Shane Nicholson: after Kasey Chambers, Hell Breaks Loose

He split with wife Kasey Chambers in 2013 but now Shane Nicholson has found his mojo with a new album.

Every day for a few weeks earlier this year Shane Nicholson climbed aboard his Kawasaki Ninja 650 outside his home on the NSW central coast, rode to Sydney for a 12-hour day in the studio and then rode back.

It was a new routine for the Americana singer-songwriter, who in recent years has turned his attention to producing records for other people at his home studio, Sound Hole, a job in which daylight does not play a significant part. For his own new album, Hell Breaks Loose, it was time to take a new approach, not only by shifting location but also, for the first time, by letting someone else take control of the recording process.

“Last year I made about nine albums for other people,” Nicholson says, “so I felt like I should not be involved in the scientific aspect of my own album. I’ve learned over the years being involved in the production takes a bit of the shine off it for me, so I had to find a way of removing myself from the process.”

That way was to employ his friend and respected studio whiz Matt Fell to produce his album — and in Sydney, not at Sound Hole.

“It was like a holiday for me,” Nicholson says, “because I’d start the day with a ride down the coast, play guitar and sing all day and then ride home. There was no moment where I felt like I was working.

“It has left me with such a good feeling about the record. Usually it takes me months before I can listen to a record I’ve made.”

The previous studio album bearing Nicholson’s name was 2012’s Wreck & Ruin, his second album with his wife Kasey Chambers, following their award-winning Rattlin’ Bones in 2008.

The couple’s split in 2013 had a significant impact on both performers, professionally and personally. They have two children together whom they now co-parent. Chambers poured some of her feelings about the break-up into her album Bittersweet last year. The subject is never far away on Hell Breaks Loose, including on the title song, but Nicholson stresses that overall the album is about moving on rather than dwelling on the past.

“It’s actually post-break-up,” he says, “[it’s about] finding your feet again and learning to be a new person in a new environment.” Nicholson admits he struggled for a while after his marriage broke down.

Apart from the shared family, the singer had also been an integral addition to the Chambers music family that includes Kasey’s father Bill, mother Di and brother Nash, as well as a fluctuating number of like-minded artists who have shared a Chambers stage.

“I mainly struggled with the world changing and finding how you fit into your new world — and creating a new world. It’s like starting from scratch. I found that really difficult, especially juggling that and having kids and still being tied to the old world. Co-parenting is difficult but I am finding my own dynamic. There’s a lot of that on the record.”

In Rattlin’ Bones and Wreck & Ruin, Chambers and Nicholson made two of the most critically lauded country albums in Australian history. They also performed together here and overseas, and in a variety of ensembles. He says the likelihood of any of that happening again is slim.

“I would doubt it,” he says. “It’s certainly not something I’d be interested in at this point. I loved it, though, and I learned a lot and we made some pretty good music. Even our solo records were always a reaction to what we were doing together.

“It was a big chapter. All of that was condensed into eight or nine years, a relatively short space of time.

“Those albums … I have a place in my heart for them, but that might be it now.”

Songs on his latest album such as Secondhand Man and Single Fathers draw a direct line to Nicholson’s new status.

He says writing about it was “very cathartic. It was an ongoing therapy session. Hell Breaks Loose is probably the only break-up song on the record that addresses the whole thing directly. I don’t remember writing everything with that in mind.”

Nicholson is sitting in the plush offices of Universal Music in Sydney, home to the singer’s latest label after he signed to Universal’s roots music subsidiary Lost Highway last year. The previous evening he performed a handful of the new songs to a small gathering of music industry folk at an intimate upstairs bar in Sydney’s Darlinghurst. Such self-promotion commitments caused Nicholson grief at one time, but not any more.

“Those little gigs can be full of anxiety,” he says. “It can be a make-or-break moment sometimes. I used to take those things so seriously. Now it’s so much more casual. It doesn’t matter if you f..k up a song or get the words wrong. I don’t feel there’s so much to prove, maybe.”

Certainly Nicholson should feel he has paid his dues after almost 20 years as a performer. His music career began in his native Brisbane with the pop-rock band Pretty Violet Stain, a group, originally called Freak, that began in high school. Although the band had moderate success, in 2002 Nicholson went solo with the album It’s a Movie, produced by Chambers’s brother Nash, which is how the couple first met.

Nicholson has released five critically acclaimed solo albums since then, including 2008’s Familiar Ghosts and 2011’s Bad Machines.

The new one has the same familiar alt-country leanings as its predecessors, but the songs on it were a little harder to come by than with previous output. Nicholson hit a writing block following the end of his marriage and during his heavy schedule as a producer. “It was the first time I’ve ever really struggled with writing,” he says. “I went six months without writing a song. I wasn’t even trying to write. Producing other records, I think, I was just music-ed out. I didn’t even want to listen to music.”

It took another break from his routine to open the creative floodgates. Last year his friend and fellow singer-songwriter Warren H. Williams invited him to come and stay with him in his home town of Hermannsburg in the Northern Territory. During the week he spent with his friend Nicholson found his mojo once more and songs began to emerge, including the album track Hermannsburg.

“The trip changed my whole life,” Nicholson says. “It was one of those pivotal moments. Warren took me out on these day trips to sacred ground and told me all about every mountain and rock out there. He was the best tour guide you could ever have. Other days he would just tell me I had to go off on my own. So I’d walk through the town. I think he recognised I needed some removal from my life for a while.

“One day I was sitting outside the church and I started writing a song, which turned into Hermannsburg on the record. I went back to the same spot next day and wrote two more songs. It opened the floodgates. When I got home I just couldn’t stop writing. I came back feeling renewed.”

Nicholson recorded most of Hell Breaks Loose with Felland drummer Josh Schuberth, but there are a handful of guest appearances, most notably from American country legend Rodney Crowell, who sings on the track One Big Mess.

Nicholson is going out on the road to play the new songs and old ones over the next few months. And he’ll be back in the Sound Hole studio, working on his next production project.

The singer says he’s looking forward to a new phase of his life and of his career.

“I’m not essentially a glass-half-full person,” he says. “My personality doesn’t lend itself to that, but Hermannsburg changed a lot for me; not just the songwriting. I was a lot clearer in my outlook after that.

“Now I’m content with how I’ve set things up. I get to work the way I like and to be the dad I want to be and in my own way.”

Hell Breaks Loose is released through Lost Highway/UMA on August 7.