XAVIER RUDD

The spiritual singer-songwriter returns with his first solo album in six years, and plenty of beautifully recorded guitar tones.

It’s been quite a while between solo LPs for Aussie singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Xavier Rudd. It’s not like he’s been inactive, though: 2012’s SpiritBird kept him busy for a while, and in 2015 he released the album Nanna with The United Nations. But now, the time is right for more Xavier Rudd music in the form of his seventh full-length solo release, StormBoy.

“I’m literally just singing about the things that are going on around me,” Rudd says. Environmental work, activism, veganism, spiritualism, surfing, camping trips in the bush and hanging with his family on the beach; everything Rudd does, he pours into songwriting. And since releasing Spirit

Bird, he’s also – awww – fallen in love. “It’s definitely a theme on [ StormBoy],” he says. “Life feels strong and solid for me now, and this record is in a different space. It’s a solid space. I feel like I’ve come to the end of that chapter where I’ve learned a bunch of lessons and I’ve been shown a bunch of things spiritually.”

So what have you been up to since we last had a chance to speak?

I guess it’s like a journal of chapters in my life. This last five or six years has not been unlike other chapters in that it’s been super eventful in lots of ways. I’ve learned lots of things, and in a way, I’ve come full circle with some personal things. And this album tracks a bit of that. I got married to my amazing partner; she’s brought a lot of love and excitement into my world, so there’s a bit of that on the album. I’ve been touring around the world and connecting with a lot of amazing players, so there’s a lot of that on the album as w ell. But there are also songs that I wrote ten years ago, that either weren’t really ready before or I didn’t feel like it was their time.

Do you feel that the record with The United Nations fed into this one in a way?

They’re separate projects, really. I had some of this stuf f on the burner before I started working on that project – as well as during and after – but they’re really separate. The United Nations stuff, I wrote that specifically for that project and it was an amazing project with an amazing group of people. We toured the world, and to actually do that as a band with