Hill Hoists
Sail Again
('Hit' Herald Sun, March
'03)
charlton hill, the sydney singer/songwriter whose debut single 2's company was a radio hit, is a renowned nomad.
and right now, he says, travel is "boiling in my blood again".
problem is, hill's debut album waterline, which also features his second single deep, has just been released in australia and he really should stick around to promote it.
"it's been great doing the australian thing for the last couple of months," hill says.
"but the heart of travel for me is going somewhere i fell completely out of my depth.
"so as much as i've seen beautiful things in australia, there is that need to feel like a fish out of water."
the fish-out-of-water vibe has fuelled much of hill's songwriting.
"travel is so easy to call on as a means to instigate change and confusion and emotional uprising in yourself," he says.
waterline was recorded in london, where hill had found his muse, not to mention the friends who would end up playing on the album.
"i get a hundred questions on, 'why didn't you just record it in sydney?'
"well, i had been living in london and these songs were spawned from the comparison it was making to my life in australia."
hill calls the making of waterline a "pretty easy" process, but he had to go through some agonising before he finally got it right.
"i was going a bit crazy having to decide on a producer and suddenly there were too many options.
"i had a trip to new york, where i'd done a couple of tracks with a super-band that consisted of dave matthews' drummer, lenny kravitz's bass player and all this stuff.
"it sounded a million bucks, but it was not the sound i wanted," he says. "i realised quickly that it was the guys i was hanging with, it was the sound they heard, it was london.
"so i needed to return to them and do all that stuff that felt right."
as for hill's former life, as a child star on home and away a decade ago, it isn't a big deal because he hasn't made it into one.
"my history is not going away, but i'm not concerned about that period of my life at all," he says.
"it was a lot of fun at the time, but there was no way i was ever going to trade any of that for my music, which i'm obsessively passionate about.
"i've been offered many, many things that might have used that side of my life to get forward.
"at times when i was sleeping on the floor in london it might have been a great option, but i never would have done it."
he describes the soapie celebrity life as "a transient existence".
"on a personal level i wouldn't want to be lifted up on to that platform for a short time and then dropped like a sack of s..t.
"music's a life and it's slowly coming to surface."
- neala johnson