SAM TESKEY ANNOUNCES DEBUT SOLO ALBUM CYCLES – OUT FRI 8 OCT + FIRST SINGLE ‘LOVE’ OUT NOW + OCTOBER HEADLINE SOLO TOUR

Sam Teskey is best known as the lead guitarist for local heroes The Teskey Brothers, with whom he has won four ARIA Awards (including Engineer Of The Year), four Music Victoria Awards and an APRA Award across their second and widely-acclaimed album Run Home Slow (#2 ARIA debut) & their 2020 live album, Live At The Forum (#1 ARIA debut). Recognised on the world stage for his work engineering Run Home Slow, Sam was also nominated for a Grammy for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical.

Relishing the opportunity to share more of his music and inspired by the great English psychedelic bands of the late 60s and 70s, like Pink Floyd and specifically their album
Meddle, Sam was keen to make a record that could be enjoyed as a whole, from start to finish.

Before settling on the title Cycles, Sam Teskey came close to leaving his debut album untitled. Not because the singer and guitarist didn’t know what he wanted to say, but rather because he wants to present his album as an open canvas, one that leaves room for the listener to project themselves onto the music.

“A big point of this album is for people to create their own journey and their own story with it,” Teskey says. “There’s lots of things that I can explore and think about and say about the record, but I really want to leave the experience up to the listener. To see what comes to them. It’s feels really nice to put the creativity back in the listeners’ hands.”

His own creative journey with the album began in early 2020. Housebound, with touring at a stand-still, he turned his attention to the vast back catalogue of music he’d amassed over the years. Teskey spent a painstaking amount of time digging through his old demos, sitting with them and thinking deeply about which songs would best capture what he wanted to say. Starting where most artists finish, he settled on the track-listing before recording a note, thoughtfully building the demos into one body of work, with each track seamlessly melting into the next.

Determined to capture the music in its purest form, he decided to record at his almost exclusively analogue home studio in Warrandyte, the same place The Teskey Brothers have recorded their albums, and enlisted the help of musician friends to capture the music live. “So many elements of the album needed to be live tracked. There’s nothing quite like getting great players in a room and recording that as opposed to layering it with overdubs and what not” he says. “That was a very special experience for me just to record that and witness having those amazing musicians in the room together. It was essential to have.”

Life cycles are a big recurring theme on the album. In fact, the record itself is a cycle, starting with the stirring, pastoral folk of ‘Love’ and ending with its reprise, ‘Then Love Returns’. It’s all part of the journey. “Cycles. That’s the concept of the album for me” he explains. “It just loops around in that sense. It could be a life cycle. Or a year. Or a day. At the start you can see the sunrise and then it goes all the way around and you’re seeing the same sunrise. The whole movement of a cycle.”