For more than 50 years, Don Walker has written some of the songs that helped Australians understand themselves. As he releases his fifth solo album, Love Songs, the Cold Chisel songwriter talks about finding stories in unexpected places, the friends no longer here, writing for Jimmy Barnes and why he still can’t quite explain where the best songs come from.
Don Walker has spent more than half a century writing songs about Australians who don’t always say what they mean, so perhaps it figures that when he’s asked what he’d like someone who has never heard a Don Walker song to take from his new album, Love Songs, he doesn’t mention love at all.
“I would hope that in there they had a little bit of a dry laugh every now and then,” he says. “That’s my greatest hope.”
Walker’s fifth solo album arrived last weekend with nine songs drawn together from different periods and places, including one recording dating back to around the turn of the century.
Its title is about as uncomplicated as album titles get.
“I had a couple of songs that we had recorded with Roy Payne back in 2022, and another long song, ‘Darwin’, which I wanted to record,” Walker says.
“At some stage early on, the title and that thread appeared. I don’t quite know where from, but it meant me looking back through the vaults to see what songs I had there that might fit with the already existing catalogue songs.”
One of the treasures Walker found in those vaults was Could You Still Be Here.
It wasn’t rerecorded or polished for the occasion, Walker recorded it at home, straight to DAT, around the turn of the century.
Ask him what he hears when he listens to that recording now and, characteristically, Walker remembers the room.
“I heard a particularly beautiful room that was in that house where I lived, where I had the piano,” he says.
“It was a wide basement that opened onto the street, but it had a huge expanse of parquetry floor. I used to go down there and just play the piano and sing songs into a DAT machine, and it had a beautiful natural ambience.
“They were just demos, but a couple of times on recent albums I’ve taken one of those recordings and put it on the album, because there’s something attractive about a song that’s not recorded with overdubs and built up, but is actually a performance.”
For all the mythology surrounding Cold Chisel and songs such as Khe Sanh, Cheap Wine and Saturday Night, Walker’s writing has often been about people and places observed at close range.
Some of those characters, he admits, are him. Plenty aren’t.
By his early 20s, Walker had already moved through very different worlds and travelled widely around Australia.
“I’d also travelled a lot around this country, with the democratic means of travel being trains and hitchhiking,” he says. “So I’d seen a broader range of Australian humanity than the average 21-year-old.”
I first had dealings with Walker 18 years ago, while working with Jimmy Barnes on the Icons of Australian Music: Jimmy Barnes book. So when we talk about writing songs for other voices, Jimmy inevitably enters the conversation.
“There are a lot of songs that I’ve written that Jim can sing and I can’t,” Walker says.
“I’m not a soul singer. I can’t draw people in simply with the timbre of my voice. As I say to him, both him and Ian, but in particular Jimmy, he has a unique timbre and it really draws people in.
“I always tell our front-of-house guy Henry, ‘Get me out above the band there, and don’t put any effects on my voice’, because we’re not going to get them in with the sound of my voice. If we get them in at all, it’ll be with the story. They have to be able to hear the words.”
Then comes a line that could only really come from Don Walker.
“With somebody like Jim, he could be singing crap, but it would still sound highly attractive,” he says with a wry smile.
His solo records also give Walker room to go places that simply wouldn’t work within Cold Chisel.
“With my solo records, I’ve got room to do songs that are just never going to be suitable for Cold Chisel,” he says.
“I can’t take a 14-minute song to Cold Chisel. I mean, I can, and they would like it and they would do it as a thing, but it’s not really what Cold Chisel’s about.
“So with my solo stuff I can do a whole lot of things that are just not suitable on a Cold Chisel record. And with Cold Chisel, vice versa, because of the skills of Jimmy and Ian as singers, they can do things that I just can’t do myself.”
There is another presence on Love Songs that matters enormously to Walker.
The late Roy Payne plays guitar on Luck and Fly Away, recorded in 2022. The rest of the album features a formidable group including Shannon Bourne, Garrett Costigan, Michael Vidale, Hamish Stuart and The Harmonettes.
“There are moments, you know,” Walker says.
“Clearly he was a very close friend, not only of the existing band, but he was a good friend of Shannon Bourne, the guy who plays guitars with us now.
