There's a fine line between things being well considered and things being over thought. So says Husky's thoughtful front man Husky Gawenda. Discussing his band's sophomore album Ruckers Hill, "I think we're sometimes not so good at treading that line." He can be forgiven, however, considering they had around 50 songs to whittle down to just 13 for the album.

"We certainly knew from the very beginning that we wanted to make a record we were proud of and that started with having the songs we thought were good," says Gawenda. "The first stage was coming up with a bunch of songs that we were ready to start working on. That took quite a long time."

What he and his fellow band mates have come up with is an epic, multilayered album that develops on the sounds established on Husky's earlier release Forever So - sounds that were implanted in Gawenda through his love of greats such as America, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, George Harrison and Simon and Garfunkel.

"For me and also the rest of the band we've always been very interested in and just loved old music," Gawenda says. "The other guys in the band are very into blues and jazz and also, like I am, to the classic songwriters from the '70s. It's not something that we necessarily think about but those bands and those songwriters and the kinds of sounds that they created are very much a part of our musical palette."

Though he admits there is some danger in copying things and sounding too much like your influences, Gawenda says it's a great thing to incorporate and to learn from the music that has come before you.

"And hopefully when it comes out of you it comes out different."

Keen to let the writing and the songs evolve, "We had deadlines that we thought about, and talked about, and then allowed ourselves to break because we wanted to give the album plenty of time," Gawenda says.

This meant getting the lyrics right as much as the music. "A lot of the writing for me is about the writing of the lyrics. And I spend a lot of time on that," he says.

For inspiration, he drew on some big names. Citing Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and Leonard Cohen as three of his heroes, for Ruckers Hill Gawenda gained special inspiration from one of Cohen's non-musical creations, 1966 novel Beautiful Losers.

"While I was writing and recording I spent a lot of time walking. It was my way of taking a break and getting out of the house. I would walk in the mornings to get coffee at a cafe on [Melbourne's] Smith Street. There was a little bookshop and cafe and there were probably five books and one of them was Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers," he says. "I started reading it. And I ended up reading the whole book in small portions. Every morning I'd read five or 10 pages."

Saying one of the hardest things with writing is overcoming self-created restrictions, this novel came about at the right time to help push Gawenda into new directions.

"It was almost serendipitous finding that book, at least that's how I saw it. It's a kind of wild, sort of outrageous piece of writing which in a way I felt freed me up in my writing in that period."