YES, OK, YOU CAN CALL THIS a leading question. A provocation. But David Novak is a big boy and, even in the absence of drummer John-Henry Pajak, he can handle it.
When we left him in part one of this interview, the Polish Club guitarist/singer, had confessed a fondness for the theatricality of lyric writing and performance that elevated his more “matter-of-fact” approach to everyday conversation, even in, or especially in, matters of love. The evidence is in the new album, Heavy Weight Heart, where true love runs not just smoothly but poetically.
But what about reality vs imagination? What about a local giant vs a personal story?
Paul Kelly called an album Manila, and he probably hadn’t even been there, and wrote a song about travelling to Sydney from Melbourne when he was from Adelaide. With the new Polish Club album, Heavy Weight Heart, boasting a song called Manila (a city Novak has not only visited many times but, being half Filipino, where he has family) and another called How Dare You Fall In Love In This City, (which he declares is “my favourite song that we’ve written) that is set in his hometown of Sydney, is he reclaiming territorial rights from that Adelaide upstart?
“Oooh, I’m not going to say that I am,” he laughs uncomfortably at this heretical, dare we say un-Australian, thought. “I’m definitely guilty of that same sin and if I’m going to be completely honest with you, the first time that idea of any Filipino anything, or the word Manila, came up it was from John-Henry’s mouth.
“There’s a part of me that feels like I would never initiate that journey of writing because there is this kind of impostor syndrome. I’m only half Filipino. Half Filipino, half Polish and I don’t feel like either of those; I feel Australian. But also I grew up in Belgium so I feel like an impostor Australian with an American accent. So I don’t feel any of these things.”
Well, that escalated.
“Or maybe I feel all of the above but I don’t feel like I can speak to any of them because I don’t sound or look or act in a way that would justify that,” Novak says. “But once I mix that outsider perspective of John-Henry being like, let’s just do it – it’s John’s fault that we are doing it – it turns out I do have a lot to say about it, and I do have a lot of experiences with it.
“My wife and I have been there several times in the past few years: my grandmother is getting pretty old so we try to go every birthday. We do have a lot of experiences there and there is a lot to say: it’s a crazy country and a crazy city and I’m really not sure if I love it or hate it, but I’m obsessed with it. So there is a lot to say but I’m never going to feel like it’s fully my place to do it. I feel like I need that permission of the go-ahead from someone else, and thankfully John was like, just do it. The impostor syndrome is real from every corner of the globe in my life and from every culture.”
If it already isn’t clear, Novak has an instinctual questioning of the very idea that he has something, anything, worth somebody else hearing.
“I think for me it’s the whole idea of being in a band. I feel like the whole community of musicians and music makers, we are made to feel like this should be a hobby and we are just doing it for fun, and there’s this little bit of guilt there when you go to write music, like, silly musician. So if that’s like how I’m perceiving the reaction to, for want of a better word, art that we make, I’m obviously going to turn around and feel a bit of hesitation when it comes to explaining why we wanted to write about this or why we did any of the above.
“You are right to pull me up. I am pre-emptively justifying all of the decisions and I’m pre-emptively trying to explain it. But that’s just what’s going through my mind, that’s the whole ball game for me.”
It gets worse though for Novak.
“I’m trying to go through my day and do enough and be productive enough and do enough of the band that I can justify it as a full-time thing, as a real living. Which is ludicrous, I mean it’s obscene,” he concedes. “There is so much work that goes into it and there are so many emotions in that as well that it’s so beyond exhausting. But I don’t know how you fight that without changing everyone’s reaction to how the music industry works.”
While we may not know what the Belgians are like, we may not know what the Filipinos or Poles are like, we do know that that response is so Australian. The self-lopping tall poppy.
“I’m proud of it and I feel like I do have a skill set that makes it all worthwhile. I think it would be stupid not to chase this, and have some sort of creative output, because it’s very nourishing to me personally and I think there are a modest group of people who it and it means something to them,” says Novak. “But John and I are funny: our dynamic is weird because he has a full-time job but I don’t. He is very much of the music should just be for fun, which I totally get because it is a fool’s errand in so many ways and if you have aspirations of, I dunno, property ownership and stuff like that, it is a silly pursuit to do.
“But I decided a long time ago not to want any money in my life and not want to work behind a desk. But I don’t need those daily stresses, I really don’t. Fortunately, my wife is the best person in the world and supports me in that.”
If writing about love or a hectic, vibrant city he is still exploring, has him questioning himself even as those songs populate the new album, what about something even bigger that upended his life this year? Too soon, he says, too soon.
“I had heart surgery in January and part of me is like, I should really write a whole record about it, [affects dramatic movie trailer voice] tell my story and show people what it’s like. But then you actually get to do it and I’m like, well, I don’t really have the skill set, or at least the words to articulate what I went through. I find it a lot easier to tell that story through words and just say it straight up, bluntly. You know, they stopped my heart, it really sucked, it was the worst time of my life, blah blah blah. Really easy.
“But when it comes to packaging that up in a way that we’ve just discussed, it’s still something that I feel is gonna take me a little bit of time to work out. Because again, it’s a different kind of genuineness, it’s a different kind of real to take that really rough, blunt story and make it into this poetic thing that doesn’t sound clichéd, that doesn’t sound like someone else has done before. I don’t even know if I can do it, I will try when it makes sense, but it’s a really difficult thing. It’s a really, really difficult thing.”
This really difficult thing happened to him in January, and who’s going to say six or seven or eight months later that he must have worked through in his mind, his gut, what all of that meant?
“That’s often times why a lot of the songs end up being like that Tied In A Knot song [on Heavy Weight Heart]. There is a vagueness to it, it’s a sketch of a feeling. It’s not a sketch of a specific story, or a specific moment, it’s a sketch of a thousand different ways to say I feel like shit and I don’t know why,” says Novak. “I’ve been through something, and I could tell you in words what it was, but I couldn’t really sing you the specifics because I’m still processing it.”
He shakes his head, rueful and amused at the same time.
“I’m kinda having this revelation in real time, right now, but a lot of the songs are that, and a lot of our songs often are that, where it’s really visceral because I am feeling it and I could tell you exactly how I feel and I can really dress it up in metaphor and simile, but I’m not really gonna tell you, I’m not gonna take you beat for beat through what it is, because it’s not fun, because is not something I can sing a bluesy song to a soul song to at the moment. I need to figure that out.”
It does save him, for the moment at least, from trying to find words to rhyme with surgery.
“Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy doesn’t go with a lot of things,” he laughs. “Nor does septal myectomy.”
Even Paul Kelly would agree.
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Heavy Weight Heart is out September 13
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