THERE’S a few home truths in the latest release from prolific singer-songwriter Dave Graney.

            The nineties “King of Pop”, ARIA award winning artist, played at Goleby’s Basement on Thursday, bringing his latest offering of insightful lyrics, arthouse music and underlying sense of humour to Ipswich.

            One of his latest songs, Wilco Got No Wilco, uses Chicago alternative rock band Wilco to illustrate how the rest of the world absorbs so much American culture, while Americans only get to hear and see their own culture.

            Describing Wilco as “festival favourites”, “out of shape guys in denim”, the lyrics go on to declare “Romans! legionaires!, we saw the white sails … 22 flavours of milkshake … Yankees got no Yankee, no cultural oppressor”.

            “I don’t really know much about (Wilco) but I hear people talking about them all the time. American culture, all my life has been all around us, so why should I know about this band? But I do,” Graney said.

            Sporting a beret, the immaculately dressed Graney took to the stage in Ipswich as a duo with long-time collaborator, drummer and multi-instrumentalist Clare Moore.

            They have been touring as Dave & Clare since 2017, with the exception in 2019 when they put out two albums with a full band.

            “Since we finished with the Coral Snakes in late ’97, pretty much every album we’ve done has been half just us two doing everything and half with a band in a studio,” he said.

            “We enjoy, and always liked, having a band, but especially with Covid and everything, it’s very hard to have so many moving parts, different people travelling and coming to a situation so it’s been easier for us to just keep it the two of us.

            “I like playing with our band, I like playing as a duo. I can do solo shows but I like to have an interplay of a couple of instruments.

            “My shows aren’t like everybody else’s. I’m basically a singer-songwriter but I’m a performer as well. It’s not like Paul Kelly doing a gig.

            “We occasionally do gigs with our band the Coral Snakes. We’ve done a couple of tours nationally. It was like a decade of work in an hour and a half. The whole audience knows every note and so does the band.  It’s quite incredible, but to do that every night for me would be pretty boring.

            “I don’t know whether people expect music to be like that; predictable - I know what is going to happen next. My favourite thing in music is surprise.”

            The latest album, Everything Was Funny, released under “Dave Graney and Clare Moore”, was launched this time last year but with the disruption of the pandemic, the duo are still touring the album.

            “Well, we’ve been to most places,” Graney said. “I think we might have started in Brisbane at the Junk Bar just as the album Everything Was Funny was coming out, but it has taken this time to get around to different places. We were in Adelaide finally (a week before these shows).”

            “Yeah, some things got cancelled,” Moore added. “But, you know, we just think these days all bets are off really with regard to everything. So we’re just going to keep launching it until we get the next one.”

            Graney said he found the pandemic a positive for his songwriting as he and Moore were able to create in isolation and played about 120 online shows. 

            “I found the lockdown in Melbourne quite an inspiring time. It probably focused me on writing a lot more songs than I normally would have.

            “Lockdown for everybody else was a great time of reflection. The world stopped. That was the positive thing about it, to stop competing for a while.”

            Graney said the music industry post Covid was unchartered territory.

            “People used to worry about putting out an album, saying you have to have a long lead with the print magazines like Rolling Stone - even though Rolling Stone Australia was two guys and a bar heater somewhere in Darlinghurst, printing the rest of the paper from America - it was structured in this way in different times of year,” he said.

            “I don’t know what the music industry thinking is now. It might be all around festival season, to build up an album, but we are very far outside all of that thinking.”