Gruff Rhys on moving house with a wheelbarrow, and Kevin Ayers

It’s nice to have a title you can hang an album off, right?

That’s right. Sadness Sets Me Free is a very singable title, so I just let that do the heavy lifting to start with. As I get older, I feel it’s more important to respect music’s power to uplift and that tells you what you need to do.

To what extent are the personal-sounding songs grounded in real life? To start with, the rubbish holiday on the west coast of Wales mentioned in “Bad Friend”…

Holidays are often where the kaleidoscopic demands of life threaten to overwhelm you. Broken-down bits of real life definitely make their way into the songs. I once moved house using only a wheelbarrow to move my stuff from one place to the other. That made it into “I Tendered My Resignation”. However, there was no relationship break-up.

This is your most political album so far.

I was nervous about certain songs, such as “Cover Up The Cover Up”. When I used to listen to John Peel as a young person, he used to occasionally play an overly on-the-nose political record by someone in their fifties, Jackson Browne for instance. So that was something I had in mind to avoid. It helped give me some perspective. I think my lyrics are acceptable, though!

Your love of Kevin Ayers shines through on “Silver Lining (Lead Balloons)”.

Well, I bought [1973’s] Bananamour from Cob Records in Bangor, so my love of powerful melancholy lyrics delivered in a really dry way probably owes a lot to him. You can maybe hear it on [Ayers’ song] “Shouting In A Bucket Blues”.