Whatever expectation or preconception exists around Chet Faker—whether through his recorded music or onstage—the individual behind it, born Nick Murphy, is consistently unexpected and disarming. When I interviewed him in 2019 for his debut Nick Murphy album Run Fast Sleep Naked, he showed up carrying fresh-pressed juices in a shoulder cooler bag. Six years later, he’s back in his hometown of Sydney, Australia, seated in a pink room—pink plant-print wallpaper, even a pink door jamb—and somehow, it feels entirely fitting. Pink is an apt hue for his latest album, A Love for Strangers, released under the Chet Faker moniker.
Where the line between these two identities is drawn—or whether it truly exists at all—remains unclear. The musical distinction has always been porous and grows increasingly faint with each release. He first emerged in 2012 with the Thinking in Textures EP, followed by a breakout moment in 2013 via a Super Bowl commercial featuring his cover of “No Diggity,” and then, in 2014, the sultry “Gold” from his debut album Built on Glass. Three years later, Chet Faker was shelved and Nick Murphy stepped forward with the Missing Link EP—still my favorite release of his under any name. What followed was Run Fast Sleep Naked, the instrumental Music for Silence (released via the Calm app) in 2020, and later that same year, the revival of Chet Faker. A few more pivots between Faker and Murphy followed, leading us to A Love for Strangers.
The album is layered—not only in its seamless blend of acoustic and electronic textures, but in its reflections on love, loss, and identity. Nick is a deep thinker, perhaps excessively so. But on A Love for Strangers, much of that mental churn feels loosened and released, wrapped in a warm sonic blanket that’s both comforting and deeply relatable. “I can relate to that a lot,” he says repeatedly in response to the tangential stories I share—about losing parents, misguided relationships, and the act of making art.
While A Love for Strangers is a very personal work, he brought some friends to contribute on a few songs. His one-time touring band member Jake Falby recorded strings for “This Time for Real” and “Just My Hallelujah,” Darkside’s Dave Harrington played bass and guitar on “Can You Swim?” and aLex vs aLex features on “The Thing About Nothing.”
“I just wanted to work with friends,” he says. “I’ve been doing this solo forever, and I just get sick of myself. I’m all in my feelings, and it’s good, but after a while you’re like, ‘Man, this is a lot of me.’
What brought you back to Australia after living in the U.S. for years?
Every time I finish an album, I move. I would move within New York, from Brooklyn to the Lower East Side to Soho then Chinatown. I was in New York all the way through COVID, and when everyone left, and it was just the bare bones in the city, I felt really calm. As the fillers started coming back to the city, I noticed my anxiety going up. I had this realization that the city wasn’t quite for me, even though I love it.
I went looking for somewhere that had that feeling I felt through COVID. I picked Tucson where I lived for three years. It’s this sleepy little city, more of a town. I liked the idea that it was sunny all the time, and there was always a horizon. That was fun but after a couple of years, it was a desert, literally and metaphorically. I was like, “What cities have nature and city?” I think I’ve been looking for Australia my whole life, ever since I left. Now I’m old enough, I can come back without feeling like a failure.
That’s hilarious.
Yeah, I just moved back two weeks ago. I’m having this Australia renaissance right now: “G’day mates” and iced long blacks and nice weather and beaches. I’m readjusting to home. It’s a little paradise down here. It’s a bit slow. I’m getting used to not being in America. I was used to same-day Amazon. Down here, they’re like, “Fuck you. We’ll do it when we want to do it.” I’ve got a big year next year, a lot of touring, and I like the idea of coming back to something that’s super familiar and being close to my mom. I lost my dad in 2020.
That’s a relatively recent loss.
When my dad died, I did a bunch of therapy. One of the main things was realizing that when someone passes away, you fret about how they’re going to be remembered, and what to do with their failures and their winnings. We get to create how we remember them. That’s how you honor them. That was a big thing for me. My dad wasn’t Gandhi, but I can pick the version of him that I want to carry with me, that works for me. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
It seems at a certain point, if people have living parents, they tend to want to live closer to them.
For sure. After I lost my dad, I started coming back to Australia every summer, which is your winter, for the holidays. I always like being here at the end of the year, and I’m off touring through the northern hemisphere summers anyway, and the spring and the fall usually, so, in a way, I was already living here. I feel like my blood is unable to stay in one place. I’m trying to make it stay here. We’ll see.
2020 was a huge perspective shift for me. I’d been touring ever since I could, based on this assumption that was the best thing I should do, and it’s what I love doing. But I’d never been able to not have it, to really say, “Do I love this?” Since I was able to stop touring, I was able to, for the first time as an adult, go, “Is this what I want to be doing?” I was afraid to ask that question, because what if the answer was no? I wouldn’t know what to do. But the answer was yes. Through that, I had this newfound energy and passion around making music. It actually purified what I did. It wasn’t this manic scrap of constantly trying to be an artist. It was trusting my inner voice with everything I do.