“Of course, it goes without saying he was a remarkable musician. But he was an amazing man, one of the most remarkable people I ever spent time with, and a beautiful singer and songwriter.”
For somebody whose songs have become stitched into Australian culture, Walker is unsentimental about how they were created.
Ask what he can do now that the young man writing Khe Sanh couldn’t, and he goes straight back to uncertainty.
“When I was on the road with Cold Chisel, writing songs like ‘Khe Sanh’, and especially in the years leading up to that when I was trying to figure out how to write, writing a lot of bad stuff that just wasn’t very good, I was just groping along trying to invent something.
“I was groping in the fog, trying to find something. I didn’t know what it was, but listening to the radio, I knew what it wasn’t. I knew that the existing scene, the songs that made sense to what was the industry in those days, and radio and all that, whatever it was that I was trying to find, it was something quite different. But I didn’t know what it was.
“I was writing automatically, out of that automatic writing. That is, writing with no craft or skill, just youth and energy. And then, as life evolves, you start to learn the outlines of what you actually do and start to develop some craft.”
These days, Walker says his songwriting is largely lyric-driven.
“Mostly, especially with the songs that I write for myself, it’s lyric-driven,” he says. “I’m pen and paper, playing with lyric lines. I know that if I’ve got lyrics in a certain pattern, it’ll be easy to find music for it.
“Often the music is pre-existing. I’ve got a strong idea in my head of the melodies and where it’s going, and I’m writing towards that.”
On Love Songs, Breakfast in Paris began with one terrific idea.
“Once I’d got the initial idea, ‘One day I’ll go to breakfast with a beautiful girl in Paris, and I’ll wish it was you’, which is an ethically dodgy thing to do or think, let’s put that on the record, then it’s a case of: well, that was breakfast in Paris, where else could you be with a beautiful girl and wish it was you?
“That’s where you can have a lot of fun. You can write out 20 or 30 places: ‘One day I’ll be kicking a football in Uzbekistan with a beautiful girl, and I’ll wish it was you’, all that sort of silly stuff.
“Then you choose the eight best of them, and you’ve written half a song. That’s okay.
“But the second half of the song lifts out of that and does this big loop back to the breakfast in Paris, and I don’t know how it did that. It just did that one day.
“I’d like to tell you, ‘Oh, that’s because I knew how to do that, and I pieced this together, and it was a brilliant bit of craft’.
“No. That bit got written somewhere else and dropped in my head, and I can take no credit for it, just between you and I, at all.”
Walker’s songs have also documented an Australia that bears little resemblance in some respects to the country in which Cold Chisel began.
He doesn’t lament that.
Asked what stories Australians aren’t telling themselves particularly well today, Walker pauses.
“Where do I go with that? That’s a question with a cliff on either side,” he says while pondering.
“These things, the pendulum shifts on them. I think we are telling ourselves the stories that need to be told. Some of them are being told now that maybe 50 or 100 years ago were neglected. And the reverse is true.
“That’s just part of the natural swings and roundabouts of how these things work. Things evolve.
“You can’t expect the general Australian view of ourselves that was the case 50 or 60 years ago, when I was young, to still be the view that Australia holds of itself when I’m an old man. You wouldn’t want that. It would be a tragedy if it was still the same view.”
Walker, meanwhile, keeps moving too.
He still performs, still writes and, since he was about 30, has practised what he describes as a form of martial art involving movement and breathing for about 40 minutes, ideally four mornings a week. There’s walking too, and he says he eats and drinks “pretty frugally”.
Although he’s not claiming sainthood.
“Not nearly as much of any of these things as I should do,” he points out.
And now there is Love Songs, nine tracks assembled from different periods of Walker’s life, including a recording made alone in that parquetry-floored basement more than two decades ago.
He knows considerably more about songwriting these days than the young bloke who was “groping in the fog” trying to find something different.
But ask where the really good bits come from and, apparently, even Don Walker still doesn’t know.
If the album gives you a dry laugh along the way, he’ll take that.
Love Songs is out now and can be purchased here. Don Walker’s Love Songs tour begins at Melbourne’s Memo Music Hall on October 16, followed by Geelong on October 17, Sydney on October 24, Eumundi on October 30 and Brisbane on October 31, with special guest Jimmy Dowling. You can purchase tickets to his show here.
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