Pete Murray

Feeler in 2003 brought Murray’s music to a larger audience after an earlier independent album. The acoustic guitar is important, but it is part of a broader instrumental picture that includes electric guitar, keyboards and a rhythm section. So Beautiful works because the vocal can remain close while those parts gradually change the pressure around it.

See the Sun followed in 2005, with Better Days and Opportunity among its key introductions. The songs have clear refrains, but their appeal also depends on how comfortably the band can hold a pace. Murray’s singing does not have to become more forceful at every turn for the arrangement to keep gathering momentum.

Summer at Eureka in 2008 was self-produced in a studio Murray built in New South Wales. You Pick Me Up supplies a useful first encounter with this part of the catalogue. The recording setting matters as an extension of the songwriter’s control over the work, rather than as a claim that every note must have been made alone. Later albums and acoustic projects revisit different balances between the bare song and its instrumental surroundings. The early sequence remains especially revealing because its development is measured. The writing becomes more assured without discarding the quiet spaces that first made the voice recognisable. These are records in which the band can provide forward motion while the singer sounds as if he has time to think, giving a familiar melodic shape room to carry a more private feeling.