Larsen loves the life of a creatively driven nomad

Horribly terrifying as the idea 2

might be, sometimes you have to take a major risk to get to a place where life becomes a blessing rather than something to be endured.

For professional nomad Stu Larsen, that moment came after an eye-opening trip to Vietnam, and before he walked away from everything that he once knew.

“Vietnam was my first trip outside of Australia,” the singer-songwriter says from Brighton, England, where he’s been filming a video. “I was a super shy, nervous kid—i’d love to go back and experience it with more open eyes. After then, I went back to Australia and just hung around my little hometown. And I honestly thought I’d just hang around that town, work my job, and be happy there for the rest of my life. It was really comfortable. I had a good job and was earning cash on the side doing cover gigs. But I think life for me got too comfortable. It got to a point where I wondered ‘Is this it? Is this my life for the next five, 10, 20 years?’

“So I decided,” Larsen continues, “that it was too simple, too easy, too straightforward, and too routine. And

that’s when everything changed for me. It was 10 years ago that I gave away a lot of my stuff and hit the road.”

That’s where the Aussie singersongwriter has been ever since, touring and occasionally settling in a farmhouse or apartment to write records like the just-released Resolute.

Scattered across the 10 tracks are references to life on the move, and the adventures that have unfolded. Over soft piano and hushed guitar Larsen longs for a reconnection with friends in “Aeroplanes”, and he pulls out the banjo to recount making his way across America in “Chicago Song”. Even when he’s playing things melancholy, as on the smoky breakup ballad “What’s a Boy to Do”, one gets the sense he’s always looking at life with a sense of wonder.

“I’ve realized that I just like being in different places and having new things in front of me,” Larsen says. “I’m addicted to that, and when I stop for more than a week or two I start to get a bit itchy, like I need to keep moving. I can’t really explain why, but maybe that’s because, after living this way for 10 years, I’m just used to moving on after a few days.”

If there’s a downside to being without a home, it’s that there’s always so much to take in that sitting down and actually writing a record isn’t exactly easy.

“It’s hard,” Larsen admits. “When I do stop, I try to find isolated little places with, hopefully, no phone or Internet signal where I can just kind of check out. But when I do, I find myself just enjoying a good book or the sound of nature and don’t pick up my guitar very quickly. That wasn’t the best thing when I look at the process of writing this album.”

The compensation for that? Well, as he makes crystal clear in the languid “Going Back to Bowenville”, he doesn’t regret the path he’s chosen. (Sample lyric: “When I turned 26,/ Well, I just walked away/i think about it all the time, what if I had’ve stayed.”) And then there’s the lovely folk-country ballad “I Will Be Happy and Hopefully You Will Be Too”, in which he acknowledges that, although he’s seen over 40 countries on the planet, there are so many more on his bucket list, from Cuba to Japan to St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

“I sometimes think that I love travelling even more than I love music,” Larsen says. “It’s just music is my ticket to travel. I was talking to someone yesterday who said they save up every year for their three or four weeks to travel, and then they go back and work again to do it the next year. I’m very lucky. I’m able to play a show wherever I go and then make enough money to get to the next town.” > MIKE USINGER