Few musicians have more than one aspect to their art, and of those that do, not all are willing to risk exchanging the familiar for the unknown. But on his debut solo album Paul Dempsey blazes a remarkable new trail that illuminates his standing as one of Australia's leading songwriters from a whole new perspective.

Expectations should be abandoned – they're superfluous.

On Everything Is True, the immense guitars and conclusive backbeat that Dempsey has orchestrated over Something For Kate's five acclaimed albums are put aside, succeeded by a striking new palette where a tender voice and expressive acoustic guitar are supplemented by airy rhythms, the expert punctuation of an electric guitar and gently immersive keyboards. This is music where light filters through the gaps, uplifting and eminently melodic.

With a record this good the question isn't why make a solo album, but rather why hold out on us for so long? “It was always going to happen at some point. Timing-wise it just seemed right to do it now, the band made some exciting changes last year with new management and a new label. It felt like a good time to draw a line in the sand,” explains Dempsey. “I've always enjoyed doing solo acoustic sets in and amongst the band shows so I was excited to go and explore that side of things more in the studio".

Dempsey was encouraged to make Everything Is True by his bandmates, bassist Stephanie Ashworth and drummer Clint Hyndman (with whom he'll begin composing the next Something For Kate album in due course), but as soon as he began working on the material at the start of 2008 it distinguished itself sonically from the band's formidable, multi-platinum canon.

“These songs felt very different straight away. All of these songs begin and end with me as opposed to the three-person collaboration of Something for Kate. There's no-one else getting in there and changing them - for better or worse,” Dempsey says. “There's something mysterious about them. I'm a little afraid of them because I am solely responsible for them. But I'm also as proud of these songs as anything I've ever done. They feel extremely close.”

Determined to forge an intimate new process, Dempsey had no interest in using his reputation and prior success to secure an extended stint at an exotic studio overseas surrounded by session hands. The multi-instrumentalist had no need for a surrogate band or an expensive production sheen. “I wanted a slightly thrown-together, shambolic feel,” he emphasises. “I didn't want a polished studio record.”

Instead Everything Is True was essentially recorded by just two people in a makeshift home studio: Dempsey and co-producer, engineer and “Devil's advocate” Wayne Connolly (Youth Group, Josh Pyke, You Am I) took over a pair of small bungalows at MacMaster's Beach, an hour north of Sydney on NSW's Central Coast, for a month at the start of 2009. Connolly, his partner and their young son lived in one bungalow, while the other bungalow had a living room full of recording equipment and a second room to make the noise in. At night Dempsey slept amidst the clutter of instruments that nourished each day's work.

With a beach in front of them and a forest behind them, Dempsey and Connolly worked in an environment where sunlight and birdsongs defined the days outside. That sense of space, fluid and dexterous, matched Dempsey's intentions for the album. As the very first line of “Bats”, the opening cut, suggests : “Come rebuild your memory.” What you know is not what you'll experience.

“I wanted to maintain the feeling of one guy with an acoustic guitar. Everything else is there as accompaniment, as opposed to a band record where it's this unified front,” Dempsey notes. “At the front and centre of every song here you can hear the voice and acoustic guitar – everything else is placed around it. That basic idea was kept in mind through the whole process of recording and mixing".

The results are readily apparent. From the sparkling, propulsive “Bird in a Basement” and the rousing acoustic workout “Fast Friends” to the soaring alt-country ballad “Have You Fallen Out of Love” and the sparse, evocative conclusion “Man of the Moment”, Everything Is True reveals a hitherto unknown canvas. Equally distinctive is the songwriter's voice, with Dempsey singing in a higher register, often reaching a falsetto.

“Over the years I've gotten a bit more relaxed with my voice and what I can do with it. I still hate the sound of my voice, but I'm less afraid of using it in different ways,” admits Dempsey, his wry sense of humour complementing his personal honesty. “It conveys a vulnerability. I love singing and I love how it feels to sing and to convey a lyric.”

Another key change, discovered on the earliest demos and peppered with allusive intent throughout the disc, is the double-tracking of vocals. Dempsey was taken with what it did to his recorded output – “It's those slight differences between the two performances that matter,” he observes. The tiny, almost imperceptible, variations between the vocals are like cracks that allow you to look inside the song; they're an invitation.

For Dempsey, who is passionate about favourite filmmakers such as Stanley Kubrick and Lars von Trier, the move from analogue tape to ProTools allowed a greater precision in building and then shaping the finished tracks. “It's similar to filmmaking in that you can over-shoot and then edit, with the editing process being where the film is really made and the big decisions taken about how it will fit together and flow,” he explains.

This meant the editing process occurred in Los Angeles, where Doug Boehm (Elliott Smith, French Kicks) mixed Everything Is True. “The first thing I said to him was to be absolutely brutal. If we don't think it absolutely needs to be there then cut it out,” recalls Dempsey, and Boehm did just that. But the two also added elements, with Dempsey writing and recording last minute lyrics to turn an instrumental bed into “Bird in a Basement”.

“You can struggle with songs for months, but when someone says you have two hours left something clicks and you do it and it's right,” admits Dempsey, who rates the finished piece his favourite on the album . “I improvised the vocal once and Doug said go again, so I did it a different way... I sang it five times, each differently than the previous take. I asked Doug what he thought and he said, ‘We should keep all of them – it's a five part harmony'.”

The lyrics on Everything Is True are also unburdened by prior standards. In such a comparatively quiet setting Dempsey's words have a bracing directness to them. The protagonists in these songs are strong-willed, often set on getting their due. In “Take Us to Your Leader” the central couple is full of demands, both from each other and the outside world.

“It's my version of Twisted Sister's “We're Not Gonna Take It”,” jokes Dempsey, whose too often obscured sense of humour can be found in the grooves of songs like the ruminative “Theme From Nice Guy”, where a man's willing descent from decency to selfishness is deftly sketched.

“I wrote a song about a self-aware arsehole. I thought that was funny,” says Dempsey. “There's a lot of humour in a lot of these songs... I'm not half as serious as I'm made sometimes out to be. I certainly don't expect to be taken so seriously”.

The fractured narratives and concerns with time's uneasy passing common to Something For Kate lyrics are notable by their absence here. As film influenced the recording process, the words take their cue from storytelling. On the bar-room jam “Safety in Numbness” Dempsey captures the spirit of Hal Incandenza, a character from one of his favourite novels, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (the lyric was composed several months prior to the gifted author's passing in September 2008).

The title Everything Is True is itself indicative of how Dempsey's work operates on multiple levels: if everything is true then there is no longer a benchmark for truth and therefore nothing is true. In such a situation everything, and everyone, must be evaluated on their own merits. For Paul Dempsey, who was pleased that people didn't immediately connect him to the album's first single, the wistfully beautiful “Out The Airlock”, that's a welcome outcome.

“I'd like people to listen to it with the freshest ears they can bring,” he asks. It's a minor request when the album is this good. After all, true greatness should manifest itself in unexpected, but wholly rewarding, ways.

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