FELICITY URQUHART AND JOSH CUNNINGHAM’S ORDER – MAKE US ONE WITH EVERYTHING
- 2 hours ago
- 6 min read
NONE OF THIS FLASH hotel room malarkey, not even a café in some on-trend spot with a hissing coffee machine in the background, for Felicity Urquhart and Josh Cunningham in interview mode. Today they greet me, partly off-camera each – turn your phone to landscape! – from the salubrious confines of the front of their van. With their dog, Wilson, a silent partner.
Working musicians with an extensive tour starting on Friday? You betcha. And working dog too as Wilson has been across the country with Cunningham, keeping him sane through deserts and rain forests and long straight roads, asking for nothing more than a meal, a toilet stop and a gambol. Which you can’t always say about, without naming names here, some lead guitarists.
Ok, we have established their credentials as hardy music types (who make country-ish music, which she’s been doing for nearly 30 years and he dabbled in during long years with The Waifs), but what about their status as philosophers? Having listened to their new album, Everything Around You, their third as an off-and-on-stage duo, and checked my library of Indian philosophy books, I can’t find a single reference to confirm that, as they sing, that “according to the law of karma, every action brings a drama”.
“There are three girls in our house,” says Urquhart, who has two daughters from her marriage to the late musician Glen Hannah, “and there’s always a drama.”
Cunningham, who brought Wilson as his contribution to the expanded family, says “Maybe it’s not so much karma as some scientific principle, right? Every action brings an equal or opposite reaction.”
Oh, so now they’re scientists eh? It would be more believable if it wasn’t already evident to everyone who knows Urquhart and Cunningham – universally regarded as among the nicest people in a genre not short of nice people among the requisite dickheads – that drama is the least likely thing for them to generate.
“Yes,” chuckles Urquhart, “we try not to be the cause of too much drama.”
Proof is how album three is a record found between a huge love story for two (and ultimately four) people, and a less romantic guide to surviving for the rest of the world, while musically it is bright and bouncy with some tough as teak moments. It’s like an album existing simultaneously in parallel worlds – one where they can declare “sacred is the music” while also advising “Let the others please themselves” – with similar goals to dim that drama and maybe bring you closer to, yes, everything around you.
“Surviving the rest of the world is best done in the context of being with ones you love too, so they are not entirely unrelated” says Cunningham.
“It’s an insight into how we do it,” Urquhart says of their not-so-accidental guide to surviving the mid-2020s. “And that’s always our thing: if it helps one person, that’s awesome. Having the kids now at this teenage crazy time of life, there is so much more responsibility to serve them well as their guides.”
Cunningham pushes back slightly on the idea that this may have been their intention, to offer their guide for navigating life, “but the concept of everything around you, literally everything you encounter, affects you one way or another [is true] and choosing to be affected in the right way is important”. Which is no small goal.
“As the songs emerged we were recognising, hey, it sounds like we are currently giving advice for the kids,” he says. “And maybe that’s not a bad thing. We weren’t setting out to be preachy or moralistic; it just had its own life as the songs came to life.”
There is truth in that. There is nothing preachy about these songs, whatever their religious-or-otherwise beliefs may be, more the kind of friends yarning over a meal and some drinks shared thoughts. Which is a relief for the godless among us. That said, they do sing “Everybody’s gotta have a little bit of faith in something/Live like you ain’t ever gonna hit the ceiling/Keep running down/Trying to catch that feeling”.
But maybe that’s really as simple as having faith in someone else to be there at your lowest moment, which is really have those two came together in the wake of Hannah’s death in 2019 and the break-up of Cunningham’s longstanding relationship.
“We are kind of designed to be in a community with each other, to be in relationship with other people,” Cunningham says. “All of those things, life’s challenges and problems, are navigated easier when you’ve got support, and beautiful moments are sweeter. My whole world has kind of expanded because I had been married previously but didn’t have children, so I had never been a family person in that sense. Coming into Felicity’s world, and the two beautiful kids that are a part of that, it’s given me a whole new take on life and its richness and its beauty, and the importance of having people who are not just your sweetheart, your special someone.”
Urquhart adds that “I also think it’s faith in what you do: believing you’re doing good and staying true to the path. Everybody has to have something they hang onto.”
Which, as Cunningham points out is no easy faith to cling to in a 21st-century business even less inclined to feed, house, or in any way sustain a working musician. But they, and Wilson, suggest it’s do-able. Maybe like the faith that Cunningham, who had been an integral part of the three-piece Waifs for decades, but had always been the background in that group’s public face, took up Urquhart’s challenge that this pairing be equals, including his equally prominent lead and backing vocals.
“She obviously had a bit of belief in me that I could do it,” Cunningham says, to which Urquhart immediately responds: “I told him he had to”, singing his praises as a melodic and musical collaborator and song driver. In the end, he concedes, “I had no choice”, though it was a forced operation he was happy to give into.
“Whether it’s her belief in me that makes you realise you can have a bit more belief in yourself, it all flows on from there.”
Some of the confidence presumably flowed into the sonic choices made on this album, from that clear divergence in tone to sometimes raw sounds that don’t pretend everything right now is peaches and cream. But in keeping with their collectivist approach, both deflect inquiries about the choices to praise for the musical partners in the band – “they just get what at we are about” – multi-instrumentalist and co-producer Matt Fell, and drummer Josh Schuberth.
Most of the songs began as reasonably detailed demos on a Cunningham/Urquhart mobile phone which were then sent to the other two to lay down parts, beginning with the drums and built from there. In other words they put their trust, their faith, in the musicians.
“It’s not a business transaction,” says Urquhart. “It’s friends making music together, and it’s a really joyful thing.”
As was presumably the two guest musicians on the final track, Grace And Joy, Tia and Ellie Hannah. The teenage daughters in the house. No doubt a good deal was sorted with their agents.
“Actually, you know what kids are like: they were like, ‘what do I get?’, and I went, you get dinner,” laughs Urquhart. Though Cunningham points out that one of the two, who has musical aspirations, is already talking about getting an actual manager. In any case both are clearly talented. And thinking ahead.
“They can write songs but they won’t give them to us,” says Urquhart with mock-shock. “We actually said, that’s great, can we record it and Ellie flat-out said no, write your own songs.”
Faith is important; knowing your worth is too. You suspect someone’s got plans for the front seat of the van next tour.
READ MORE
HEAR MORE
Everything Around You is out March 6.
SEE MORE
Felicity Urquhart and Josh Cunningham's tour begins at the Port Fairy Folk Festival this weekend and runs, for now, until early May. For dates and tickets go to https://felicityandjosh.com/tour/