WHAT’S MUSIC FOR? IN THE APARTMENTS IT’S FOR COMFORT AND JOY part two

Peter Milton Walsh, a man alone, but not lonely. Photo by Kate Wilson.

In part one of this interview, yesterday, the main man of The Apartments - a band you need in your life - discarded riding crops and historical shibboleths., and drew on friends Today, he looks for new worlds, words that feel, and a place called Watertown where everyone's welcome.

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IT’S FAIR TO SAY that when you listen to a record and you find yourself down or depressed by it, the cause may not be or may not just be in the record but in you. Our circumstances, our predilections flavour what we hear and how we react to it. This is obvious, but also easily forgotten when we dismiss something or somebody as too bleak or too depressing, or even unrealistic in that context. This is territory and commentary The Apartments, the vehicle for singer/songwriter Peter Milton Walsh, have long traversed.

Listening to The Apartments’ That’s What The Music Is For, an elegant record of mid-tempo-at-most songs whose subtext is loss but whose energy is surprisingly joyful, I questioned myself, asking can you find joy in the absence of people because of their presence originally? While I may have been initially sceptical, to me the answer in the record, in the songs and singing, is yes. Even better, for us and for him, it becomes restorative.

“That is absolutely true. There’s a part of me always when I’m writing, and it’s not a conscious thing but I recognise it down the track: if we have to be in this broken world then bring something beautiful to it,” says Walsh. “To me that’s what the music is for. For me, music has been there for everything significant that’s happened: it’s been part of every wedding, funeral, birth, everything that’s big. And certainly with the pattern of my friendships and the people who have been in and out of my own life, music was it, absolutely.”

Many people can draw emotional strength or comfort from poetry, films or art, but some recognise that for whatever reason – not a better/worse or good/bad dichotomy – for us the most valuable emotional conduit is music.

“I do still enjoy poetry but there is a magic in music that poetry just can’t approach,” Walsh says. “When I was a kid, 19 or 20, and I would go out to movies Brisbane had these repertory cinemas – I was born [in Sydney] but moved there when I was five, so as Graham Greene would say, Brisbane made me – that would do revivals. So you could go to a double bill and it would be a Fellini and an Antonioni, or something like that, and I would walk out of that with my friends and immediately I’d be in the great circle of wisdom as people started explaining things.

“And always my feeling was I don’t need an explanation; I’ve been in this world and even the afterglow of it is enough for me, and the meaning side of it is not that important to me when I’ve had this experience. And I think music is like that as well. I am literal in many ways but music works beyond that, the power is different. And it’s irresistible.”

He is preaching to the converted it must be said. But it is interesting to hear, as was made clear in part one of this interview, how often Walsh’s references are filmic rather than musical.

“Some moviemakers are just extraordinary when they talk about what they do,” says Walsh. “I hesitate to mention Tarkovsky because this will be put in the complete …ah …”

Wanker category?

“Yeah,” he laughs. “But Tarkovsky used to say the work has to act on our hearts or it has no meaning, at all. These people who are regarded as cerebral, they want to walk through a different world, not a cerebral world. They want to walk through a world that made people feel something. I feel like with records the thing that I like is once you hear the first track, you have entered a particular world, and movies are like that.

“You listen to a Bill Evans record: the minute that a Bill Evans record starts you are in Bill Evans’ world. Or Phoebe Bridgers, Billie Holiday, Jane Campion, Bergman. You’ve just encountered a way of looking at the world, and in some ways that will still separate us from the animals of AI.”

(An aside. As a Tarkovsky fan, Walsh did not see the Soderbergh version of Solaris. “If there is a remake of something I tend to not go near it because I just don’t want to banish anything or imperil the feeling that I have.” I, a Soderbergh fan, did. Walsh graciously declines the chance to mock me.)

If there is any connection between Walsh, a very human man of wry humour and subtlety, and the animals of AI it might only be found in a relentlessness of creation. He has said that he likes to start writing for a new record as soon as he finishes making the old one, in a manner that sounds almost like a compulsion.