Where was the album recorded?
Mostly in Tucson, in my little studio in my backyard. Just me and the lizards and the birds. But so many of the songs were written in New York. This has been an interesting record because I can remember where I was when I wrote almost every song. There’s a song called “Remember Me” on the album that I wrote in 2021. I had lost my voice. When I went to sleep every night, the lactic acid was coming up and burning my throat in my sleep, which is why I lost my voice. I was sitting at the piano in my apartment on the corner of Canal and Lafayette. I lived on the top floor of this retail building, probably the noisiest corner in all of Manhattan. I remember writing this song. I couldn’t sing it, but I could hear it in my head. I had this voice memo of me whistling the melody and I wrote the lyrics down. I had to wait two and a half months before I could sing the song.
A lot of this album is coming back around to some of the stuff that was written in New York through those last couple of crazy years. It was a little too insane to process at the time. It took going to Tucson, having the infinite horizon in my safe little desert town where I didn’t really know anyone, being almost done with that era, but not starting a new one, and almost being in a vacuum, to be able to piece it all together. I’m proud of all my albums, but there’s a kind of pride in this album that is stronger than I’ve felt before, and it just so happens to also have wrapped up my time in America, which wasn’t conscious at all.
Were you writing on a particular instrument?
It went through a few phases. I made the decision pretty early on that I wanted it to feel like what the ’90s felt like to me. I was a kid, just creeping into being a teenager. The way I experienced the ’90s, there weren’t these visceral entry points. I wasn’t going out to live music. I wasn’t always watching MTV. But I was listening to the radio in the car with Mom. I was hearing a lot of piano-centric pop songs. I didn’t have refined taste. But then I was also playing a bunch of video games and all that music was drum and bass made in Japan, so I was getting this hyper-production stuff. But also, grunge was reaching me through whatever CDs my uncle had and I also knew about this slacker shoegaze-y kind of thing. Then my aunt had given me a Fatboy Slim CD. I had The Matrix and Rob Zombie. It was a mush of all these different worlds. That’s what I wanted to do with the record.
My sense of melody comes from pop songs, and piano is my main instrument, although I do play guitar. I sampled drum samples from the ’90s. I wanted it to see if I could mush them all together. Whenever a song felt like it was too piano, I would add some guitar; or too guitar, I would add some piano. It was supposed to feel like what I remembered it being like, not what it was actually like. I didn’t go back and listen for references. I just remembered the feeling of that stuff. It was kind of a vibe thing. Nostalgia and looking back has been this big theme recently. I think everyone’s doing that because the world doesn’t feel that great so we’re looking back to be like, “I remember when it felt good.” The album was, “Let me re-soundtrack what I would want the world to feel like if I was 16 again.” If I was a 16-year-old today, I would write this record for him.
Were you thinking about the love theme as you were writing the album?
This theme of love, I’ve always written about love, since the beginning. I’ve ended up being a lot less intentionally intellectual about the stuff I do now. We had a lot of deaths in the family, five people every summer, in a row. At the same time, I fell in love twice in three years, which is crazy for me. I’ve been single for 10 years, then I had two girlfriends in three and a half years. There was love and grief at the same time, which are really similar. I literally remember being in love. I was on a boat in Greece, going to meet this girl, and getting the call from my mom that my uncle had killed himself. It was the most bizarre experience ever. I was so struck at how similar the feelings were. Obviously one feels good and one doesn’t, but they’re twins, almost the same thing. I’d heard people say grief is love leaving. One, you have them with you, and one, you don’t. I don’t think love will ever be cliche. It’s everything we all want, and it’s what we want to give.
Were there other themes going through your mind during writing?
I was going through a bit of a depressive episode, which is not unheard of for me, but it was a particularly long and heavy one. I started listening to a lot of Ram Dass, and I was microdosing shrooms. I got into all this spiritual stuff. But I had this moment where I started to realize that I had never felt a love for strangers. Whenever I met someone new, I immediately didn’t trust them. Especially with what I do, because people take photos of me, stalkers and all this stuff, it’s very easy to justify not trusting strangers. That was my default. I would study them and figure out if it was safe for me to relax around them or not. I realized I’d done this my whole life. I thought that’s just how you meet people. Then it started to occur to me that I could choose to trust people when I meet them, or that there’s a gray area here. That’s where this theme came from: this idea that we meet people we don’t know, and that we can choose to try and love them.
