“It’s kind of strange, being plonked back into your former life, as an adult,” Darren Hanlon says. The 48-year old musician is on the phone, sitting in the old housing commission home he grew up in. The story of how he ended up back in Gympie, in southeast Queensland, has a New Testament ring to it. First, his partner, Shelley Short – the US folk singer who first duetted with Hanlon on his 2010 single All These Things – discovered she was pregnant. Living on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean, the expectant parents reunited in Portland in February 2020, when a plague spreading across the US west coast forced them to make a snap decision to flee.
Flying to Hawaii to avoid America’s mainland transit hubs, they were almost stranded – until a Qantas attendant at Honolulu airport quietly told them to return the next day. “She must have felt sorry, saw Shelley sort of waddling out of there, it was very biblical,” Hanlon says. “So she just snuck us onto this plane and, as we took off, the pilot said, ‘You guys are very lucky, this is the last Qantas 747 flight for the foreseeable future.’”
Eventually, they wound up back where everything started for Hanlon. Their son Rocky “was born in the hospital where I was born, my parents were born, my sister was born,” he says. “The hospital’s perched up on the hill, and from the window you can see our house, the school, and my grandparents’ house – this kind of triangulation between the three main locations of my childhood. Seeing those red-roofed Queenslander houses, it hasn’t changed – you could squint your eyes and it could still be the 80s.”
And this week he watched as Gympie’s streets began to resemble a scene from Genesis, in the city’s worst flood in two decades. “I just felt helpless,” he says down the phone in Melbourne, a month after we first speak. He left Gympie just before the flood, in order to prepare for the release of his new album, Life Tax; back home, Short and Rocky have been without power, water lapping at their front yard.
“The area was like an archipelago really; they were inundated with spiders and snakes,” he says. Short found a snake in Rocky’s pram; their son was bitten by a spider and taken to a boat ambulance.
Hanlon plans to return once the bridge into town fully reappears. Despite the distance and devastation, he feels heartened watching his hometown rally together: “Something like this just unites everyone. The government response was really poor, so the only place you’re really getting any information is from Facebook groups. It’s been really nice to see people are being kind.”
Before parenthood, a pandemic and a flood changed Hanlon’s world, he was holed up in Melbourne, writing and recording songs in a church hall in Northcote and surreptitiously sleeping out on the street in his old Nissan campervan.
“People look at me like I’m some kind of hobo freak when I tell them this,” he says of his “urban camping” experience. “But it was the most joyous period, I loved it. It was so freeing and I would get so excited about going to sleep.”
Back in the church hall, he pieced together his sixth album: Life Tax, a record of quiet songs bathed in natural reverb. “Often I was there late at night, and it was so boomy and echoey that you had to be mindful of the neighbours,” he says. “That’s why a lot of the songs are kind of gentle on this record – I think I was trying to keep my voice down.”
One noisier exception is the lead single, Lapsed Catholic, a wry, jangly pop song about losing his religion. For Hanlon, a former altar boy who once considered joining the priesthood, the song has been a surprisingly controversial addition to his catalogue.
“I haven’t written that many protest songs,” he says, of the song’s rebuke of homophobia in the church. “I know that people found it confronting – I got quite a few emails about it. I think of it more as a pro-love than anti-Catholic, but people started walking out of my gigs when I play it.”
It was a disappointing reaction to a song that, for the most part, is an affectionate portrait of Hanlon’s “childhood of Sundays”. “I thought I should just tell it through my eyes; it became more of my journey through the Catholic church, and why I was disillusioned,” he says. “I hoped maybe people could understand it that way.”
Completed in 2019, Life Tax will finally be released this week. Beyond that, Hanlon isn’t sure what his and Short’s lives as touring musicians will look like with Rocky. He did, however, somehow manage to play 28 shows in 2021, many of them in parts of his home state that had never heard of him. “I kinda thrive off being insulted – and there was a lot of that out there,” he says.
Hanlon also found time to join the growing ranks of celebrities and musicians to cameo in the hit children’s cartoon Bluey. “I’d heard rumours for years that they’d cut the first season using my music – they’d put some of my songs as placeholders to get the kind of vibe they were after,” he says. “I wasn’t sure if that was actually true, but then they contacted me out of the blue.”
After Bluey’s creator, Joe Brumm, confirmed the story, Hanlon was pleased to get a say in how his character, a door-to-door energy sales dog, should look. Fittingly, he chose another callback to his Queensland childhood, an old farm dog named Brownie: “He was just a mutt really – I loved him when I was a kid.”
Since the episode aired, Hanlon’s already had one all-ages show derailed by shouted requests to reprise his four fleeting lines of dialogue. Just like Gympie, Brownie is yet another piece of his childhood that he’ll never be able to leave behind.
Darren Hanlon’s album Life Tax is out on 4 March (Flippin Yeah Records)
