What's an artists life if there is no angst
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
"Did you enjoy your dinner dear, it was lovely thanks"
It's lunchtime on a Tuesday, and Fred Smith has just been to the dentist.
We've arranged to meet at what must be one of the oldest cafes in Canberra, on a busy street filled with other cafes, and other people on their lunch break. He's wearing a hat - he is a musician, after all - but he's also, it must be said, wearing a suit.
It's a work day, and this is his lunch break. Later, he'll go back to the office. When he goes home, he'll have dinner with his wife and daughter, and maybe read her a story before bed.
Then he'll get up in the morning and do it all again.
There's an in-joke happening here, and it's not just that for Smith, this is only half the story. He - famously by now - spends only half the week as a diplomat in the Department of Foreign Affairs. The rest of the time, he writes music, and tours.
Until recently, these parallel lives dovetailed conveniently, in that has often written songs about the conflict zones in which he has travelled and worked.
But in the past five years, the frontier has shifted to the domestic, in the most finely tuned sense.
His latest album is his first in eight years not to focus on war and death. Instead, he has turned inwards, to work, family, the pressure of raising a child and dealing with ageing parents, of maintaining a marriage and growing older.
This is the other part of the joke, and one of the reasons why he's picked a middle-of-the-road cafe on weekday, in his hometown, to talk about his new album, Domestic. He'll be launching it, tongue-in-cheek, on Valentine's Day.
"It's even got a pink cover!" he says, just in case the title isn't convincing enough.
He's a longtime O'Connor resident, but today, we're on the south side, and the Manuka cafe we're at is a symbol of comfort and familiarity. As is the case for many second-generation Canberrans (a relatively rare breed), the city, and in particular Manuka, is full of ghosts and stories.
Caphs, where we're eating lunch, was the place he would come to in his last year of boarding school, to try and look more sophisticated.
"That was before I realised I couldn't drink coffee," he says.
"My only vice now is folk singing, and that's bad enough."
Back then, he would busk with friends in a nearby arcade, and lounge on the lawns beyond.
Further afield, there's the Dickson cricket ground where he scored a hat-trick when he was in the under-13s, and the Jamison tennis court where he once dislocated a shoulder. One day, his own daughter will have similar memory layers.
He's also nearing 50, and, in some lights, life just isn't all that glamorous when you've got a young child and you've been with your partner - Maryanne Voyazis - for 20-odd years.
But, there's poetry there, and Smith, better than most, knows how lucky we are to live where we do.
As the rain falls in our home here in the suburbs
I am grateful for the ceiling up above
And I'm grateful you've not left me for another
You're the one thing that I'm certain of
As his songs show, there's strength and comfort on the home front, and delicate personal reckonings when it comes to watching parents - in this case his parents-in-law - die.
Smith says he's come to see, over the years, that these experiences are just as song-worthy as off-beat travel and far-flung conflict zones. It just requires a different touch.
"I kind of admire people like Helen Garner who can write about the most mundane things and make them fascinating," he says.
"It pulls you to pay attention."
Smith has gained a reputation for having something of knack with diplomacy - it's amazing what you can achieve with a smile and a guitar - but there has always been something more complex at play.
He was once described as "Australia's secret weapon" in international diplomacy, and he was the first Australian diplomat to be posted to Afghanistan's Uruzgan Province in 2009. The experience led to one of his best-known albums - Dust of Uruzgan in 2010 - and, six years later, a book of the same name.
Before that, he had been posted to Bougainville as a civilian peace monitor in 1999, where he first discovered his talent for asking questions and building bridges between different worlds, whether through songs or straight-out diplomacy.
He's been on various trips, including back to Afghanistan, in the years since, but not since his daughter, Olympia, was born five years ago.
"I think I've just been more immersed in Australia in the last five years, in a good way," he says.
"While it's been tough with Maryanne's parents, it's been beautiful with Olympia, and I'm lucky enough to have my parents living in Canberra too, which is not what everyone has.
"It's just been a nice period in family life, and I've got on a nice little roll. I've been productive enough."
He's written a book, turned out a few albums, travelled the country playing his songs. And while he jokes about needing to be a better father ("I think I've managed it"), he's also more interested in examining what makes up a good life when you're simply getting on with things - in many ways a universal experience.
Working hard and finding a balance in how you want to live your life has its own kind of beauty, he's found. While he still finds his work in foreign affairs fulfilling, he's adept at self-promotion - and doing the hard yards to keep his name out there.
"There's a lot of work, and I'm getting to a point where I probably would [do this full time] but I'd rather not," he says.
"I enjoy my work, and I think if you're a full-time musician you just end up in a very sort of narrow loop of self-involvement. There's a real risk that you could lose your grounding in the real world or run out of things to actually talk about. For me, life has become about balance, and with balance actually comes productivity in the long run."
He did try, once, to focus full-time on his music, moving to America with Voyazis for three years. But by then, he'd seen too much to be able to narrow his focus sufficiently.
"I just found it a bit disorientating, just being entirely orientated around my music career. It was a great opportunity, I learned a lot, but I think I need the balance, the contrast," he says.
"So I wake up on a Monday morning and I don't put on a suit with great enthusiasm, but I know it's good for me, and you get used to it, hanging around smart and engaged people."
And he's hardly ready to hang up his suit - or even wind down his career - just yet. In April he's heading back to Afghanistan for a one-year aid posting. He just figured he'd launch an album before setting off - one with an entirely different outlook to what people have grown used to.
"The first half is, I guess, broadly my musings on 21st century Australia from drought and bushfires and Bondi and all of that, but the second half is a bit more domestically focused," he says.
The songs are certainly not saccharine, I think they're a more balanced and ambivalent perspective on the challenges of middle-aged relationships.
- Fred Smith
"That's been my reality for the last five years and I haven't gone anywhere since Olympia was born and combined with that, there's been a period in which we've managed the demise of Maryanne's parents."
As Greek migrants, they were, he says, sort of an embodiment of the dynamic that makes up his own twin professional and creative lives.
"They came out from Greece in the 1950s, and ended up running a jewellery shop in the Belconnen Mall for the last 30 years of their life. It was called ACT Charms," he says, smiling fondly.
"He was 89 by the time he died. He spent his teenage years dodging Nazis in occupied Greece, and the last two years of his life watching women's tennis in my living room."
They may well have found their own kind of poetry in living the quiet, comfortable life in Canberra, having escaped a blighted Europe. But, says Smith, a Westfield shopping mall is pretty oppressive too, in a different way.
These parents-in-law have made their way into a couple of the songs on the album, such as Heart Work:
If you find yourself alone in an old folks' home one stop from the mortuary station
Best not to curse the nightshift nurse with your views on immigration
Seems she came here of late from some African state for centuries shabbily run
Now you may well infer, it's just you and her and some heart work to be done
Several of the tracks are also love songs - wry and tender, and not at all soppy; it's not Smith's way.
"There are times when marriage seems more about endurance than euphoria - we endure a lot together" he says.
"The songs are certainly not saccharine, I think they're a more balanced and ambivalent perspective on the challenges of middle-aged relationships."
The sentiments fit well with the idea that, by this time in life, it's possible to enjoy what we have, while still searching for where it all fits.
And so, he frets about protecting his baby daughter from harm, wonders at his wife's ability to find the best stuff in charity shops, muses about mellowing with age. It's more middle-of-life musing than mid-life crisis.
"It's all about love songs for middle-aged people," he says.
- Fred Smith is launching his latest album, Domestic, on February 14 at the Cultural Centre Kambri, ANU. Tickets and CDs available at fredsmith.com.au.