Congratulations on your fifth album But For All These Shrinking Hearts! The record has received high praise from both fans and critics, how do you feel about the end result?
I love it! Every record I do, I want it to be better than the one before and to be honest I wouldn’t release it unless I thought it was. I think it’s my best record yet.

Any standout tracks in your mind?
For me the opening track ‘The Book of Revelations’ is special because it was one of the first tracks that I wrote for the new record but it still has that kind of freshness to me. We’ve just started playing it live for the upcoming tour and it sounds really great as a live track.

What ideas and inspirations did you draw upon for this record?
It’s funny, when I am writing the tracks I never really think about what I am processing as a whole but once I put the collection of tracks together I realised there are a lot of themes of being disillusioned with a lot of things. When I think back about the times I wrote the record we had Tony Abbott as our Prime Minister, George Brandis was cutting arts funding and I just felt disillusioned with the state of the creative world, so there’s a lot of those themes in there. The record also explores my own relationship with creativity.

How would you describe that relationship?
It’s up and down, it’s like any relationship. Sometimes I’ll go down to my studio and I will be bursting with enthusiasm and other times I just want to watch TV.

In those down times, how do you inspire yourself?
You have to recharge the batteries. I go to galleries, read books, I’ve been trying to do some painting, which I am absolutely awful at but it’s a good outlet. Surfing is really good as well. You kind of realise there are really simple pleasures in life that never change.

What was it about Charles Redheffer’s fraudulent perpetual motion machine that resonated with you?
It was a really poignant visual metaphor for that disillusionment that I was feeling at the time. I believe the thing that will keep pushing us forward as a species is our ability to innovate our way out of trouble and use creative thinking. For me it’s like we have this capacity for creative thinking, for keeping our species going, but at the same time there’s these bored old men cranking the wheels of these machines, much like the man and the perpetual motion machine, behind the scenes.

We hear some of the tracks were actually born from jibberish, can you elaborate on that?
For some of the tracks I didn’t have any lyrics by the time I wrote the melody line so I just sang jibberish and listened to them on headphones and just wrote down what it sounded like I was saying. From there it just kind of morphed into real words and then I started building stories around those little accidental things that sounded like sentences.

Take us back to moment when you first heard one of your songs on the radio?
It was the song ‘Kids Don’t Sell Their Hopes So Fast’ and it was the first solo track that I put out, it got played on triple j and then got added to the station’s high-rotation. We hadn’t really anticipated that. I was working at a record store and I heard it when I was driving home, it was a feeling of elation. I thought if I can keep going and leverage off this one tiny little moment, it could actually be okay. It was a real feeling of hope I guess.

One of our absolute favourite visions of you is cruising down the water on a guitar-shaped boat in the ‘Make You Happy’ film clip. Does that boat really exist?
It did exist but at the end of the clip it got auctioned off on eBay to raise money for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation and it sold to an anonymous bidder. To this day I don’t know who bought it. There have been lots of rumours, someone once said that Russell Crowe may have bought it but I don’t know if that’s true. I certainly haven’t heard anything in the last ten years about it. I’d love to find out though.

What have been some of your personal career highlights on this incredible journey you’re on?
There have been lots! Early on, I could see things changing. All of a sudden shows began to fill out and I got signed to Island Records in the UK and Europe. Playing Glastonbury Festival was pretty mind-blowing but for me, I think the biggest highlight is building my studio in my backyard. It’s just a really great space to rehearse and record in. Having the capacity to be pretty much self sufficient with that kind of asset is amazing. I’ve been collecting gear and figuring out what I needed over ten years so to get that finished is a big thing for me.

What or who inspires you?
It’s always different. It’s pretty much all drawn from my own life, just whatever is happening, things that I am dealing with, things that I’ve heard of, things that I am disillusioned with or excited about. That’s always been the way I process events, I write songs about them. It’s my view of the world really.

Is your process of songwriting almost cathartic in a way?
Yeah absolutely, it always has been. It’s hard to explain it but it’s like something bubbling up inside me and I just know that I need to fish around until I figure out what it is that needs to come out. A song eventually emerges and once I finish it I feel a sense of relief, it’s a strange thing.

You’re about to embark on a national tour including a show at Miami Marketta, what is the best and worst part about touring?
It’s actually pretty much all good these days. When I first started it was hard because I was away a lot, it was different back then. Instead of playing Sydney, Brisbane, Gold Coast or whatever I’d play everywhere in between those places so I’d be on the road for six weeks at a time. These days I’ve got a good balance where I’ll head off on Thursday and be back on Sunday and be dropping my kids off to school on Monday. I do love playing live so it’s great to experience those highs and then to come home and have some balance and perspective on the whole thing.

Finally, any words to live by?
Something I’ve said for a long time is if you open yourself up to the world, the world will open itself up to you. I really believe that if you are just open to experiences and opportunities coming your way, not in any kind of magical or mystical way, but just be positive and ready to accept these things then opportunities will come your way.

Josh Pyke is playing at Miami Marketta on Thursday February 4. Tickets are available thorugh Oztix.