It’s been a whirlwind of a year for the gorgeous, hip-swingin’, smooth-voiced DAN SULTAN. His second album, Get Out While You Can, has found the attention its deserved, had a role in Australian musical Bran Nue Dae and his performance at the Paul Kelly Tribute concert was critically praised. “It’s really good,” Sultan’s deep voice crackles down the phone line, “but you don’t want to burn out. You don’t want to party too hard and do all this work at the same time, or be too hard on yourself. You need to make sure that you can still relax if you need.”
Sultan and his band have landed a slot at this year’s Splendour in the Grass, which he’s (rightly so) keen for. “Obviously we’re not one of the larger bands on the bill, so it means we’ll be playing pretty early, I imagine. Once we play, we can just hang out and have fun, which I’m really looking forward to. I’ve never been to Splendour in the Grass before, but I’ve been to Woodford. It’s gorgeous – a beautiful part of the world.”
Lyrically, Get Out While You Can is emotionally dense; love songs roll along with heartbreaking tales of growing up. “Personally, I’ll imagine things and I’ll try and be empathetic towards a certain character,” Sultan explains. “Scott [Wilson] helps me a lot with my writing, we obviously co-wrote together. He’s really good at writing lyrics. I’ll do a lot of the arranging and producing and music. In some cases I’ll go to [Scott] with bare bones for words and he’ll come to me in a couple of weeks, and he’ll have a beautiful story using where I was coming from.”
“I think I’ve always had my own understanding of music, Scott just showed me country music and some underground soul music I hadn’t heard. I’ve been playing guitar since I was four, writing songs for a long time and I’d been in bands. I had my own kind of battles and successes and failures before I met him, and him the same. Then we met up and got it together.”
And is a third album in sight? “Yeah, we’re starting to think about it, we’ll wait and see. It’s good to keep up appearances. I’d like to get to work on another one pretty soon, but you know, we’ll wait and see. We’re not too hard on ourselves.”
As for Canberra, his expectations are pretty open. “The time before I was in Canberra, I was actually camping in one of the city gardens. I was hitching up to Cairns – me and my friend went camping. It was our first night and we didn’t put a fly-up on the tent, because it wasn’t going to rain, but of course the bloody sprinklers came on in the dark, so we got pretty much saturated. As long as that doesn’t happen this time around…”
Catch Dan either at his show at the UC Refectory on Saturday May 22 or at Splendour in the Grass, this year held in Woodford, QLD, over Friday-Sunday July 30-August 1. UC tickets through Ticketek, Splendour tickets are on sale Thursday May 6 through Moshtix.
