#matt corby | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

slenderframe71 · 1 year

Link

After losing his home last year, the Australian musician suddenly felt inspired to write his new album, Everything’s Fine. He talks about the bad times that led to it

When catastrophic floods hit the New South Wales northern rivers in early 2022, musician Matt Corby awoke to find himself in an apocalyptic scene. Cows were swimming past his balcony, while neighbours perched on top of their roofs awaiting rescue. In search of higher ground, he jumped in a dinghy along with his dogs, four-year-old son, heavily pregnant partner and mother-in-law, and headed for a bridge in Murwillumbah. There, they huddled together with about 100 others, while cars floated underneath and street signs only just poked out from the water.

“There were pregnant women, there were kids, there were dogs fighting, there were cows everywhere. It was chaos,” Corby remembers. “It was still raining and the water was coming up … There was no phone reception. It was a full end of the world kind of thing.”

Corby and his family were eventually rescued by three good samaritans who began ferrying people, five at a time, to safer territory in boats. But his home – which was not insured – was ruined. After the initial clean-up, he and his family moved into the music studio he has on a nearby property that had been unaffected by the floods. Amid the madness of trying to rebuild their home and care for a newborn baby, Corby felt invigorated for the first time in a long time to write songs.

“I was like, this better be good, because we’ve just been through a lot,” he says.

It wasn’t just the floods. Corby, a singer-songwriter who has been in the public eye for 15 years now, had watched the music industry he is part of become decimated by lockdowns. His partner, a nurse, had been working the Covid ward even while pregnant with their second child. And he had been going through his own health struggles, which he is reluctant to speak about, but from which he says he “definitely almost died”. It was, to put it lightly, a “bad time”. So you might wonder why Corby titled the album he eventually emerged with Everything’s Fine.

“Well, because it’s just not,” he laughs. “I thought it was funny.

Corby is speaking from the music studio where he made Everything’s Fine, his third album of emotive folk-pop music that centres his crooning vocals. He is a mix of a somewhat reluctant and very open interviewee – warm and loquacious until we hit a topic he flatly refuses to elaborate on, like some of the other lows that informed the new album, which he wants to keep to himself. Because while his career has had many highs, like the two Aria awards he has picked up and the success of his seven times-platinum breakthrough single Brother – the unmistakable yelping “ooeeeoo” vocal riff has followed him around ever since, Corby says – there have also been challenges.

If you were a consumer of free-to-air television in the mid-2000s, you may remember that Corby first found fame as a 17-year-old on season five of Australian Idol, in which he came runner-up, and has previously described going on as a “big fucking mistake”.

But Corby’s path into music began much earlier. He grew up in Sydney’s Sutherland Shire with his parents and sister, raised in a Pentecostal church now known as Shirelive (the same one attended by former prime minister Scott Morrison). While he is no longer religious, Corby enjoyed his time in the church – and got his first professional music gig there. When he had just begun high school, a group of travelling singers came to perform for his congregation. Taken by them, Corby approached the group and introduced himself as an aspiring vocalist. He auditioned to join and, a year later, was offered a position in the lineup.

“At first my parents were like, absolutely not, you’re not leaving school to go and join these crazy people … [But] eventually they caved, which they always kind of regretted,” Corby says. “I think they just lost me then – I was gone.”

Corby left school at 14 and moved into a house in western Sydney with the other members of the group, where he would live when they weren’t on tour. He saw his parents only “sporadically” during the 15 months he spent with the band and did Tafe schoolwork by correspondence (“I didn’t have a tutor, I just read the curriculum and filled in the blanks”). The group would tour for weeks at a time at the behest of local churches, who would bring them out to play at schools during the week, youth groups on Friday nights and do two Sunday services each week. “We were like a recruitment agency,” Corby remembers. It was fun but also daunting playing to school kids, who are “the toughest crowd ever – they want to destroy you”.

Towards the end of what would have been his year 10, Corby left the group and returned to his parents. He initially got a job making sandwiches at Subway, before re-joining school in year 11 – but had only made it through the first term when Australian Idol held auditions, which his father convinced him to attend. That was a decision Corby would later come to greatly regret.

