Diesel

Days Like These

"I think it's officially eight. I'm pretty dead sure of that. I remember thinking it was 2008 and it was my eighth album." When you've been a part of the musical landscape for almost 20 years, it's easy to lose track. To do the maths requires a little revision of history. So, before introducing his eighth studio album, Days Like These, Diesel takes a quick look over his shoulder.

First, there was Johnny Diesel & The Injectors - a bolt of lightning that struck the Aussie rock scene 19 years ago. "That went for nearly fi ve years of touring, and one album," Diesel recalls. "It was quite meteoric, I guess. Then kaboom! It was all done going into '91." He went solo - the dawn of the platinum-selling, ARIA-winning solo era. Hepfi delity was followed by The Lobbyist and Solid State Rhyme. A blues album with Chris Wilson in 1996, Short Cool Ones, signalled changing times ahead.

Then came the Mark Lizotte interlude - "The six years I spent in New York, in which... I only made one album," Diesel laughs. "Gee, that sounds bad when I say it that way!" On his return to Australia, Lizotte became Diesel again, and entered a solo acoustic phase. He was one of the fi rst to issue a Liberation Blue album, taking a diff erent look at golden moments from his back catalogue on the 2004 live recording Singled Out.

Touring - "more than I ever expected" - off the back of the album, Diesel was reborn. And so a new age dawned in soulful fashion with 2006's Coathanger Antennae. Now comes the offi cial eighth album (we're pretty dead sure)... Days Like These. "It's a new spin on old ground," says Diesel. "A lot of people will probably say when they hear this record 'Oh good, he's rocking again!' It's like, 'Whaddya mean? What have I been doing for the last four albums?'," he laughs. There's a freedom about Days Like These, an immediacy that stems from its casual creation. "It was just the three of us," says Diesel. "Myself, Richie Vez on bass and Lee Moloney on drums. We've made three records now - the fi rst record, Hear, was me feeding demos to them and saying 'Check this out, this is how I want it'. The second was Coathanger Antennae, and that was starting to get a bit more loose and have more of a language to it, 'cos we'd done a couple of hundred shows by then."

The easy chemistry flowed into Days Like These. Studio jams would turn into big bangs- when the dust cleared, Diesel would scan the debris for musical diamonds. "Kapow! There'd be all this smoke, then the guys would walk off and I'm left holding the baby," he laughs. "I kept it really off -the-cuff . I went with the fl ow, where the style was going when we were jamming. I can always make other records - acoustic solo, or some totally diff erent terrain - but with these elements - me, Richie and Lee - it's a rock three-piece thing, so I wanted to stay true to that."

Staying true meant not over-polishing things - "There wasn't a lot of jiggery pokery, going back over the same thing," Diesel explains. "I was saying to the guys 'It's uncanny - everything I'm putting down, it's like, OK, that seems to work, on to the next thing'. Anything that popped into my head, it just seemed to stick, especially when it came to the guitars. Guitars are something I feel very attached to and very intimate with, it's almost like my singing voice - my guitar voice. So we stuck with guitars pretty much all the way, and I created a lot of textures with guitars that almost don't sound like guitars, which is kinda cool."

The songs that emerged from this process are simply strong - classic salvos of rock, pop, soul and blues. There's the title track, which you'll be singing after just half a listen. The epic closer, Take My Heart. And Lay Down Here, "which gets a bit full on towards the end," says Diesel. "I wanted the intensity of All Along the Watchtower - every time I hear that song it stops me in my tracks and shakes me up, whether it's Bob Dylan's version or Jimi Hendrix's version, it just floats my soul every time."

Prisoner is a quiet surprise, yearning and beautiful. "It's a cross between JJ Cale and Elliott Smith," Diesel says. "Richie played the piano - an upright piano just happened to be there, it was a bit out of tune and it sounded perfect. And a jet plane went by at the very end and it was like 'Great, we'll have that too'. That's what happens when you're in Petersham, right near the fl ight path," he laughs. Need Your Fire is a soulful Diesel stomper, while bluesy jam Something Good locks on to a dirty groove - "At the end of the day, the music I always gravitate towards has a soul/ blues element to it, that's where my DNA lies," he says. Ain't Giving Up has echoes of everything from Knocking on Heaven's Door to the Beach Boys "The chord structure's really simple. It's about as close to the West Coast sound as I get."

Though eclectic individually, "once you hear the songs all together, it all starts making sense," Diesel says. Indeed, the terrain covered by Days Like These proves that, even after 19 years of singing, songwriting, guitar playing, recording and producing, Diesel can still surprise himself. "It's a bit like a fish - fish have a memory that's three seconds. I am still surprising myself for that very reason, that I don't really seem to store it up," he says. "I think it goes in there somewhere, it all goes to become part of your character, part of your vocabulary. The guitar is a bit like looking at a sky full of stars for me -every time you look at it you notice something diff erent. Just when you think you've got it mapped it out, it's like nup, it's endless, it's infinite."

Once again, Diesel has done the maths - in fact, Days Like These is not only a stellar album, it's a numerological marvel. "The freakiest thing, if you want trivial numbers," Diesel whispers, "is the fact the CD is exactly 36 minutes, 36 seconds & 36 milliseconds. I don't even wanna know what the next measurement of time is after that, 'cos it'd probably be 36 as well.

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