By CAROLINE TUNG

Melbourne-born indie musician Jack Carty has come a long way from writing and playing songs in his room as a 19-year-old.

But even now, 10 years on and with his fourth album under his belt, his music still begins at home.

The new album – Home State – was performed, recorded and produced in his living room in a little apartment in Brisbane’s Red Hill.

The simplicity of it is important to him.

People are increasingly attracted to small-scale operations run by “real people”, he says, pointing to the growing interest in brewing craft beers and producing local coffee in the suburbs.

“I think music is kind of similar, and for me in Australia as an independent artist, I feel like there is a movement towards people that want to support that,” he says. 

Home State will be performed live at Melbourne’s The Gasometer Hotel tomorrow night (Friday, August 26), after launching in Canberra and a show in Sydney last weekend.

The album adds to his list of critically acclaimed releases – One Thousand Origami Birds (2011), Break Your Own Heart (2012) and Esk (2014).  It was no easy feat to ensure Home State was given “the release it deserves”.

“Independent artists have a lot more freedom to express themselves the way they want to and run things the way they want to,” Carty says.

“But the flipside of that is that they often don’t have the sorts of budgets for production and recording and tour support that artists who are signed to major labels do.

“I left the label and the management company that I’ve been with and I was really waiting to see what would happen next.”

The album “happened almost by accident” following Carty’s marriage in September last year, after which he took a break five years from almost non-stop touring.

“I was at home and I started just demoing songs and gradually it kind of turned into something that I thought, ‘this could actually be a record’,” he explains.

“I realised I didn’t even need to have a low-fi record, it could be like a full-on hi-fi album …. so I just threw myself and all my time and energy into that, and it just came about really organically.”

At the end of last year, Carty was awarded an APRA Professional Development Award, which helped him finish the album.

After clocking up around 452 hours of home recording over one year, he successfully launched a Pledge Music Campaign to raise funds for the release of Home State.

The album debuted at No.36 on the ARIA charts 10 days after its initial release on August 5.

Every song has a slightly different inspiration, each inspired by travel, love and what Carty calls “the relations between places and relationships”.

Carty plays all the instruments himself except for the bass, played by long-time collaborator Gus Gardiner from Sydney-based band Papa vs Pretty, and a few guitar solos from Jordan Millar.

A way with words combined with trademark honesty distinguishes his approach.

He makes a point that not many people his age (he’s 29) are doing “really lyrical stuff that has running narrative threads throughout the whole thing”.

“There are people doing it, but I think there’s not much in the mainstream at the moment,” Carty says. “Something that I’ve always focused on is trying to tell a story with each song.”

However, Carty finds touring in Australia comes with certain challenges compared to performing live in Europe.

“You can play somewhere and the next day you can drive an hour and play there and you’re playing at a completely different place to a completely different set of people,” he says.

“Whereas touring in Australia, there’s 24 million people in the whole country, but they’re spread across a huge continent, so you’ve got to fly or drive for hours and hours between shows.”

As a touring performer, Carty is attracted to Europe for its “really big appreciation for art” and the long history of folk tradition and narrative, which are both central to his music.

“People really seem to get behind that, so I did notice over there that there seems to be a real excitement around that kind of thing,” he says.

 For more information on the Australian and New Zealand tour and to purchase tickets visit http://tour.jackcarty.com