Full interview with Local Sounds (unedited)

Question 1

‘Sunset or Sunrise’ feels like it’s sitting on the edge of something big. Can you tell us about what inspired the song and how it took shape?

Andy’s Answer:

Cam and I were driving back to Sydney from Batemans Bay after playing this great little festival called Nellijam, and I think that feeling you’re describing, “sitting on the edge of something big” was already in the air.

There’s a particular kind of energy in those in-between moments. You’re leaving something behind, heading toward something unknown, and there’s excitement in that, but also a kind of quiet dread. Like standing at the departure gate, knowing your life is about to change, but not quite knowing how.

That feeling became central to Sunset or Sunrise.

We were listening to a lot of music; The War on Drugs, Sam Fender and The National, but also just talking, sharing ideas, letting things blur together and bubble over. And I kept coming back to this image of momentum; something already in motion, almost too far gone to stop. Like a train moving through a landscape that’s starting to fracture.

The album as a whole lives in that space between two worlds. The past and the future. Who we’ve been and who we might become. And this song sits right on that fault line.

On a personal level, it’s about love and identity; about how we shape ourselves for others, and how we perform versions of ourselves in the hope of being loved or understood. But underneath that, there was also a broader unease I couldn’t shake; this sense that culturally and politically we might be drifting toward something we don’t fully understand yet, but can somehow feel approaching.

I’d been reading Christopher Wylie’s Mindfck*, thinking a lot about manipulation, division, and how reality itself can be subtly shaped. And I think that fed into the emotional tone of the song; that sense that something is coming, and we’re all, in different ways, participating in it.

The lyrics came quite quickly after that. It felt less like writing and more like tuning into something that was already there.

So yeah, that “edge” you’re talking about, that’s exactly where the song lives.It’s not quite the fall, and it’s not quite the flight.It’s that suspended moment just before you find out which one it is.

Question 2

There’s this tension in the song between moving forward and standing still. Was that something you were playing with intentionally, or did it show up naturally?

Andy’s Answer:

That tension was definitely deliberate, but I think it’s also something we live inside all the time.

There’s that U2 song Running to Stand Still, from The Joshua Tree album which I’ve always loved. And my dad used to say something like, “for things to stay the same, everything must change.” Those ideas seep in, they find a way to live in you somewhere, or maybe you recognise them because they hold up a mirror to you in some way.

I started with the cinematic idea; film fascinates me, as a series of still frames creating the illusion of movement. Twenty-four frozen moments a second, and suddenly we believe in time moving forward.

But then it also triggers something in me that I’ve always questioned about memory.

How much of our sense of movement is actually just a story we’re telling ourselves? A sequence we’ve stitched together after the fact. Little fragments, like a Super 8 film, flickering somewhere in the mind.I think of memories from childhood that get prompted by photographs, but I wonder how much is real, and what is simply the repetition of a story over time?

And then I also wonder if at times parts of us don’t move on at all.

Maybe they stay behind, stuck in a moment, remaining there frozen, unalive, but like ghosts.

Like the last time you kissed a lover goodbye at a train station. Some part of you still standing on that platform, watching the train disappear forever over and over for eternity.

And in this, you end up with a strange duality; you’re moving forward, your life is unfolding, things are changing, but at the same time, you’re still in the past etched into a stone cliché ready for the printing press of your own myth.

And I think the song sits right in that space.

Like you’re moving forward whether you like it or not, but part of you is forever standing where you were, almost like that idea of the moment before death, with your life passing before your very eyes.

Question 3

You’ve made a career out of trying lots of different creative things, from music to film to poetry. How do you approach switching between those mediums?

Andy’s Answer:

For me, there is really only art; the act of communication, or maybe it’s better defined as a communion with something eternal.

Each medium just offers a different doorway into that space. Music connects directly to emotion. Language bridges into the intellect, into abstraction and logic. Images feel closer to dreams; that symbolic, layered and intuitive subconscious space.

What I love about visual art is that a single frame can hold an entire story. Every element interacting; sometimes reinforcing meaning, and sometimes contradicting it, mirroring the complexity of life itself.

As culture moves more toward these short-form expressions of TikTok and Instagram and rage bait soundbites, full of emotional triggers and oversimplifications, I think there’s a responsibility for artists to push back a little. To reintroduce nuance, and to acknowledge and even celebrate complexity.

Because life is too vast, too layered, too ironic and contradictory to fit neatly into small boxes.

Question 4

You’re based in Byron Bay, which is a place a lot of people associate with an easy-going lifestyle. Does that setting influence your work, or do you find yourself responding to it in a more complicated way?

Andy’s Answer:

Yeah, Byron definitely has a reputation now.

I remember doing an interview with Dave Graney on RRR a couple of years ago, and he introduced me as “Andy from Byron.” I didn’t quite catch the invitation in the moment, but in hindsight it was a perfect setup; I could’ve had some fun with it.

I should’ve said something like, “Oh Dave, you know how it is up here, I got up, posted my morning gratitude video to TikTok, did a bit of yoga, had my media team capture some golden hour content down at Wategos, as I was perfectly leaning into the light.”

