Looking For Home

Two years in the making, a remarkable collage of sonic textures and stories, Upon Ayr is the debut solo album for Ben Fletcher – a founding member of Bluebottle Kiss and then The Devoted Few – who, since 2005, has been a member of Sarah Blasko's internationally touring band, moving to London in 2010 to continue touring Europe and the US with her.

“I think definitely, most of the stories on there are about movement and travel and stuff,” Fletcher admits. “The past three years I've been living in London – Sarah and I moved to London at the same time – and there was lots of travelling and we did almost 200 shows in 2010, and it was non-stop moving and travelling. And that's seeped into the writing of this record, lots of talk about movement and what home is.

“That was very important and a big thing that Sarah and I kept on talking about, what home means to us and how where you are at the time imbues what you're creating and what you're trying to do. Sarah lived in Brighton and I lived in London and we were both writing at the same time, and it happened that we were recording at the same time, and mixing at the same time and mastering at the same time, so there were lots of uncertain texts going, 'What are we doing? What is this? Where are we? What am I doing here?' And the uncertainty of what home is and where you are really seeped into the record. You know, travelling around and you get after a tour and you're not actually home because where I grew up is in Sydney, and then you get back and it's just hard to know your surroundings and how to be certain and feel happy and confident and stuff. Friends and family really make that possible within yourself, and so when you don't have that, after a while there's just a lot of uncertainty, and so that was a big theme for me in the album, and I think Sarah's as well to a certain extent – it was a search for home.”

Fletcher goes on to cite Thomas Wolfe, and specifically his book You Can't Go Home Again, as a major influence on his art and life. So similar are the book's protagonist's stories that Fletcher feels it's maybe written just for him. “It's [a] great opus [about] this guy called Eugene Gant and his life, and it really kind of touched a nerve and so I re-read it while I was travelling round, and so quite a few of the songs are about that character and how he relates to me. And I find that him and me, the character Eugene Gant is actually written after Thomas Wolfe, so that was him writing about himself, but I think sometimes I feel like he was writing about me. There was a lot of uncertainty about what he was doing and his position in life and where he was headed, and all of that came out in the record. But there's also little bits of the death of a relationship and stuff like that, which I'm always kind of transfixed by,” he chuckles, “because they're not about the death of any relationship that I was in – at least not these ones anyway – just close friends and friends that had been dating for 20 years and all of a sudden they're not anymore. There's a song called Strangers Sleeping In The Same Bed, and it was just about a friend who said he woke up and he felt like he was next to a stranger, and that kind of freaked me out – it really scared me.”

Fletcher will be playing the following dates:

Sunday 17 March – The Workers Club, Melbourne
Wednesday 27 March – The Vanguard, Sydney