“Well, I like to try because I always feel like that was it. I’ll finish and say, that’s it, it’s never going to happen again,” he explains. “But Tim [Kevin, producer], with whom I’ve worked now for two albums, he just keep saying to me, well, you’re wrong, so I try and see if something will come up.”

Is it unreasonable to suggest that part of this need to write is fear? He must keep moving to keep convincing himself he is, or still is, a writer?

“Yeah, yeah. I possibly would be quite content if I just stopped as well, but I do have this kind of thing that there is something here,” Walsh says. “I wish I had discipline; I don’t have any discipline. I have an unhurried, stately [he laughs] pace. Stately may be overstating it. I couldn’t do what Burt Bacharach and Hal David did, which is go in, it’s 9 o’clock, here are three songs in the top 40 I want a hit like this by 5 o’clock, and Burt does Anyone Who Had A Heart, Walk On By, then, oh, it’s 4 o’clock, well we can go home now.”

This is why The Apartments have never had a top 10 hit, because Walsh refuses to clock on at 9 o’clock and write a smash song. We now understand.

“There’s a part of me which obviously wishes I had some [of that] but I don’t; everything is quite random with me. Also I’ll do things and if I’m not happy with it I just drop it and leave it behind. It works for me.”

Has he written many songs since the end of making This Is What The Music Are For?

“I’ve got bits and pieces lying around and I’ll see if they sing to me at the right time.”

So the fair is not over?

“No,” he chuckles. “The fair is not over.”

But the compulsion, if that is what it is, has a purpose too. Walsh talks about a friend who while suffering from depression had listened to The Apartments’ exquisitely moving 1997 album, Apart, which was reissued on vinyl almost two years ago, and details how “it had worked with him, got him out to the other side”. This became a crucial spark for the new record.

“I remember saying to [Walsh’s partner] Kate at the time, well, that is what the music is for. So I’ve had this idea of where the music stands in people’s lives. I did a show at Earlwood last year and everything worked out very well with just a three piece of piano, trumpet and guitar, and this Italian woman came up and introduced herself after the show. She said ‘this is probably the most uplifting night of music I’ve had in a long, long time: I used up all my tissues’.

"And I thought again, that’s what the music is for, that experience.”

There would be more than a few of us, with or without experience of depression, who have had that moment with The Apartments: finding things that buoyed us by their existence and showed the beauty in even the hardest time, which brings us back to where this started.

“I don’t get sad listening to music; I get sad by other things and other situations, but not listening to music. There is something else going on,” says Walsh. “I recognise Frank Sinatra is the king of the carefree: Songs For Swinging Lovers? That’s a great Sinatra, that’s a sunny day Sinatra. But the Sinatra that I really love, and the one that first spoke to me was the absolutely bottom of nowhere on a spring day Sinatra: Ava has left him, he suddenly knows what a torch song means, and he is singing it. That vulnerability, I just love that.”

Another favourite of Walsh’s is Sinatra’s late masterwork, 1970’s Watertown, which he describes as “hard-core, suburban loss that predates Raymond Carver but it’s that kind of loss”.

I semi-jokingly comment that it was amazing that nearly 20 years later Sinatra was still mining the heartbreak of Ava Gardner leaving him in his work, and Walsh makes the connection to his own album for me.

“This is the thing: the people we know they keep disappearing taken the past with them, but [the past] also lives whenever you think of them,” he says. “Mostly you pick that up in the clarifying light of loss, that’s when it occurs to you.”

READ MORE

Small Wounds In Close Up: The Cinema Verite Of The Apartments: part one of this interview

HEAR MORE

That’s What The Music Is For is released on October 17.

The Apartments will play

Low 302, in Sydney, on October 17

The Junk Bar, Brisbane, October 25

George Lane, Melbourne, November 15;

and tour Europe in March/April 2026.