Or some such ridiculous stereotype.

Before telling him the truth.

At the time, I was working as a funeral director. During COVID, when all the gigs disappeared overnight, I found myself sitting with grieving families, helping them plan farewells for people they loved. Driving the deceased to the crematorium. Standing there as someone’s entire life was reduced to ash. Then heading to a nursing home to bring someone else into our care.

And then, later that same day, jumping on the radio to talk about music.

That contrast is life in Byron to me. Or at least, that’s life everywhere.

There is beauty here; the light, the ocean, the volcanic rocks thrusting through the earth, the sense of possibility and the fertile soil. Everything grows here. It’s  so green and so blue. But there’s also floods, depth, grief and complexity just like anywhere else. There’s a loneliness, a distance, you definitely need a car to get around, though the culture of hitch-hiking is still going strong.

I think I missed that moment with Dave because I was still trying to be one thing; a “musician,” whatever that means. But life doesn’t really work like that. We’re all carrying multiple realities at once.

So yeah, Byron influences my work, but not in the way people might expect. I’m not here writing rainbow mantra songs to Gaia.

Sunsets are more than a photo opportunity, they’re liminal spaces that we inhabit like Airport Departure Lounges; they’re thresholds we passage through as we journey into the darkness of night, and the theatre of life.

On the surface, it’s an easy-going place here where fantasy and reality meet between sunset and moonrise, and between the luminescence of flash photography and a famous lighthouse, where a homeless beggar and a social media influencer can each pretend the other doesn’t exist, and in that uncomfortable tension, that’s where the songs come from.

Question 5

You’ve toured with some legendary artists like Nick Cave and Portugal. The Man. Can you tell us one small moment or memory from the road that has stuck with you?

Andy’s Answer:

After the Brisbane show, which was one of the last at the Festival Hall, I got to go out to dinner with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. It was an incredible honour. I sat next to Nick and Anita Lane. I was blown away by what a complete gentleman Nick was. He was much kinder and softer than what I had imagined from his stage persona. It completely disarmed whatever myth I’d built up around him.

At one point, I got to tell him about a dream I had, where we were walking arm in arm and I said to him in the dream, “Nick what do I have to do to be a rock star?” To which the Dream Nick said, “It’s as simple as sticking your dick in a dim sum” When I told him this, he laughed so hard he nearly fell off his chair. Through tears he said, “Maybe it is.” But then added, “Hang on, was it steamed, fried or still frozen? Maybe I was trying to tell you it’s very difficult.” He then went on to add, “I think you better take that one up with your therapist.” It was a beautifully human moment. A moment I will forever treasure. I saw him again recently in Brisbane and I felt that I understood his lyrical poems more than before, especially since becoming a Dad myself. My respect for him has deepened. I realise now that Nick was never just a rock star. He’s so much more nuanced than that, so much more human and so much more angelic also. He’s an eternal being. He’s communing with that timeless space on stage and through his music, He’s a wild god.

Question 6

What always surprises you about making music after all these years? Is there something that still catches you off guard?

Andy’s Answer:

Yes, what still catches me off guard is the mistake.

Or what we call a mistake.

Years ago, I wrote a series of poems called The Mistake Poems, and it came from a moment of mishearing someone say “flowers” and hearing instead, “for all hours.”  It opened up a little doorway for me into something I wasn’t expecting.

Hitting a wrong note whilst playing guitar can have this same effect.

Most of the time we just correct it and move on. Our brains pull us back to what we know.

But song-writing, for me, lives in that split second before the correction.

That moment where a melody is still mumbled, and not quite formed, full of strange nuance and possibility. That moment before I come in, trapped by reason or by a rehearsed identity, and try in my folly to tidy it up, to make it clever, or to make it “right.”

But sometimes the best thing you can do is not fix it.

Just follow it.

I think that’s what still surprises me; that music seems to reward those moments where you let go of control. Where you yield and allow the accident to change you, and take you somewhere new.

If we rehearse our responses too much, we risk the chance of living a safe and already known life instead of walking a thrilling tight rope into the great unknown and discovering amazing things about ourselves and the world we live in. I don’t know.

In a way, it’s like the song is waiting for you to make a mistake to show you what it actually is, rather than what you are trying to make it be, if that makes sense?

I still definitely get caught off guard by that; that something so small, so accidental, something that could almost go unnoticed, some little flirt or coincidence can hold the potential to open up an entire world of experience.

Music is how we get to hear all the subtleties of our rich emotional inner world expressed. It’s about possibility. In one single chord is a whole world of exploration. Whilst playing Bach’s Prelude in C Major recently, I noticed that from the very first C Major chord, if you listen carefully, you can hear the whole harmonic series rattling away. It’s all there if you’re open. Bach starts out diatonic, but soon brings in that secondary dominant and on it goes through a G diminished chord and we sense our own complexity, Music is eternal, it’s everywhere at once and even in its simplest form, it’s so richly complex. Harmony and rhythm might just  be the most perfect expression of the wonder and beauty in our known universe. Blessed are we to have such a marriage between the rational and the irrational, between our brains and our hearts.