Who is Jeff Lang? Take your pick -- he's a masterful guitarist, one of the few who can easily handle a song as intricate as Richard Thompson's "1952 Vincent Black Lightning" and make it sound effortless yet still exciting. A great songwriter -- his most recent CD Whatever Makes You Happy contains many examples of his skill in that area, and the varied inspiration for his material. For example, the song "Rejected Novelist Fails Again" was taken from an article found in the newspaper, telling the story of a Japanese writer who was tired of rejections and so decided to commit suicide by smashing expensive cars in the centre of Tokyo, hoping their owners would kill him! (It didn't work.) Lang is also a singer with an unaffected Australian accent, but not least, he is ultimately a friendly, down to earth person who is happy with his place in the world.

The Melbourne-based artist plays the music-biz game by his own rules, and the last few years have seen extensive international touring, playing solo and supporting artists of the caliber of Bob Dylan, Ani DiFranco and Dr. John. His new recording is the first to be distributed by the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, equivalent of the BBC), but Lang is adamant this will not affect the way he works. The following interview took place to promote the new album and a national tour.

MH: I've played the new CD a couple of times -- it must be a good thing, but I reckon it will take more than a couple of listens to absorb it all, musically & lyrically.

JL: Yeah, you'd like to think that with a good record, it can take you on a bit of a journey and that if you do want to delve in deeper with each listen then there's something there for you. There's a lot of wallpaper music around but I don't want to make it. It's funny, you hear some of that sort of stuff and you think, at least two guys have sat in a room giving each other the thumbs up over this! This rocks! (laughs)

That's always going to be there but there's always real music too.

Of course there is. Even in the darkest dark days of the 80s and so forth, right in the middle of that, Tom Waits put out Raindog, so what the hell. Good stuff is there for people who care to look for it.

Nowadays, unless you lease something to the ABC for example, you do have to search for the music, it's not necessarily in the shops.

No and it can be hard to know if you do go in -- have you ever found that experience when you go looking for a record to listen to but you don't know what. You go in and you almost can't find anything 'cause there's so much stuff and they're all just names. It's kind of overwhelming, whereas I find if I go in with a few things specifically in mind, then I usually end up about buying five others as well. But you need to have something to look for. The funny thing about online music you know, like yeah the Web's open to everyone but they've actually got to look for you. It cuts both ways.

You still own the copyright for the recording and you've just leased it to the ABC?

Yeah.

That's a very sensible way of doing it.

Well, I made the record the same way I always do, which is I make the decisions about who I want to work with and pay for everything and we took it to them. We did a deal with them for a few records so it's a different story from here in but they've signed me for who I am, so it's not like they're going to say "OK, now it's time to talk to our hair consultant" or something like that. They really got what I do, so that's why we're here.

Reading all the positive quotes that people like Bela Fleck have given you, is it tricky to keep your feet on the ground?

Well, you have that kind of backdrop of people who are looking over your shoulder. The people that first really inspired me to do what I do, all your inspirations and influences like Dylan and Tom Waits and people like that, Blind Willie Johnson and Skip James, you know, it's all pretty towering stuff to you and you never actually measure up to the esteem you hold other people in. You never actually live up to that for yourself and that's a good thing. You have to get over that, in a way, to not just actually give up sometimes. You hear things and you think, "I'm sorry, that's just too good!"

A bit of self-deprecation helps, you think?

You've got to be down to earth about it. The Indian guys, they talk about the music being the power and they're just the vessel. That's the way to look at it really. The music is what you're trying to serve and you're just a servant to the music and if you look at it that way, then you can't help but be humble because what you're actually channelling and the energy that comes through it is the greater power in the equation. Without meaning to sound all hippy, I actually believe that to be true. I've felt things at gigs that you can't really explain just in terms of the audience and the energy that they bring to it, and everything where you go, "Wow, we're all just riding a big wave of energy here."

The fact that I'm sitting on the stage and they're sitting at a table or standing at the front, there's really no separation there in terms of the act of what's going down. In those moments where everything sort of distills to its essence and you really go somewhere with the sound, you know that's not my doing. That's not them sitting there and passively watching me do something incredible. That's all of us experiencing something amazing and the music is the vehicle for that. It's like me turning up on stage is like a catalyst for it, really. Sort of like the spark.

The new CD was recorded at Mixmasters here in Adelaide, I notice.

Great studio. They have a really great facility up there. The fact that you're staying upstairs at the studio keeps the focus there. They've got such great gear and great sounding rooms. They approach it like artists in a way, they really try and get everything to where it's conducive to you actually channelling this stuff, you know. Very can-do people. I've got a lot of respect for them and it's always a pleasure to work there.

