Sam Shinazzi’s latest album may have come from a dark place, but the singer from Sydney’s south feels like a man reborn, writes DANIEL HERBORN.

As a great Australian songwriter once wrote, from little things, big things grow. For Sam Shinazzi, the Springsteen of the Shire, the genesis of Then I Held My Breath – his third and best record – was being at a low ebb and having some downtime.

“At that point in my life I had a three-week window open. I don't think I had a job, I didn't have a girlfriend, you know, I didn't have a life basically (laughs). I wanted to get a move on with things. I think I wrote one song, and then another, and thought this could be kind of fun, so I just tried it as an experiment and it worked. I don't know if that's because of where I was in my life at the time, or just luck, but the songs I wrote I just really liked.”

While Shinazzi never tried to force himself to write songs, there was a concerted effort to kickstart the creative process. If he wasn't in the mood to write a song, he would sit down with a guitar and try to get in the mood. At the end of each day, he'd ring his guitarist, Adam 'T-Bone' Taylor, and play him the latest fragments of songs.

Shinazzi knew the process was working when, after a wretched day, he sat down and burned through 'Today We Lost A Great One'.

“I wrote it pretty quick,” he says. “It felt pretty amazing ... that one's pretty special.” He describes the experience as cathartic “and even though people who know my stuff might think that of me, that's not a word I use often”.

Those familiar with Shinazzi's back-catalogue may also be thinking the new songs evince a drift away from his very personal style of songwriting. Previous record Stories You Wouldn't Believe played like an extension of the detailed tour diaries he kept, studded with references to friends, love interests and musical inspirations – all mentioned by name. This time around, Shinazzi tells me, the songs are still personal, but perhaps less direct. 'Today We Lost A Great One' buries its pain in more universal terms while 'Graduation Girl' hints at lingering regret, though you'd be hard pressed to say exactly what it was about.

The local details have hardly disappeared, however, with the events of 'Bluebelle' taking place in a cafe on Sydney's iconic bohemian strip, King Street. Then there's 'Girls', which continues this penchant for naming friends, reeling off the names of some 30 girls, in alphabetical order no less. While still heartfelt (he sent a copy of the song to every girl mentioned) there's also a tongue-in-cheek element to the song.

“That was more me saying I've mentioned a few people before, how about I mention 25 or so people in one song?”

So how do people react when they find themselves in his lyrics?

“They're usually pretty okay with it. To this day, I've never said someone's name and said something bad about them and I'm pretty sure I never would ... But it's been brought to my attention, by a few people, that, at times, it's not embarrassing, not uncomfortable, but somewhere in between”.

The copies of 'Girls' Shinazzi handed out hark back to the earliest days of his musical career, when he would give demos and lo-fi recordings to friends. It was a strategy borne out of necessity, and as Shinazzi explains, also “a confidence thing”.

“You want to make sure people like what you're doing before you necessarily go do it properly – and I had no idea whether people liked it or not.”

“I have a really bad short-term memory. If I don't have a pen and paper, I could have the greatest song ever written and it'd be gone, and it won't be back.”

People, it turned out, did like it, and the DIY distribution saw him stumble into the then-vibrant lo-fi scene which came to profoundly influence his work. “To be honest I didn't realise it was that much of a thing to do, I was just doing it and obviously got more aware of things happening overseas, people like [Sebadoh’s] Lou Barlow and all those guys and then I thought, oh this is kind of cool, I could see myself in this kind of scene.”

On Sebadoh's uber-influential III, Barlow had sung about his girlfriend in a track bearing her name, while legend has it that he later wrote a song for his then-estranged partner, who heard it, and promptly came back. True or not, his early songs often had the feeling of late-night pleas played into answering machines. You can draw a line between their emotional rawness and Shinazzi's heart-on-sleeve writing; the honesty is unusual, disarming.

Shinazzi attended the University of Sydney. But its legendary band competition — a breeding ground for embryonic versions of The Vines, Youth Group and The Whitlams, all of whom probably lost to an eight-piece “jazz-funk” band that broke up the following week – passed him by. “I wasn't really that social [at university] to be honest ... I was pretty quiet, just did my work and was seeing bands when I could.”

But he soon found his niche. While mostly living in his beloved Sutherland shire,he found like-minded souls in the inner-city music scene, playing drums for slowcore outfit Landspeed and turning up on records by SPDFGH and Peabody. These early days were ultra-prolific and his first home recording, released under the c-minus project moniker, contained a whopping 29 songs.

There was even a split release with the iconic Smudge and Shinazzi formed a firm friendship with the group’s laconic frontman Tom Morgan. Before the split release he had been “a Smudge fanboy, going to all the shows”.

