“I had no idea what I was doing, but I knew I wanted to make a great album,” Chet Faker tells Apple Music of his 2014 debut full-length, Built on Glass. “I was obsessive and fixated; I had this intense approach to the record that if I just sink as deep as possible into the shadows of myself, something good will come out of it. It was a very young, naive, sacrificial process.” In hindsight, the Melbourne-born artist—real name Nick Murphy—admits his “complete immersion” in the album’s creation came almost to his detriment: “I haven’t really written a record in that way since, and I don’t think I would either,” he offers. Part of that process involved scrapping an entire album because it didn’t hold together as a complete piece of work—“So, then it became about making a cohesive experience from start to finish, and that was where the immersion came in”—coupled with a devotion to exorcising his innermost thoughts and emotions. The latter was informed partially by his split with “a really big love” partway through the album’s creation. “So, then a lot of these songs that had been love songs had this extra layer, and this bittersweetness entered the record,” he says. Murphy’s immersive approach paid dividends, his rich, soulful vocals enveloping a collection of R&B and soul-influenced electro that, in addition to incorporating dashes of ’90s Chicago house (“1998”), demonstrated his talent for layering myriad sonic textures to create a rich tapestry of sound (“Lesson in Patience,” “No Advice [Airport Version]”). Here, the singer, songwriter, and producer looks back on Built on Glass, track by track. “Release Your Problems” “It’s a declaration of intent—looking and finding my problems and using that friction or tension as fuel for the record. I was just lyricizing trains of thought of problems—worrying about a connection with someone, walking home drunk. It was just this medley of the not good places in your head. The opening line, ‘Oh, you’re taking all I own/You’re feeding something,’ is exactly what I did with the record—taking all I own, everything I have, and feeding it into something.” “Talk Is Cheap” “This is my favorite song I’ve ever written. Most people think of it as a love song, and it is, but it’s also a breakup song to me. You can find it in the song if you look for it, but it’s not evident. The chorus is written to someone, but the verse is written internally for me, which I think a lot of people don’t know. And there’s a pretty common lyric misunderstanding, which I’ve never gone out of my way to correct, because I quite like what people think it is. The line that everyone thinks is ‘Oh soul, you’re weak rhyme’ is ‘Oh soul, you’re weak or I am.’ It’s being at odds with your internal self, and something’s gotta give.” “No Advice (Airport Version)” “I remember sitting on my housemate’s couch in Abbotsford, watching TV, and then the melody to this came. It was almost this spiritual. You could sing it without music. I got in my car and drove to the studio in North Melbourne in the meat market. The ‘Airport Version’ is a reference to Brian Eno, Music for Airports—it became this ambient version of itself, so that’s where the ‘Airport Version’ name came from. I wanted it to be short. I wanted it to be almost the sweetest song that’s gone too soon. It was a palate cleanser.” “Melt” (feat. Kilo Kish) “This song really was about this pocket and this swing. It starts with that bassline. You have no idea where the timing is, and then it comes in and the beat is super swung. That West Coast kind of Questlove/Dilla [sound] was a big influence—this crazy, cyclical swing. Lyrically, it's about having poor taste in partners. It’s definitely digging into not making the right decisions romantically.” “Gold” “A love song, pure and simple. That moment when you fall in love, before it gets stupid, or silly, and before it settles down and it’s rich and mature—just that moment where you’re like, you can have no sleep, and you just feel good all the time. I remember waking up with the bassline in my head. I have a voice memo on my phone—my girlfriend was asleep, it was 4 am or something, and I’m [singing it]. It’s so quiet, you almost can’t tell the notes. It was really inspired by ‘Rock On’ by David Essex. But it quickly morphed into its own thing.” “To Me” “‘To Me’ is about being in my bedroom in my share house with nothing and trying to navigate negative thought paths. It’s self-referential in the title—to me. I don’t think I’ve ever really spoken about this. The song really seems like [it’s about] someone who hasn’t