Chet Faker: my album milked my brain

“Soul music was the last time pop music was cool … soul music is still cool now,” Chet Faker declares. The Melbourne crooner occupies an interesting niche in the musical landscape. With his quintessential hipster beard, ironic stage moniker and cool-as electronic production chops, the 24-year-old singer, songwriter and producer is unquestionably a product of his generation. But he's also low-key, disarmingly genuine, an old soul who wears his musical heart on his sleeve.

Though his real name is Nick Murphy, it turns out that his nom de disque is not mere snark but a sincere tribute to the legendary jazz trumpeter. So is he used to fans and journalists referring to him at Chet? “I am used to it … I mean, it basically is me. The music’s so personal, you know?”

After riding a viral-hit R&B cover (No Diggity), a highly regarded EP and a string of canny collaborations with fellow Aussie wunderkind Flume to wide exposure, Faker now finds himself on the verge of huge success. His first full-length album, Built on Glass, drops this month on Future Classic, the Sydney-based label that scored a smash hit with Flume’s debut. The first single from the album, Talk is Cheap, already has more than a million hits on YouTube (possibly also thanks to the eerie beauty of the video). Faker’s winning combination of indie, electronica and the more gritty, passionate strains of soul and R&B seems to have built-in appeal to a wide audience both in Australia and overseas.

A little like his namesake, Baker is a white guy with earthy good looks, an unselfconsciously gritty vocal style and a keen sense of what will sound great in a smoky lounge at three in the morning. Talk is Cheap exemplifies his approach, with the sleepy intensity of its sultry, jazzy funk and its lyrics chock-a-block with double entendres. “I just love a slow groove,” Faker says. “I feel so comfortable in it. But I listen to a lot of fast music, a lot of techno and house.” He says the new album has new, more upbeat directions in store. “There’s a song that’s 135 BPM – and that’s fast … Half the reason Talk is Cheap was the first single is because it is a segue into what’s coming; it felt like a natural progression.”

Despite his organic vibe, Faker is no retro or revival act. Offsetting the blue-eyed soul, his productions incorporate some of the same electronic soundscapes and scattershot breakbeats as his counterparts in the booming Australian electronic scene, including Flume, Ta-Ku and Seekae. To Faker, electronic music is where musical experimentation takes place today. “It inspires the hell out of me, I listen to a lot of it. I love that way dance music can put you in a trance.”

For the young Nick Murphy, electronic-music production was just another channel for his teenaged obsessions. “I have an addictive personality,” he says. “I was addicted to computer games … and then all that obsessive nature just piled into music.” At the age of 15, he took piano lessons, taught himself guitar, and applied his geeky smarts to an early version of Ableton, now the industry-standard production software. He didn’t see much difference between acoustic and digital instruments. “It was everything at once depending on what mood I was in.”

That hybrid approach paid off when he began recording in earnest as a young adult. His breakout, in 2012, was a hazy indie-soul cover of Blackstreet’s 1996 R&B anthem No Diggity. Its combination of arch indie irony and earnest crooning made it an apt crossover hit, grabbing worldwide play when it was licensed for a Super Bowl beer commercial. After Faker released an EP, a slew of accolades quickly followed, including breakthrough artist of the year at the Australian Independent Music awards.

While coping with the flush of early success – he admits that touring “stressed me out” – Faker found time to hole up and record a full-length debut. Built on Glass was recorded on a low budget, with lo-fi equipment, over two years alone in the converted North Melbourne meat cooler Faker calls home. He admits his highly personal and emotional approach to music made the experience of creating an entire album a draining one. “It really milked my brain … I’m kind of obsessed with struggle a little bit. That sits next to creativity, right?”

His relief at being done with it is palpable. “An album is like a book or a diary or a snapshot … It just feels so like the end of a chapter when you finish one.”

To recover, he’s been taking time off from songwriting while a lengthy world tour, which looks to greatly widen his overseas exposure, kicks into gear. “I feel like I’m creatively recouping,” he says. To make life easier between dates in North America and Europe, he’s rented an apartment in Brooklyn. There, for the moment, he’s more likely to be taken for a bearded hipster bartender than stalked as a star, and that suits Faker just fine. “I’m nobody there. That’s important to me. I don’t want to get comfy. It started getting easier in Melbourne, you know?”

There was speculation he was permanently relocating to greener northern pastures, as so many talented Aussies do, but he refuses to commit one way or the other. “It’s up in the air.” For now the free-spirited Faker says he’s willing to the lead the unsettled life of a troubadour if it benefits his music. “This record that I’m about to put out is a chapter in my life, and Melbourne, Australia is a huge part of that, because that’s where I was, that’s where my thoughts were, that’s where my people were, that’s where I was inspired.

“So yeah, I’ll go somewhere else, because you need that challenge of location, and the freshness around you. Because if I’m in Melbourne I’m just writing the same thing. I always think of the place as a really useful tool to kind of inspire a specific release or something you’re working on.”

Regardless of how he found inspiration, Faker may be peaking at the right time, with the resurgence of soul, disco and deep house on the pop charts marked by the likes of Daft Punk and Disclosure. He’s dropping a hybrid indie/soul album into a world that’s probably ready for it – though he says he didn’t plan it that way. “I’m looking at the same blogs everyone’s looking at, I’m reading the same things, and listening to a lot of the same music, so it’s like this collective movement towards it. But yeah, it is interesting that’s becoming the thing. I guess, lucky for me.”