excellence – Bones Hillman (Swingers, Midnight Oil) on bass, Ross Burge (The Mutton Birds) on drums and himself – though Dobbyn allows that he may bring in someone else for this first tour.

“I’ll do another tour in November with a lot more players, but this time we are just doing little community halls that can hold 300 or 500 people – we’ll play for two hours maybe.”

Capturing the ‘Available Light’ started proper early 2004 at Neil Finn’s Auckland studio, Finn pre-producing as well as sharing acoustic guitar, vocal and piano duties.

“We worked on the song structures and basic arrangements and then Bones and Ross came in and we slammed it down – complete with the road noise, birds and locusts! Neil Baldock did an amazing job of getting everything in. He’s an incredible engineer. We tested all these mics – flash Neumanns and stuff and ended up using $300 Audix mics all the way through.

“We played some gigs at the same time as we were pulling all the songs together, because I wanted to get a feel for how this would sound as a three-piece, and we needed to get that kind of telepathy you only get when you are a few gigs down. It was the first time in my life I have consciously thought in those terms and it was one of the best decisions I made. We’re a band and it really kicks that way from the word go, good rhythm tracks make everything else simple.”

The studio wasn’t up to producing finished tracks and with Neil setting up to tour the world with his own new Finn brothers’ album, Dave was for a time unsure how to find completion.

“I thought to myself, ‘What’s my favourite NZ music?’ TrinityRoots hands down – and the stuff coming out of Wellington I just love. So I got in touch with David Long [Wellington-based producer and another former-Mutton Bird] and decided to take a hard disc and all my Pro Tools stuff down there and a plug it together with Lee Prebble at the Surgery – the heart of where Wellington’s music is coming from. It was shot in the dark but having some sort of bridge between Wellington and Auckland seemed to make sense. Unself-consciously the record has a good sense of community about it.”

Long himself added more guitar to the album and wrote horn arrangements for the likes of Toby Laing, Steve Roach and Warren Maxwell, who also sang on a few tracks. Dobbyn clearly enjoyed the couple of two-week stints plus odd days spent in Welli.

“It was kind of walking into someone else’s bohemia – that’s what I loved! I felt more collaborative on this record than most I’ve made. I was staying at David Long’s place and we only re-recorded a few tracks really. A couple of doozies came out at the end of the process to round off the album – Keeping the Flame and Outrageous Design were the two last songs I wrote. The credit sheet’s quite full – but it’s good!”

Lee Prebble mixed all the tracks except Welcome Home which was mixed by all-rounder Neil Baldock who also mastered the album at his own studio in Auckland.

It’s been eight years since Dave last had a drink and five years since his last album ‘Hopetown’. A Phase Four funding grant for this new album has been kept open on NZ On Air’s books for most of the time since. For a few of those years he worked away quietly on his own in a tiny central Auckland writing studio, teaching himself to be an engineer, learning Pro Tools and also, he says, learning to play piano. “I did get cabin fever for a while but I kind of assume that you have to with most records before you get them to come home!”

The move to his friend Neil Finn’s studio building was an important part of the recovery process from a depression which he now readily admits has gripped him pretty much since he gave up the bottle shortly after his 40th birthday. Only a year ago, he says, he wouldn’t have dreamed he would finish a record again. Now he has more enthusiasm for his role than ever.

“I lacked a bit of confidence for a few years there. Mainly because I was trying to find a new relationship to it all and unlearn a whole lot of things I’d thought were true – and get rid of a lot of baggage. I don’t think I was very well to be honest,” he laughs, evidently at the deliberate understatement. “I was bit down on it – I ran out of walls to bang into! We beat up on ourselves – I think as a songwriter it goes with the territory.”

Most of this album has been written on piano, a significant change after seven guitar-origined albums. The piano has led to using different keys and he says better vocal performances as well as guitar playing from him.

“You can play Welcome Home in G and it sounds okay, but you play it in A flat and it’s a more welcoming! Call me coy Roy, but it is! I’m playing guitar through smaller amps a couple of Fender Pro Juniors and a little Vox AC15. What the AC15 lacks in low mids and punch the Juniors have got – they’re great little amps.

“I have got quite conversational with a piano these days – I grew up listening to people like Leon Russell, a lot of that southern American music attracted me piano-wise and I’ve been exploring that over the last couple of years. I was moved to play piano ‘cos that’s where I found a lot of peace. If I played piano three or four hours a day I could crawl into that and maybe a song would pop out. If it didn’t someone would come and knock on the door – I think it is part of my job to talk with other musicians and encourage them.”

