“When we go back on Country where we’re from, we ask questions of the country,” Troy Cassar-Daley tells Apple Music. “And we’re probably trying to engage the old spirits to get advice. A bit of strength comes back when you listen to what the country is telling you. Every time I drove away from there, I was a step away from grief.” The Gumbaynggirr/Bundjalung artist’s 12th studio album is the most emotionally raw of his storied career to date. Written in the wake of his parents’ passing, it’s the sound of a man in mourning, adjusting to life without his mother and father, and the slow journey towards acceptance and moving on. After his mother died, Cassar-Daley returned to her property at Halfway Creek, near the New South Wales town of Grafton. The intention was, simply, to heal. Though he initially planned to record Between the Fires in Nashville, so connected did he feel to his location that he opted to record the album in her house, surrounded by the old photos that inspired “Let’s Ride” and the stereo he sings of in “Moving On”. Phone recordings of birds (“Dreams”) and rain on the corrugated roof (“Ready for the Rain”) brought the property itself onto the album. Aptly so: it’s an album intensely inspired by the lives that had been lived there. There was an additional fire to which he needed to tend, which too shaped the album—that of his troubled marriage, which the singer says “took a bit of a hiding because I did push people away while I was mourning”. “Congratulations” is a devastatingly raw assessment of the breakdown of his relationship, while “Thankful” pays tribute to his wife and their ability to find a way through. Read on as Cassar-Daley talks through each track on Between the Fires. “Between the Fires” “The drum feel at the front feels like a call to battle, and it was the battle with grief. I was going to fight it head on. When I hear those drums start, I can hear my mum’s loungeroom. I thought, if someone was going to be a listener, and you were knocking at our front door at Halfway Creek, this was the introduction song that should bring you into the house. Then you’re welcome to come in and go on the journey of this record.” “Every Other Day” “‘Every Other Day’ really is about allowing yourself to have a shitty day. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Every day on some people’s Instagram looks to be perfect. But if you zone in, there’s imperfections—we have to allow ourselves to have imperfections.” “Let’s Ride” “It’s a move forward. It was a brightness that I found going through old photos at Mum’s house. I saw this photo of me on top of this car. I use the car as a metaphor for moving forward. I just felt like I needed some light, I needed an escape. [Guest vocalist] Kasey Chambers is the perfect foil for me when it comes to a car song. She always interprets things perfectly. It gave me a real lift of spirit to write this.” “We Still Have a Chance” “Instead of picking up our differences and making them divide us, we should be celebrating how much variation we have in our society. I think I wrote it on the run into The Voice [the 2023 referendum proposing the formulation of a federal advisory board comprised of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to guide the Australian government on First Nations issues]. Then I realised that we are much bigger than the piece of paper that The Voice was talking about, which is our Constitution. My grandparents raised me to be strong and to get on with anyone. This song really is like, I’m not giving up on bringing people together through our differences.” “Some Days” “I saw the empty chair where my mother would normally sit, and I thought, I’ve got to celebrate her memory. But there was also this pang of sadness that went, wow, that’s the end of that. And that’s one more adjustment. The whole adjustment theme makes its way right through the record. Some days are going to be good, some days aren’t going to be so great.” “Old Road Home” “I drove so many miles between Brisbane and Grafton over many, many years. When I was very young, without any ties, it was always a great sense of freedom, a sense of going to some place that I felt safe. This song is really my safe place. I think it’s got a broader relatability to a lot of people who’ve got that stretch of road where you’re going back to the country that nurtured you as a young person. You see that last city limit sign, and you go, nothing in the world makes me feel like this. We are all connected to Country and that’s the connection song for me.” “Windradyne” “I discovered this man on a tattoo on my cousin’s back. And he said, ‘Mum wrote a book about this man, he was a great warrior from the Bathurst region.’ I had a day off in Adelaide, and I had my Auntie Mary’s book, and I looked at the photo of him and I said, ‘Windradyne, you’re going to have to help me. I need some help to tell your story.’ And that book opened at certain pages, with recounts of his behaviour, how strong he was to bring three tribes together to fight the settlers, but also to talk between his people and the settlers as well. He was a really interesting character. I hope I scratched the surface of his story with this song.” “Good and Bad” “This song’s just a mirror. That’s why the last verse says, ‘Take a look in the mirror at the people we turned out to be/Is it all you ever wanted or a bitter disappointment you see?’ It was a deep dive this tune, because it sort of covers off the simplicity of a young person’s life and the complications that arise when you get older. We make our lives complicated. Sometimes we should look back at that simple time in our life and bring some of those elements with us.” “Ready for the Rain” “I arrived [at my mother’s property] the week before we made the record. The afternoon I arrived, we had this huge thunderstorm. I had my phone, got it out on the veranda, and taped the sound of the rain on the tin roof and the thunder. It was just an amazing feeling. I felt alive. It’s a real celebration of how beautiful that stuff is that falls from the sky.” “Dreams” “I’m laying in my boyhood bed with the window cracked. I hear this bird that I’ve never heard at our property ever. It was the saddest, most mournful thing I’ve ever heard. I thought it was probably the old people saying, ‘I think you’ve spent enough time, you should be going home to your own family and stop dwelling.’ That's exactly what the bird felt like it was saying. As I was packing the car one of the times I’d been down, the biggest flock of black cockatoos flew over. It was like a goodbye. A goodbye from the bush. That was why I [recorded it and] put it onto the end of the song. To have the hello and goodbye from the birds really bookends that song perfectly.” “This World Alone” “That song started as a conversation [with co-writer Don Walker of Cold Chisel] about immortality, feeling mortal after knowing that people come and go in your life, but what do you arrive with? You scream into the light, you look into the light as you’re going. It’s a beautiful journey.” “Thankful” “The bookends of my relationship are ‘Thankful’ and ‘Congratulations’. [My wife and I] had been living separate lives for about six months. It was getting harder and harder to deal with. We finally got to that stage where we just started to work stuff out. ‘Thankful’ fell out of the sky from the moment we reconnected properly and went, ‘We’ve got something worth saving here.’ We could agree on that. We didn’t agree on much else at the time.” “Till I Get Over You” “A cousin told me about being in prison, and his missus was having an affair with his best friend. They both separately came to visit him as well. I could hear the anger in him, but he said it just became a part of life. He said, ‘When I got out, I realised that I was not meant to be with those people in my life anyway.’ But he did say he felt like running his car through his [friend’s] house and burning it to the ground. They were his initial thoughts. But he said he didn’t like jail and didn’t want to end up back in there. He’s now so well adjusted and has stayed out of trouble.” “Congratulations” “‘Congratulations’ was a hard one to put on this record. It’s awfully sad about what people can do to each other. That actual line, ‘Congratulations, you finally pushed me away’, I think I’d written that maybe five years ago. So it’d been simmering for a long time and I never finished it. At the end it twists around and says, ‘I finally pushed you away too.’ So it wasn’t just a ‘it’s your fault’ song.” “Moving On” “I had the car packed; the black cockatoos had already sung their song saying goodbye. I dragged the guitar back out of the car, sat on the veranda with a pen and wrote this song. Probably the quickest thing I’ve ever written. It was decided we would record it live in the kitchen, with the band in the loungeroom. It’s full of imperfections, but what in life isn’t? I closed the door on the grief that afternoon. It was probably the first time I’d left the house and not teared up.”