Tim Clark

It was a bit like something out of a movie: in between clients, a middle-aged counsellor in suburban Melbourne starts writing songs. He writes one, then another, then another, and they keep coming until he thinks he has the makings of an album. With no experience in the music industry and not even able to play guitar, he decides to take the plunge. He’s going to make an album.

He literally googles ‘music producer’ and, unbeknownst to him, the first one he reaches happens to be a highly accomplished, well-known local producer. The producer is wary of taking on this neophyte, and hasn’t worked much in the counsellor’s folky-country style, but hears something of promise in the rough demos and decides to take a chance.

This is how Tim Clark’s debut album, Ghosts of the D1 Drain, came to be. Powered by the leap of faith of producer Myles Mumford, the album took shape over six years, Mumford calling in some of the country’s best musicians, including Louis King (Grace Cummings, Angus & Julia Stone, Sex On Toast), Patrick Wilson (Georgia State Line), Holly Thomas (Quivers) and John Bedggood (Things of Stone and Wood, Bernard Fanning), and enlisting the gifted Ade Vincent (Lior, The Tiger & Me) to add string arrangements, with members of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra to perform them.

The songs explore the kinds of themes you might expect a counsellor to write about – death and grief, depression, isolation, and the eternal presence of the past (hence the ‘ghosts’ of the title) – but with a broad palette of musical moods from chipper and jubilant to melancholic and heartbreaking, and styles ranging from pure toe-tapping country to lush chamber folk.

Similarly eclectic are the life experiences he draws on, from his booze-soaked teens in Melbourne’s western suburbs, to his time as a disillusioned high school teacher, and the many characters, both real and imagined, he encountered on the way. To describe the songs as personal would be an understatement; they mine the sometimes beautiful, sometimes brutal depths of feeling that come with knowing, loving and losing people.