In the same way, Dobbyn had himself needed Neil Finn to help him find a focus and get on with this album.

“I did – I knew that would happen. We’d done it before, in ’94, when we did ‘Twist’ he kind of pulled the songs out of me. We’d bang against each other and this work would come out. It’s a tense relationship but a good one. It’s more a state of mind than a state of heart to get the impetus to start the song before it’s anything intellectual. I am a lyric guy – that’s my strength, but it’s usually the hardest thing to come together for me.

“Everyone’s just looking for a turn of phrase and that is where my talents lie – in lifting up a very familiar feeling and putting a handle on it.. We mine it and it’s given to you when you are ready – and I wasn’t ready for a few years. I never try to write a song to type [like another Loyal]. It’s how do you feel and what’s around you? Things have to grow up inside of you. It’s getting a lyric and wrapping it around something that will stick around – that’s what I’m looking for… always.”

Dobbyn admits he broke all his own album delivery deadlines, but says he wasn’t sure he ever had a record company deadline.

“At one point it didn’t seem like I had a relationship [with Sony] at all. I wanted everything to be different and as it has transpired the company is different now anyway [as Sony/BMG], there is more of an understanding that a local roster is important and a nurturing A&R relationship is important. What it takes to let a record go and be proud of it and not have any doubts that it was pointed in the right direction – that it hasn’t been taken out of my hands. I have felt that those things didn’t happen in the past.”

His previous outing ‘Hopetown’ was released by Sony late in 2000, perhaps a little too hot on the heels of the double-platinum selling best-of called ‘Overnight Success’. ‘Hopetown’ spent two months in the Top 50 charts but managed only 9000 sales, a loss maker, and it seems Dobbyn was filed under ‘no longer cost-effective’ by the record company more attuned to giant hits.

Things have certainly changed. Michael Bradshaw, who took charge of the merged Sony/BMG, reckons ‘Available Light’ is Dobbyn’s best work yet, and says he will be disappointed if it  doesn’t go triple platinum (45,000 sales). Intriguingly the two both joined Sony back in 1988, and Bradshaw sees the declining sales of Dobbyn’s last three albums as symptomatic of a global trend away from singer/songwriters, a trend that has recently been reversed. He cites Dylan’s resurgence as a comparison.

“These days most New Zealand artists are respected and admired, but Dave is adored. We are repositioning him as not just the guy next door but as a serious talent.”

He thinks the album has three good radio singles on it and there will also be a ‘collectors edition’ DVD version of the album available retailing for just $5 more than the album itself.

An important key to the completion of ‘Available Light’ was the involvement of the internationally experienced music marketing consultant Lorraine Barry, initially offering album marketing advice, now as Dobbyn’s manager. Barry, who previously worked as Director of International Marketing for Virgin Records in the U.K, has been planning for this release since August last year. Her diligence has been rewarded with rapid adoption of the new single by radio across the country.

“In my experience being an iconic artist can mean that they don’t get the [media] exposure or credit that they are due,” she explains. “So it was important to encourage the controllers of airplay to listen to the album and radio play has certainly tipped the scales for it.”

Having a whole album marketing plan is a new thing for Dobbyn, but it seems that there are deeper issues which have created road blocks on the business as well as creative pathways.

“When it comes to inspiring others to work with you on your stuff you have to have relationships. I just haven’t had the skills or the confidence, even though I’ve probably done a good job of masking it. A lot about performance is a mask of what’s really going on underneath – you’re trying to get noticed in some way. This record to me is a whole experience. I can see the tours, the gigs, I can match the photographs of the beach that I take with the music and they come from the same place -it’s connected somehow.

“I have discovered the music is not about me but about ‘us’ and has to be shared and taken for the gift it is to everyone. Nobody can claim ‘these are my songs’ for very long because they become everyone else’s – it does for me anyway in New Zealand! And I’m happy for that.

“These songs sound like they have always been around, and that has been the thing about the whole process . But it took a lot of darkness to get them out, that’s for sure! It’s been an emotional rollercoaster this one. The trip from a depressed reclusive hermit into an outgoing guy who wants everyone to sing along can be a long way across town!”

www.davedobbyn.co.nz