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TJ Eckleberg releases his 7th studio album Black & Amber in August 2016.
Eckleberg returns to Australia briefly from Japan, launching his new album with a solo performance at Colbourne Ave (Glebe) on Thursday 11 August.
The album is released independently on Akimbo records.
Following three adrenalin-fuelled years in Berlin, the Australian singer-songwriter’s 7th album finds him in the calm of Kyoto, Japan, delivering his most focused album to date. Black & Amber marries the rush of new adventures with the loneliness and loss of leaving things behind – offering darkness and beauty in equal measure.
On Black & Amber, Eckleberg explores what it is to trade a world you know for one you don’t. In Someone I’m becoming, he asks ‘Was it something I was becoming? Something I’ve become? Someone coming undone?’. It’s a soulful, lush guitar-based album of sparkling tremolo, ragged radio speaker vocals, rippling sunshine delay lines and Eckleberg’s knack of balancing world weary whisper with fragile wail. From the disorientation of I swallowed the ocean to the sweet nostalgia of Mini Moke, the album merges a lost sixties garage soul with an off kilter indie aesthetic – magnifying small details into glimpses of what it is to make it through the day.
“Berlin was a crazy endless summer, but Kyoto is a different world – I’m walking past centuries old temples and sculpted gardens by the river, past Maiko and priests catching bullet trains. The silence, the detachment, the confusion throws a curious light on who I was, and who I could be…” – TJ Eckleberg
O Henry
O Henry
TJ Eckleberg (This might feel like home – 2014)
Directed by Michael Mortlock – Mortlock Photography & Media
tjeckleberg.com
O Henry is the first single from This might feel like home – TJ Eckleberg’s sixth independent release. It’s a song about how love catches us wide eyed, gets us listening for the unexpected and sometimes finds us even when we run away from it.
tjeckleberg.com
tjeckleberg.bandcamp.com
soundcloud.com/eckleberg/this-might-feel-like-home
This might feel like home: Interview part 2
TJ discusses the ideas, themes, collaborators and spaces that gave the album its unique vibe.
This might feel like home – April 7
Finally the album is on it’s way. it’s been finished a while, but in between moving countries and trying to survive as a musician, it’s taken it’s own sweet time.
But below is the first of a two part interview with Michael and Melly Mortlock about the album.
Enjoy.
Love and how it finds us? Nothing to do with me…
I’m a little weary lately
less inclined to run from what runs after me
Nothing to do with me chronicles – in snapshots – a pretty transitional part of my life – and I guess to some extent one that continues now. In my early thirties I went through a major break up, and the ensuing chaos of my life took me in a multitude of unexpected directions. Many of these directions were deceptively and heartbreakingly unhelpful, others became steadfast and enduring friendships.
Continue reading “Love and how it finds us? Nothing to do with me…”
Nothing to do with me
[This might feel like home, 2013]
I wake up in the morning
stumble to the sink and wash my face
make myself a cup of coffee
brace myself for the day
I’m a little weary lately
less inclined to run from what runs after me
Love found me on the telephone
when I couldn’t stop crying
a gentle friend listened in silence
drove to Maroubra to sit beside me
Whatever I did it had nothing to do with me
whatever I did, love found me
Continue reading “Nothing to do with me”
If you look too long you see… angry, lost young men
[Eyes Open – SUPERHYDRATED, 2000]
It’s hard to hear this song without hearing the squealing wheels of trains; feeling the languid heat of the Australian summer; and catching the disconcerting other-worldy echo of the suburban malaise I grew up in. But the song centres around the eight years I taught English and Drama at Birrong Boys’ High School – a tough school in Sydney’s southwest – working with Nick Danta, collaborating with Tim Carroll and the BYDS network and creating several large scale drama projects framed as responses to violence.
And if you look too long you see too much
And it’s hard sometimes, just keeping your eyes open
During this time there were more than a few tragic student deaths, and these stories weave their way through the track. The train announcer’s megaphone voice is particularly piquant – one young man was killed tagging a carriage; a few years later disaster arguably avoided when an alert train guard spotted a year eight boy showing his friends a gun on the platform shortly before school – enabling authorities to find it on him during class. Too many stories to list.
Continue reading “If you look too long you see… angry, lost young men”
Eyes Open
[SUPERHYDRATED, 2000]
A kid on a train with tag sticky hands
A bridge in the distance not distant enough
A speeding up carriage slows down a life
Exhale like the bottom of an aerosol can
If you look too long, you see too much
And it’s hard sometimes just being
A kid on his knees with gun barrel eyes
A brother who’s been drinking but not enough to fall over
A stupid crack like a fire cracker going off on Chinese New Year
Blood all over quite unlike a quilt cover
And if you look too long you see too much
And it’s hard sometimes, just keeping your eyes open
and it’s hard sometimes, just to open your eyes
Continue reading “Eyes Open”
Charcoal – waiting for holy moments
This, the closing track on illumineon, was written in London in the middle of a treacherous year, while I struggled to make my ‘difficult’ third album, embark on a new musical direction and teach English and Drama full time in London’s South West (and later South East) to stay afloat. If I recall correctly, I was standing at the exit gates on Tottenham Court Road.
Replete with quivering ghost voices courtesy of some strange Ibanez delay unit and sliding industrial background guitars, I’ve always been happy with the way it nails the nonchalance of waiting for someone at a big city station while holding the warmth and humble certainty of spotting them for the first moment in the crowd.
It’s easy to be busy looking for something else, searching the world for hope, love, kindness, warmth. For me, Charcoal whispers back – twelve years later – ‘Look at what you have! Be surprised by what you see every day… hold these things, the embers are easily blown out.’ Grand gestures fade as quickly as small moments, but there are more small moments, so grab what you can.
Someone is shouting
Electric, mega phonetic
Subway train insistent