Russell Morris & Band

ARIA Award-winner Russell Morris celebrates the release of his new album Black and Blue Heart produced by Nick DiDia and Bernard Fanning. After six decades on the road, an album can almost write itself. It might arrive in the space of a few months, fully formed in vision and texture in the mind of the vigilant creator. But it takes a rare combination of talent and circumstances to realise that vision as vividly as Black and Blue Heart.

“I’d met Bernard [Fanning] years ago,” Russell Morris remembers. The Powderfinger frontman came backstage at one of the Australian rock legend’s countless gigs to pay his respects with a mutual friend. “But It wasn’t until I moved up to Queensland last year that we sat down and started talking.”

The warmer environs had already exerted a strange, organic influence on the songs Russell was writing in the wake of the platinum-selling, ARIA-winning blues-rock trilogy—Shark Mouth, Van Diemen’s Land, Red Dirt Red Heart—that so spectacularly relaunched his career from 2012 onwards.

“I went back to the blues, where I started in the early ‘60s, and that allowed me to reset all the quantum things in my writing and in my body. It kickstarted my creativity. I think that’s how this album happened so fast and so confidently.

“The band, the studio…it all fell into place beautifully but the songs came from where I came from. I went back to the well and I drank from the fountainhead, and this is the result.”