done you well, but I was really singing to myself and just being like, you keep on lying to me, telling me I’m not good enough, or I can’t do it—it’s just really at odds with my inner thoughts and inner voice.” “/” “This was sampled from this ‘how to quit cigarettes by self-hypnosis’ record from the ’60s. Originally, I wanted to trickle it all throughout the record, but it was a little bit kitschy, and I felt like it took away from some of the authenticity. But it had this bit where it said, ‘This is the other side of the record, now relax still more,’ and I really liked that. Ironically, I was smoking cigarettes through this whole record, just chain smoking. Things get a lot darker [from this point] and faster as well. So, there’s this clear separation.” “Blush” “A lot of these songs had verse, chorus, verse, double chorus, and I wanted to do something that was really free-form. ‘Blush’ is almost the opposite of ‘To Me.’ If ‘To Me’ is acknowledging the inner voice and fighting back, ‘Blush’ is the voice. It’s so dark. I wouldn’t like to write from that place anymore. It’s quite macabre.” “1998” “This person who was close to me had lied about something and taken credit for something I had done, and it was really strange. Also, the kind of fame and fever that was happening in my life at that time, there was just this weird experience I was having of becoming an object to people. So, it was a little bit about one person doing this thing, but also about [how] at family functions I’ve got uncles and cousins lining up to take photos, and this weird feeling of, I’m with my family. I remember skipping certain family events ’cause it was getting weird.” “Cigarettes & Loneliness” “The whole thing was done in one night. It’s a post-breakup song. Trying to make love work, and I didn’t know how. And I wanted to know how. I didn’t fall out of love; I just couldn’t get it to work. I went in the studio in the evening, and I was there until the sun came up. I remember driving home in the morning peak-hour traffic, my eyes hanging out of my head. Probably shouldn’t have been driving—I’d been up for 24 hours.” “Lesson in Patience” “It was like a forest-for-the-trees moment. I was so deep in the record that I was just like, I don’t know what’s going on. It was almost an exercise for myself, hence ‘Lesson in Patience.’ It should have been ‘Lessons in Trusting the Process.’ I was on such a quest for perfection, so I wanted to see what happens if I open the doors without an intention. I’m going to give one track on the record a chance to be free of my goals, my manic vision, and just be a little snapshot of where I’m at right now sonically.” “Dead Body” “It fades out over a minute and a half, and it was like, this has to go at the end. What I loved most about it, which is really heady, but it finishes, and if you have the album on repeat, it perfectly comes back out of that silence into ‘Release Your Problems.’ There was this cyclical thing going on. It kind of talks about the whole record a little bit, all the thoughts that have been considered. But again, it’s sort of negative. It’s in that vein of ‘Blush.’” “Killswitch” “It was a SoundCloud release—the old SoundCloud, before it was considered official streaming. And then, not long after, it came out on the Japanese edition [of the album]. It must have come out in between finishing the record and the record coming out, and that’s why it went up to SoundCloud. I don’t think it really fits the record. It has a different energy to it that I think makes sense on the Expanded Edition and now with time.” “VHS New (1998 Demo)” “It’s the ‘1998’ demo. It’s pretty similar—the bassline is just a different synth sound. There are some parts missing. I thought it would be cool to keep the original title, I guess ’cause it sounds like a cassette, that noise—really lo-fi.” “1998 (Nick Murphy Remix)” “That was my remix, ’cause I love dance music—it’s a big part of my history, my influence, my DNA, which you can’t really tell, listening to my music. So, any opportunity to dip my finger into it, I will.” “Gold (Flume Re-work)” “It’s really a remix, but they just called it a ‘re-work.’ Harley [Streten, aka Flume] has got such a great sound, and it’s caked into that remix. I thought it was nice to put my remix and Harley’s remix next to each other on the Expanded Edition, as a sort of connecting dot to these two worlds that were big around this record—working on music with Harley in that whole EDM world, and then the underground disco and house scene that was really what I came up in in Melbourne.”