“We had mutual friends, but I was pretty shy, I couldn't really talk to him, even though he was really nice ... Eventually, one night, around my first record, I just saw him out socially, and we just ended up talking for about two hours. He was really complimentary with what he was saying to me about my stuff and it was so good ... He's been really supportive of what I do, which is a pretty big thing since I put him on such a pedestal.”

In fact, Shinazzi rates Morgan as both the humblest person he's met and the best songwriter in the country.

With such support, and a growing reputation as a sincere and committed performer, if never a flamboyant one, Shinazzi made a solo trip to America on the eve of his second record. For an artist who enjoys the experience of life on the road and whose sound often draws comparisons with Americana stars such as Josh Rouse, the trip provided indelible memories. There were surprises along the way: meeting fans who had downloaded the songs from the internet, and sung along to every word; and enjoying Los Angeles despite its reputation as a charmless concrete jungle. But most of all, the tour forced Shinazzi to grow up. “I had no-one holding my hand and I'd probably go close to saying it was life-changing. It just made me focus more on what I wanted to do with my life. I don't know if that's to do with distance, or solitude, or different societies, but just over the month it became clear that I wanted to, not just be more positive about things, but to appreciate people and things more.”

Just as his idol Bruce Springsteen had sung about Arkansas, Nebraska and New York streets numbers 57 and 82, Shinazzi had included many local references in his songs. He’s attracted to this style of storytelling almost unconsciously. An alternative title to his debut record could be Greetings from Sutherland Shire, NSW. But he was surprised to find how universal the songs proved in the states. “I'd be singing a song about Gosford or whatever and people in Washington were just loving it and I thought this is cool, this is easy.”

By the end of the songwriting sessions leading up to Then I Held My Breath, that sense of ease had well and truly returned. Personally and professionally, the tide was turning. Most of the songs for the album were in place – Shinazzi having become more equipped to judge his songs with time, better placed to judge when they were complete and how to assemble them into a coherent order. “The more I do it and the older I get,” he says, “the more I just kind of know.”

Perhaps this sense of rejuvenation is most vividly sensed in the closing 'Something Great Must Come From This', while 'My Very Own Mary-Ellen' and the aforementioned 'Bluebelle' provide the record's other emotional peaks. Recorded with good friend Wes Gregorace of The Devoted Few and mixed by Wayne Connolly (“hard-working but laidback in one sense ... Someone I'd always looked up to, just a really sweet guy”), the dozen songs fulfill Shinazzi's vision of putting together a cohesive song cycle. “That is very important to me. I wouldn't want to just write 12 songs, record 12 songs, and say that's my album. It has to say something, it has to mean something”

One song that particularly means something is 'Please Don't Let Me Forget', which documents an ordinary day made extraordinary; a celebration of friendship in the hours leading up to a show at the Annandale Hotel. The “band on the stage singing about regret” is The Mountain Goats, but the song is “not so much about the show, more just the afternoon and the night, the whole kind of experience ... the company I was in.”

In a fit of inspiration, he rang his then record company late at night and sang it into their voicemail. “I was driving home and I thought I better document this song … I have a really bad short-term memory. If I don't have a pen and paper, I could have the greatest song ever written and it'd be gone, and it won't be back.”

Sometimes seeming lost in his own world on stage, Shinazzi nonetheless talks in detail about crowd reactions, how similar they are across the country and across the world. He is a keen observer and his songs show a desire to cling to telling details (“Please don’t let me forget/ The dignified way you tilt your head”) and to keep moments, good, bad and in between, alive in song form.

Apart from personal memories, Shinazzi agrees his passion for TV shows (favourites include The OC, Ed, One Tree Hill and Dawson's Creek) informs his songwriting. “Though not in a musical way if that makes any sense,” he explains. These days, he says, it's more like “I'll write a song and think it could be good for a TV show.”

If I could choose a soundtrack for Shinazzi to write it would have to be his all-time favourite film, Beautiful Girls. It’s a low-key, talky affair, but beautifully realized, full of affecting riffs on friendship, about idolising girls, about hanging on to something precious about yourself. Perhaps the key scene takes place in a bar, the characters united in the warmth of a sing-along version of Neil Diamond’s ‘Sweet Caroline’.

Any low ebb that marked the genesis of the record must seem distant now. Recently, Shinazzi had the thrill of one of his own songs appearing on TV series The Unit and in September he played 'Divan' on stage with Tom Morgan's Smudge. “I had no idea it was going to happen … just an amazing moment in my life,” he says.

Good times never seemed so good.

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