After we chose our 13 or so songs and recorded them, the next challenge was to put them into some kind of sequence on the album. As well as providing a listening experience, we wanted the album to serve as a kind of narrative of Lawson’s life and insight into his thinking. My first thought was to order the songs on the CD in the same order that they fell off Henry’s pen. But that didn’t really didn’t provide a listening experience and really didn’t tell the story that we wanted to tell. So the way that we’ve put the songs is by aligning them to the various phases, the important stages in Henry Lawson’s life.

Lawson went to the bush and in his most creative and productive period he drew a lot from his bush experience. That’s reflected in songs like Knocking Around, To An Old Mate and The Glass on the Bar. It was after his move to Sydney in 1883 that he was well into his into his socio-political phase, a phase best reflected in songs like Second Class Wait Here and Faces in the Street.

After that Lawson got married and took his young family off to London to try to establish himself in London’s literary circles. It’s a matter of history that he was not successful there and neither he nor his wife, Bertha, were happy in London. In the cold and the dank and the dark of London, unhappy and financially stressed, Lawson romanticised Australia in poems like The Bush Girl and Taking His Chance.

Back home from London, the next period of his life in Sydney was distinctly less than successful and happy. His marriage, which was under stress in London, broke up. He fell deeper and deeper into alcoholism and during this period he was thrown in jail on some occasions for failure to pay child support and alimony. He also spent periods of time in and out of the Darlinghurst Mental Hospital.

In desperate straits Lawson was taken under the wing of Mrs Byers, his housekeeper, who admired him greatly and looked after him and nurtured him. After some years they move together down to Leeton, a couple of year after World War I broke out. Lawson was in a very deeply patriotic phase with specific regard to World War I at the time and Scots of the Riverina reflects his deep patriotism as well as the sort of empathy that marked his best stuff.

From the time he returned from London, lived in Sydney, went to Leeton and then came back to Sydney where he live the life of a vagabond on the streets of Sydney, Lawson reflected constantly on his lost love, Hannah Thornburn. He also reflected on his failures and his reputation as a morose, sometimes bitter, embarrassing drunk around Sydney. We’ve tried to reflect this in A Prouder Man Than You.

Towards the end of his life, I think, Lawson realised that the light was “going dim” and he wrote the poem The Low Lighthouse, a declaration that he understood he was getting close to “check out time”. We’ve followed The Low Lighthouse with The Shame of Going Back. While Shame was really written much earlier in his life, it can be seen, in the context of Lawson’s life, as a pretty accurate depiction of how life unfolded for him. To Jim, the last song on the album, comprises his last words to his son and, interestingly, carries with it the sense he had that he would be more successful and respected after his death. Turned out to be true.

We hope, that in ordering the tracks as we’ve done, that we’ve created a listening experience as well as a story and a kind of insight into the life and times of the artist and the man who was Henry Lawson.