It comes through that way.

Cool. I must say we did certain things that really worked off that, too, like the instrumental excerpts that come between some of the songs were recorded as big free form twenty minute long jam sessions with the idea that we'd maybe get these little excerpts we can use, 'cause by that stage we'd recorded a lot of things and there was a lot of different textures and different colour on various songs. So we thought it would be good to get things that could work as a palate cleanser in between certain songs, so that's what we did.

Palate cleanser. I like the idea!

It can do that, you know. If you've got something where you finish one song and the next song is quite a big change, it can be effective to have that jarring change butt up against each other and that really works in the course of the record, or you can do this type of thing where something else picks you up at the end of one song and carries you across to the other, you know? That way, on radio obviously, people usually play one song from a record and they've all got to work in that context but then looking at the thing as an overall album, I tend to look at it almost as how they used to do things -- not a concept, but great records from the seventies like Sticky Fingers or London Calling, they'd take you on a real journey through the course of the record.

Do you have to channel lyrics as well? There's a few interesting stories, or hints at stories, there.

Yeah, it definitely is something that I try to let the lyrics that I'm writing lead me to the story, rather than sitting down and going, "OK, today George W. Bush is in my face and I want to write a song about that." It doesn't tend to be the best stuff that I do. As much as you'd like to be able to phrase that really effectively! I do those occasionally, it's almost like exercising the muscles in your brain that channel this stuff, you can make yourself write songs but they're not generally the best ones.

The ones that tend to be the more interesting things are things like "By Face Not Name" -- I know where the inspiration maybe came from, which was driving around in the midwest and seeing all these pro-life billboards everywhere, but it's not a song that sort of goes, "You people who stick up pro-life billboards are fucked, why don't you leave women alone?" That would be a really dull song. This song just came out the way it came out and I read it back and went, "shit!" (laughs) It's an amazing thing when it happens. Wish it would happen more!

The new CD is a good rootsy album; it shows there is a great deal of diversity within that genre.

Roots music is pretty broad, it incorporates a lot of different things. I feel there's a lot of different elements that comprise my sound, I've gleaned a lot of inspiration from many areas. You shouldn't really try and box that in, you shouldn't necessarily also try and cover all of them if you're doing it just in a willful manner. It's not like you want to flit like a moth on a lightbulb, you've got to make sure it actually is expressing what you're genuinely trying to say in the material. I feel like you take people who listen to the whole record on a bit of a trip through all the various facets -- probably more so than any one record I've made, particularly with there being certain songs that are electric guitar, and then other songs that are more quiet acoustic performances, and then there's ones that are quite raucous acoustic performances. There's even one that the main body of the song is just someone else playing piano and me singing without guitar being part of it, so it's a more varied trip on this one for sure.

Is it possible to define the attraction of the guitar to you, as opposed to other instruments?

I think a lot of it for me came from what I listened to. There was a lot of guitar in what I listened to, although since then to get inspired by different things, you end up seeking out other instruments because it's a little one-dimensional just listening to guitar players and playing guitar. A lot of influence for me comes from instruments like the sitar or instruments like the uillean pipes, things like that. It can be really great fodder for playing lap slide guitar; I've got a lot of melodic and ornamental ideas from uillean pipe players from Ireland. That sort of thing is what you go through later but in terms of the initial attraction, I think it was a big part of a lot of the music I was into, like Dylan and the Stones, Ry Cooder and things like that.

It's a really immediately rewarding instrument, I think is the other reason why it ends up connecting with you when you're young. I mean, guitar sounds good falling on the ground, you know? You strum a chord and it sits against your body and it feels good to play and it sounds good straight away. Something like the violin, you could spend a year trying to make it sound remotely in tune, it's not as immediately rewarding. I don't know, maybe there's something psycho-sexual in it as well 'cause it's very womanly. (laughs)

And phallic.

I guess, yeah. I was thinking it looks more womanly than phallic. Depends who's playing it, whether they're a dick or not!

I asked Richard Thompson the same question and he also mentioned the portability of it.

That's true too, you can't be carrying your grand piano in your back pocket. And it is very versatile, I mean look at how many different types of music it is. I've got records from Africa, records from Hawaii, records from everywhere and guitar crops up on all of them. You can pretty much go anywhere with the thing. You sit down with one guitar and hand it to me and it sounds like me. You hand it to Bob Brozman and it sounds like Bob Brozman. It's a really personable instrument, too.