ANNOUNCES EAST COAST HEADLINE TOUR THIS MAY
WITH SPECIAL GUEST LOU JAMES
Frontier Touring is thrilled to announce the return of one of Australia’s most impressive songwriters and performers: Nick Murphy. Murphy returns to Australia in May 2019 to perform three special headline dates, following the 26 April release of his long-awaited sophomore full length album, Run Fast Sleep Naked.
Released Friday 26 April via label Future Classic, the Dave Harrington co-produced record is Murphy’s first full length release since his widely praised 2014 debut Built on Glass (released as Chet Faker).
As premiered on triple j this morning, Murphy also shares the video for soulful lead single ‘Sanity’, a song that brings bright piano melodies, off-kilter beats, and radiant synth lines to his unflinchingly self-aware lyrics. The video was directed by BabyBaby and filmed in the Canary Islands.
Listen/watch: Nick Murphy’s ‘Sanity’
Run Fast Sleep Naked is the latest in a series of widely acclaimed releases from the singer / producer / multi-instrumentalist, including Built on Glass – a platinum-selling effort that won him seven ARIA Music Awards including Best Male Artist and Producer of the Year, and lead to him playing sold out shows on five continents; appearing at major international festivals including Coachella and Glastonbury; performing on television internationally including The Ellen DeGeneres Show and Jimmy Kimmel Live!; and seeing his music videos receive hundreds of millions of views, including over 180 million views alone for his MTV VMA-nominated video for ‘Gold’.
To make Run Fast Sleep Naked, Murphy spent four years traveling the world solo with a microphone in his suitcase, recording his vocal tracks in whichever spaces and environments most inspired him. During that time, he immersed himself in intense self-examination, a process aided by his reading of Joseph Campbell’s theories of the artist’s shaman-like role in modern society. With its penetrating songwriting and kaleidoscopic palette, Run Fast Sleep Naked is a hypnotically candid document of that searching, an album equally informed by constant questioning and steadily arriving at fragments of truth.
Run Fast Sleep Naked – out 26 April via Future Classic (pre-order here)
Although Murphy captured his vocal performances in spaces across the globe – including his grandmother’s living room, a studio in Tokyo, a vacation rental he shared with his family in New Zealand, and his own New York City apartment – the musical component to Run Fast Sleep Naked was mainly recorded at Figure 8 in Brooklyn. And in sculpting the album’s shapeshifting sound, Murphy enlisted over 15 musicians and a full orchestra, embedding each song with unexpected textures and wildly varied tones.
“It’s almost like I was finding different shapes and colours from around the world, and then bringing them back and putting them all together,” Murphy says. “If you sit in one space for a long period of time, you get settled and stop experiencing the world in a new way,” he adds. “There’s a kind of power in leaping into the void without set structures and systems in place.”
In bringing Run Fast Sleep Naked to life, Murphy rigorously questioned his own motivations for making music and his fundamental intentions as an artist. “At some point I realised there was a path I could continue on where I could put things forward as a way to boost myself up, or as a gain to my ego,” he says. “But that’s not true to the whole purpose and role of the artist.” In that questioning, he discovered a new touchstone for his creative output: music that empowers and elevates each listener to a more exalted version of themselves, and ultimately undoes a certain emotional suppression imposed from the outside world.
For this tour, Nick Murphy has partnered with PLUS1 so that $1 from every ticket will go to organisations bringing dignity, equity, and access to communities who need it.
Don’t miss the chance to witness Nick Murphy performing in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney this May.
TOUR DATES
Wednesday 1 May – The Forum, Melbourne (18+)
Wednesday 8 May – The Tivoli, Brisbane (18+)
Tuesday 14 May – Enmore Theatre, Sydney (Lic. All Ages)
