Dave Dobbyn - From Darkness to Available Light

The first Kiwi artist to grace a cover of NZM, talking up 'Loyal' back in October 1988, Dave Dobbyn returned to help celebrate the magazine's 10th birthday in '98 with 'The Islander', his fifth solo album imminent. The mid-June launch date of his latest album 'Available Light' all-but coincided with NZM's recent 100th issue. We have all, this magazine included it seems, grown up with Dobbyn - or at least with his national conscience-defining songs like Be Mine Tonight, Outlook for Thursday, Slice of Heaven and Loyal.

'Available Light' has already rendered a new Dave Dobbyn classic with its opening track and first single Welcome Home. More will almost certainly follow from the dozen other straight-ahead three minute servings of lyrical precision, heavily laced with Christian imagery and enhanced by some of our most respected pop musicians.

Ever voluble in front of a microphone, when we meet Dobbyn is irrepressible - his eighth album due in three weeks and only days away from departure on his own Intrepid Journey - to Morocco. Oh the perils of fame. Without a guitar or piano for three weeks he will have just his cameras and a journal for company. Photography it turns out is another of his passions, the photo at right a self portrait, by way of proof that he's not without talent.

"I'm just going with my two still cameras and a day pack - we're doing it guerilla style," he laughs. "I like getting out of my comfort zone a bit now and again. Then I will come back, release this record and go on tour with a band!"

Actually it's more like a trio of excellence - Bones Hillman (Swingers, Midnight Oil) on bass, Ross Burge (The Mutton Birds) on drums and himself - though Dobbyn allows that he may bring in someone else for this first tour.

"I'll do another tour in November with a lot more players, but this time we are just doing little community halls that can hold 300 or 500 people - we'll play for two hours maybe."

Capturing the 'Available Light' started proper early 2004 at Neil Finn's Auckland studio, Finn pre-producing as well as sharing acoustic guitar, vocal and piano duties.

"We worked on the song structures and basic arrangements and then Bones and Ross came in and we slammed it down - complete with the road noise, birds and locusts! Neil Baldock did an amazing job of getting everything in. He's an incredible engineer. We tested all these mics - flash Neumanns and stuff and ended up using $300 Audix mics all the way through.

"We played some gigs at the same time as we were pulling all the songs together, because I wanted to get a feel for how this would sound as a three-piece, and we needed to get that kind of telepathy you only get when you are a few gigs down. It was the first time in my life I have consciously thought in those terms and it was one of the best decisions I made. We're a band and it really kicks that way from the word go, good rhythm tracks make everything else simple."

The studio wasn't up to producing finished tracks and with Neil setting up to tour the world with his own new Finn brothers' album, Dave was for a time unsure how to find completion.

"I thought to myself, 'What's my favourite NZ music?' TrinityRoots hands down - and the stuff coming out of Wellington I just love. So I got in touch with David Long [Wellington-based producer and another former-Mutton Bird] and decided to take a hard disc and all my Pro Tools stuff down there and a plug it together with Lee Prebble at the Surgery - the heart of where Wellington's music is coming from. It was shot in the dark but having some sort of bridge between Wellington and Auckland seemed to make sense. Unself-concsciously the record has a good sense of community about it."

Long himself added more guitar to the album and wrote horn arrangements for the likes of Toby Laing, Steve Roach and Warren Maxwell who also sang on a few tracks. Dobbyn clearly enjoyed the couple of two week stints plus odd days spent in Welli.

"It was kind of walking into someone else's bohemia - that's what I loved! I felt more collaborative on this record than most I've made. I was staying at David Long's place and we only re-recorded a few tracks really. A couple of doozies came out at the end of the process to round off the album - Keeping the Flame and Outrageous Design were the two last songs I wrote. The credit sheet's quite full - but it's good!"

Lee Prebble mixed all the tracks except Welcome Home which was mixed by all-rounder Neil Baldock who also mastered the album at his own studio in Auckland.