Ash Grunwald

"It's good to do it this way, it's all compact," explains Ash Grunwald of his upcoming Australian tour.

"This is about ten weeks. There are a lot of places I'm going to miss getting out to this time around. There are a lot of places I'd like to get to, but now doing overseas stuff, it gets...A year's gone by and you haven't been back to a particular venue."

Ash Grunwald is disappointed that he can't get to every regional centre in our vast, brown land, so what makes him so darn considerate? Frequent flyer points? Or is it the very nature of playing, dare I say it, 'roots' music?

"It's funny, I don't know if it's a coincidence, but that word, 'roots', it's always been a grass roots thing for me. It started up from touring around and building audiences up one person at a time, going out to a lot of regional areas, selling my own CDs. That's really how I've done everything, up until here, really. There's a pretty strong connection with the punters who like to come to your shows, because it's a different method of doing stuff, it's a lot more personal."

However, he does believe that the atmosphere at his shows has changed significantly over the last four years.

"From touring around and playing to people who are there to have a good night and have a party and participate in the music, it's sort of grown into something - and I don't even see it as my doing, I see it as the audience's doing. Now gigs are sort of an everybody-joins-in kind of thing and it's more of a party-style thing. Because you get into a rhythm playing live and I don't really prepare, I just turn up, jump up on stage and try and make sure that my guitar's in tune before I start. And then just do whatever I feel like doing, because I don't feel like I have to fit in with anyone but the audience."

If you don't know Ash Grunwald as bluesman extraordinaire, you may still perhaps have heard him as 'roots' expert, manning the airwaves for three genre-specific hours of Triple J's broadcast each week. It's a job he relishes.

"It's pretty fun, I haven't done it for a while, I've been overseas, but this week's my first week back and during this time, over the whole tour, there's a few dates I'm going to miss but I'm going to be doing the show the whole time. Triple J have been really supportive and flexible with me, given that I spend so much time on the road. Sometimes I do it from other locations."

And here's the question I want to ask - has listening to, and talking about, such a phenomenal volume of music influenced him as a musician, or has it merely reaffirmed his own, original identity?

"Wow, what a full on question, there's so many concepts in there. It's been a really good thing for me, musically. It's ironic, I think what you ended that question with is true, it has given me a stronger sense of what I want to do, in contrast, because you've got your radio hat on and you're spinning all these tracks, but as a musician you're being influenced all that time. My ears have been tweaked a little bit just by listening to so many different songs and different approaches. Now I think about production heaps, when I didn't used to think about it at all. And on the new album, I've tried so hard on every song to make them sound sonically really good and interesting and with full-on grooves. Before, I just went in and played live in the studio.

"It's really multi-tracked, whereas before I used to be totally anti-it. Well, I've totally changed my mind. Well, I haven't changed my mind as such, it's just I'm at a different stage, because I did two albums with no overdubs...And now I've thought, I don't have to repeat myself. I just want to build this up and layer it up and make it really thick and I really have come to the conclusion that multi-tracking is the only way to make an album sound really thick. And that's what I've done, but I hope it's still got the darkness in there and the murk that is in some of the other recordings."

Ben Revi

Ash Grunwald plays at the Governor Hindmarsh on Fri 25 August. 'Give Signs' is out now through Shock.