The flip side of that, I also fell deeply in love with two particular people in a short time period. It didn’t work out, and I was quickly faced with this idea that they’re strangers. I’d fallen in love with strangers. On top of that, my dad passed away, who wasn’t a stranger to me, but you also are left with all these questions when people die, and you realize that, in some ways, they also were strangers.
This whole theme is what the record became about: We are all strangers to each other, but that maybe only a handful of people are able to feel love regardless of that weird juxtaposition. Sometimes we feel like we can only love someone if we know them, but then realizing, well, that’s not true, because I’ve loved so many people that I don’t know.
Isn’t it wild how something you’ve lived by most of your life can suddenly be blown apart?
It’s crazy how much of our history is based on anchor points. I don’t know if you’ve ever had that experience when you find out one of your biggest anchor points is incorrect. I’ve had a few of those recently where my whole personality is based on that. In high school, I wasn’t into music. I was a gamer, a bit of a nerd. The singing teacher, the choir leader, Trevor Jones—we’re still friends now, I love him—he called up my mom and was like, “Your son should join the choir. I’ve heard him singing in the yard, he’s got a great voice.” I was 15, someone sees something in me, which is what I needed at that time because I guess I didn’t feel like I had anything special. So I joined the choir, and I got into singing, and I was like, I’m a singer. I found out years later that he didn’t actually hear me singing. He said that to everyone’s mom. He just made it up. I found that out only a couple years ago when he came to a show of mine. It’s like finding out your parents put your dog down and it didn’t actually run away. Even if you find out as an adult, it hurts.
That just blew my mind, also, it’s really funny and it’s kind of creating a false sense of confidence to get you to do something, which is good.
I’m totally grateful, yeah. But briefly I was like, “Am I not good at music?”
Last time we spoke, you had reverted to your birth name, Nick Murphy, and you’ve since brought back Chet Faker. Why is that?
It’s funny that we’re talking about my dad passing away. We all have our concepts of mortality. That was my first parent that passed. I realized life is so precious, which I know is a cliche, but for those of us that are here, what a gift. Life isn’t that serious. And even though music is everything to me, it’s also just music. I had [the Chet Faker album] Hotel Surrender and it was almost like I had this rare flower in my garage, and people were like, “Why won’t you show it to us?” And I’m like, “Because it’s not the right flower for what I’m trying to do.” But this flower had blossomed, and it’s not that big a deal. It’s cool to share it with people, so I brought the Chet Faker name back, and I’ve ended up with two names.
Do you make a musical distinction between Chet Faker and Nick Murphy projects?
Speaking of blossoms, my creativity always seems to bloom wherever I draw a line. It blooms just over the line. The two worlds are mushing back into one. I’m starting to think that my whole creative career is going to be one great big separation and reunion over time. This new album has a lot of what I would have considered Nick Murphy stuff. I feel as though most of the mess I’ve made was me trying to intellectually explain what I’ve done from a creative point of view. But the more I trust the instinct and a feeling, the more it makes sense later. That’s the approach I’m taking now. I try to think about it a lot less now and trust the process.
Trusting the process always works.
And also, what do you want to do? A little bit before we spoke last, I started reading a lot about the creative process. There were a few books that really stuck with me. This concept of the responsibility of the artist—which I hated when I first read because I’m a musician, I can do whatever I want, that’s what I love about it. But there’s a book by Kandinsky called Concerning the Spiritual in Art which talks about the responsibility of an artist from a collective point of view. Essentially how Joseph Campbell also called the artist myth-makers, and how myth guides culture. Vonnegut called the artist “the canary in the coal mine.” We’re supposed to be the sensitive alarm bell for society. All that’s to say, if you can kind of be inspired about anything, you have to have a little bit of a choice to say, “What am I going to choose to share?” I definitely have songs where it’s a good song, but I don’t want to ripple and manifest it for the rest of my life.
I actually pulled this quote from you from our last interview: “Being an artist is about documenting a spiritual path and being honest and raw with yourself. For me, music has always been about catharsis and honesty, clearing and creating a pathway to growing and moving forward and living a better life.”
I agree with him, that 2019 version of me.
It was a fantastic thing to hear, and you referenced some of the same people you mentioned just now.
I still agree with all of that. The first thing is an honest catharsis. The next thing is, “Is this worth sharing?” Everyone can express something, and everyone should, but it’s whether or not you then put that on a platform for the world. Since 2019 we’ve all been through some shit. I still believe a lot of the same things, but I’ve softened some of the edges, rounded out the edges a bit. Instead of an artist with a capital A, I think it’s reasonably noble spending time making art. But also, it’s just art. It’s not do or die. I think the 2019 version of me probably thought it was do or die. Now I look at it more as how grateful I am that I get to make music. I still believe those things, but I don’t think I’m on some righteous crusade from God to be an artist. I’m just lucky that I get to make it.
