Husky honour a home no more on album No 4, Stardust Blues
The Melbourne indie folk band’s new album Stardust Blues centres on denizens of a now-demolished building.
Husky Gawenda was feeling adrift, having spent a fruitful year or so in Berlin making music with his cousin and bandmate, Gideon Preiss. There the pair shared a 13th-floor apartment that overlooked the city, where Gawenda would sit on a balcony and write into the small hours when not having adventures elsewhere within Berlin’s bustling night-life.
Under the band name Husky, the two had written and released two albums blending indie folk and rock music since 2012, while the Berlin trip preceded a third album that would be released after their return. But though Gawenda felt the tug of his true home, Melbourne, the problem was that he had nowhere to live until a meeting in the German capital with a friend named Tunni Kraus offered a tantalising solution: take a room in what he dubbed the Westbury Hotel, a 1920s-era mansion in the inner-south suburb of Balaclava, situated on Westbury Street.
The returning Australian took up the offer, dropped his bags in a room at the Westbury and soon found that, as with the fabled Hotel California, he could check out any time he liked but he could never leave: the building and its rotating cast of curious characters became his new home.
“I ended up living there for five years with Tunni, bandmates, other friends, painters, musicians; weirdos of all sorts,” he tells Review from Melbourne last month. “It was a kind of artists’ commune. We wrote there and recorded, and had parties, and there was this atmosphere of magic and mystery that I think everyone felt as soon as they walked in the door. It was an inspiring place.”
For Gawenda, a songwriter for whom stories are the connective tissue of life itself, the Westbury offered plenty of rich material for his art, which is why it makes perfect sense that the fourth Husky album, Stardust Blues, is based on the people he encountered there.
Its cover artwork is painted by Kraus, the creative friend who sent him tumbling down a five-year rabbit hole. And the only reason he checked out? “It’s demolished now,” he says with a sigh of resignation. “It’s no longer.”
The story behind Gawenda’s journey into a career in popular music is unusual, as about a decade ago he was seriously considering three vastly different career paths. He worked as a journalist at The Age newspaper, where he enjoyed the daily challenges of news reporting and was inspired by being surrounded by writers, that strange breed who care deeply about word usage and sentence structures.
Given that his father, Michael Gawenda, was the paper’s editor from 1997 to 2004, landing in the newsroom felt a little like a fait accompli for the son of an accomplished storyteller, yet his restlessness was such that he was also studying for the Graduate Medical School Admissions Test, commonly known as the GAMSAT, while entertaining thoughts of becoming a doctor.
At the same time, he was also writing music and playing in bands, and he and Preiss were recording the first Husky album, Forever So, in a backyard studio. Soon before he was due to sit the exam, lead single History’s Door got picked up by Triple J, and the twin possibilities of journalism and medicine were eclipsed by the excitement of what was now in front of him.
“We went from being an obscure, completely unknown couple of guys recording in my bungalow to being played on the radio and being contacted by record labels and all of that,” he says. “The truth is I kind of forgot about the GAMSAT. I got really busy and suddenly we were talking about tours, and international tours were starting to be planned, and we signed our first record deal. I quit my job at The Age and threw out all the GAMSAT materials, and that stuff’s history.”
Forever So was released in 2012 on Sub Pop Records — the Seattle label that signed the likes of Nirvana and Soundgarden and, later, popular indie acts such as the Shins and Fleet Foxes — while its follow-up, 2014’s Ruckers Hill, saw Gawenda win the $50,000 first prize at the Vanda & Young Global Songwriting Competition for its second track, Saint Joan.
“On the one hand, it seems like a weird thing to have a competition that makes a judgment on how good songs are,” he says of that achievement. “On the other hand, it was nice to get that recognition. It made it easier for me to say I’m a songwriter. It made me feel like it’s a ‘real job’. When people ask you what you do and you tell them, often their response to that is, ‘Yeah, but what do you do for a job?’ Which is fair enough, I understand; it’s not a usual job.”
Since Gawenda and Preiss formed the band in 2008, they have played with several line-ups, with the current configuration completed by bassist Jules Pascoe and drummer Holly Thomas. In the past, most Husky songs would begin with Gawenda coming up with a skeletal structure on guitar or piano, then he’d bring it to his bandmates for them to flesh out. This time, album No 4 started with instrumentals written alongside Preiss and Pascoe, and this new model of composition bled into his writing.
“They were kind of like canvases, but not blank canvases; they had distinct personalities and moods, and kind of told a story in their way,” he says of those instrumental beds. “I took them away to write lyrics and just tried to feel for what that story was, and let the feeling transform into lyrics and melodies.”
At the time, Gawenda had been reading James Joyce’s epic novel Ulysses and was captivated by the way in which its arc follows the minutiae of one day in one Dublin man’s life, and that informed his thinking, too.
“As I was writing, the lyrics seemed to become a narrative,” he says. “It was unintentional at first, but as I noticed there was a story emerging, I followed it and ended up with this character — semi-based on me — and a bunch of friends and other characters, semi-based on my friends and the people who lived at the hotel, and the people who came through the hotel. The story takes place in a city that’s semi-based on Melbourne, and the idea is that it happens over 24 hours — but a fair bit happens in 24 hours, I think, in real life.”
That process of discovery is one of his favourite parts of the job. “That’s what you get addicted to,” he says. “You don’t know exactly what happens inside the chrysalis, but if you can get it happening, you can get the magical butterfly on the other side of it. That’s what songwriting is all about: trying to make that happen.”
In Gawenda’s eyes, Stardust Blues is the closest he and his bandmates have ever got to realising their artistic vision. They wanted to tell a compelling story using words and music, and they have. While the building itself is no more, through these 12 tracks and several music videos filmed on site before and after its demolition, the Westbury Hotel lives on.
Stardust Blues is out now via Ditto Music.
More Coverage
