Aussie rocker Pete Murray thirsts for a classic album

Pete Murray will tour New Zealand in August.

The boy from Brisbane is a long way from home. He's ringing from Russia, where his radio hit, Better Days, is going over quite well.

"It's been really quite bizarre," he says of his rapid rise to fame in Australia.

"Here we are playing in Moscow to Russians who don't understand anything I'm saying and it's really bizarre but that's music. Music can travel."

Murray's popularity appears to have come virtually overnight. Just a few years ago, he turned to his guitar when a knee injury ended his rugby career.

From playing at friends' barbecues and at clubs, he took his independent release to Melbourne and signed with Sony BMG in 2003.

His first label album, Feeler, went to the top of the Australian charts the following year and sold half a million copies.

Murray's second album, See the Sun, is also doing extremely well, with singles Better Days and Opportunity on high rotate at many radio stations.

Murray is sometimes described as an Aussie Jack Johnson, a comparison he doesn't mind but thinks his music has a rockier edge.

His music is melodic and polished but it's the raw sound of folk-rockers like Neil Young and Bob Dylan that he craves, both musically and lyrically.

He loves their style, "what the lyrics are, how they sing it, how they perform it, the instrumentation that they have. The sounds of those albums sound fantastic, I just love them."

"Nowadays when everyone's in the studio, everything's so perfect. You've got a good track for this and if you're out of tune, we'll put the autotuner on you and it's so boring.

"If you listen to any Bob Dylan album, you hear him playing harmonica and it comes in and out of key, and his voice is not that fantastic but the way he just uses it, that's the beauty of it."

In a curiously old-fashioned way, it's clear that Pete Murray isn't out for a short-lived pop career. He's very focused on the quality of his lyrics and his aim is to create a classic album along the lines of his heroes.

"They capture the imagination and the heart of what they sing about and that for me, that music will live on forever and that's the kind of music I try to write."

The comparison with Jack Johnson and Ben Harper is no coincidence -- Murray co-produced See the Sun with Eric Sarifin, who has engineered Ben Harper, to capture similar rootsy sounds.

Sounds that Murray says are hard to find today.

"So many pop songs sound the same. I find it difficult to tell the difference between Avril Lavigne or Kelly Clarkson or whoever they are. All the record companies go, 'That works, we need to find one of them'."

But if he admires any of his contemporaries, it's his mate Bernard Fanning, formerly of band Powderfinger, who is also enjoying solo success.

"I think he's a brilliant songwriter. I loved his stuff with Powderfinger and I think he's one of the most talented songwriters in the country."

Murray tries to take his family with him on longer trips, such as the one he's currently embarking on through England and Europe (he's big in Holland, much to his bemusement).

After such an early impact in his homeland, he says he's giving the Australian market a break for a while, to try other countries, including the US and New Zealand.

"I'm working hard to make it a long term career and I think you have to work at it to make that happen, it just doesn't come to you."

Pete Murray and his band the Stonemasons will tour New Zealand from August 2-5.

- NZPA