“I really, really didn’t enjoy being on the show,” he says. “It was a bad time for me. I was a kid – I was 16 … You get plastered all over television and you cop a bad edit and you have these minor producers prodding at you and trying to make you upset. And then you have these judges that are, for the show, prodding at you. I think when you’re older you enter into a show like that knowing a little bit more about what you’re in for. When you’re a kid … you don’t understand how you’re being manipulated.”

Corby was in a “really bad place” during Idol, at a time before there was any real public discussion about mental health.

“This is the beginning of Myspace and stuff and a lot of online nastiness, and I just copped it from all angles from people,” he says. The online abuse was compounded by the gnawing feeling he was torpedoing his life dream: “I just thought I was ruining my chances of being taken seriously as a musician.”

When the show ended, Corby “respectfully declined” a record deal with Sony Music. He didn’t go back to school and instead spent a year playing shows under different names. The attempt at anonymity was only semi-successful – “people would always be like, aren’t you that bloke from the television?” – so after releasing his first EP independently, Corby moved to London and began playing open mic nights, enjoying being able to play to crowds who did not recognise him.

Eventually he moved back to Australia, and at age 20 wrote the pathos-imbued track Brother in his bedroom at his parents’ house, pouring into the song the shame he felt about betraying a close friend. The breakthrough success of that track was followed soon after by another hit, Resolution, and Corby’s career was set. In the years that followed he released two albums, the first of which hit No 1 on the Aria album charts, and moved to the northern rivers with his partner.

At first, Corby didn’t think much about making another album after his 2018 LP Rainbow Valley, instead focusing solely on teaching himself music production and engineering, and then using those skills for other artists – including singer-songwriter Budjerah, whose debut EP Corby earned Aria nominations for his studio work on.

Then in late 2020, Corby was taken to hospital with stomach pains. Doctors found a tumour, which he had removed, along with a portion of his bowel. He spent a week nervously waiting to find out if the tumour was cancerous. “Luckily it wasn’t,” he says. “The recovery wasn’t pleasant but I was just glad to still be here.”

Eventually, after that rocky period of natural disasters and personal reckonings, he felt ready to write Everything’s Fine. While it’s sonically in step with his earlier work, the record signposts a new era in Corby’s career, one in which he intends to take a step back from the limelight and prioritise producing other artists – largely to spare himself the ancillary requirements that come with putting out his own music. Because despite his manager’s urgings, Corby does not want to be on social media: “I genuinely hate it,” he says. “I think it’s poisoned us as humans.” He has little interest in touring beyond the bare minimum: “There’s a lot of young artists that probably deserve to be in that spot now more than me.” And he doesn’t like having to speak to journalists: “Probably because I did Idol – that’s where I was like, nah, I don’t care about promoting myself ever again.”

Corby would rather spend his days making his partner toast in the morning and dropping his son at school before tinkering in the studio. He and his family have been slowly rebuilding their home – raising it “a good metre above” the all-time flood level, which they hope will be enough – aided by the community that’s rallied around him. He had a lot of friends come to help in the aftermath of the floods and says it was “really beautiful to see that side of humans” in a time that was very difficult.

In a career of highs and lows, Corby has learned to take the good with the bad. That is what those dark days last year taught him, and the ethos he wrote his new record around. Because while Everything’s Fine is ironic, it is also true.

“Even if you just get totally shat on and life throws you a bunch of fucking curveballs, you’re still here, you’re still breathing, there’s still things that you can do,” he reflects. “Appreciating those fleeting moments of being present and enjoying what is left to enjoy when things go south – it’s really the only stuff that can keep you from spiralling … On some level, everything is kind of fine. Even though it’s so not.”

Everything Fine is out now (Island Records Australia). Matt Corby is touring Australia in May and June, then UK, Europe and the US later this year; https://www.mattcorbymusic.com/tour

#australian music #music #culture #folk music #pop and rock #matt corby

6 notes · View notes