CAMERON AVERY

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Growing up between Perth and Broome, Australia, multi-instrumentalist and Tame Impala touring bassist Cameron Avery always had an interest in music, but he never saw it as a viable, do-it-alone career.

“I had a million shitty jobs,” relates the 28-year-old artist over the phone from Perth. “Being a forklifter, I worked in beer gardens, serving coffee, dishwasher. You do every job you can because you get fired from every job when you leave for tour.”

He started playing music as a kid. “My mom used to play music for me in the house,” Avery says. “My mom’s a really good singer. She used to sing and she used to do commercials to pay the rent.”

First came piano—“I learned how to play piano when I was little, then I gave up after about six months,” says Avery— then guitar at fifteen. He went back to piano, took up drums, and continued from there, adding bass and harmonica to the mix. “I’m not great at any instrument,” he says. “I’m adequate at enough instruments that I get on with them.”

It was when Avery met Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker that things started to shift. “I started playing music a lot more,” he explains. Fuzzy, psychedelic, Sixties-influenced stoner rock—Tame Impala has left an impression over the past few years. The band’s brand of electronic psych rock is modern and very much  its own. It took five years of touring and working random jobs in between touring cycles for Avery to get to the point where side gigs were no longer necessary.

And while there were solo ventures on the side—Avery’s garage rock project The Growl was “more grungy and angsty,” he says—it wasn’t until recently that the artist started playing as just himself. “It becomes different when you put your own name on it,” he says. “Changing it to put it under my own name—it made it personal.”

Now, Avery is preparing to release his solo début Ripe Dreams, Pipe Dreams on March 10. “I recorded it in between touring with Tame Impala in any studio I could really get into,” he explains.

Ripe Dreams, Pipe Dreams is a big band–influenced, sweeping rock album looking to the music Avery listened to growing up. He wrote the music and lyrics himself, and they represent a sound that is personal and unique from the projects he’s participated in with other artists. It is quite different from the one Avery helps create as a part of Tame Impala, in particular. In place of Pink Floyd and Magical Mystery Tour-era Beatles, Frank Sinatra, Etta James, Sarah Vaughan, Dean Martin, and Elvis Presley are influences. String arrangements give Ripe Dreams, Pipe Dreamscinematic touches: “I’ll watch old French cinema, but I’ll also watch Iron Man II. I love cheesy cinema,” he says. “I draw a lot from film, and that sort of comes out in the record.”

The lyrics are bare, autobiographical, and straightforward. He sings of the beginnings of relationships (“C’est Toi”), about choosing “sure things and bored things” over the one whose argument was “long but not strong enough” (“Wasted on Fidelity”), and reacts to “some relationships” in direct, non-metaphorical terms.

“My music is very much trying to make it as honest and real as it can be,” says the artist. “It was very, very self-indulgent. I just wanted to make something that I wanted to listen to. That’s the kind of music I really listen to. I don’t listen to a whole bunch of contemporary albums and I haven’t in so long, apart from my friends’ albums and like, Leonard Cohen. But as far as contemporary albums go, there is nothing that has really inspired me. You just try to make it as honest and as real as it can be. I wasn’t trying to please any pocket. You can’t have aspirations of dominating. You can’t look outwards. It’s an inwards-looking album.”

He’s preparing to release the offering, and he’s getting ready to tour with his best friends from home. “I’ve got my friends from Perth with me,” says Avery. “We don’t really have time to do much. There’s lots of laughing. I generally just laugh my ass off and drink beer. We’re not a very mature bunch. But there’s not much more you can do. You get there, you load in, you play the show, and you go to sleep. It’s very monotonous. All you can do is laugh, play your set, and drink beer. You do that a hundred times.”

He says he still gets nervous before shows— “every time.”

As for the album, “like I said, there was no plan for world domination,” comments Avery, who is based in New York when he’s not on tour or visiting friends and family at home in Australia. “I wasn’t really thinking about anyone else when I was making it. It was just about my life experience and sonically just totally self-indulgent about how I wanted to make it sound. I’m in complete anticipation for it not going down so well with a larger populace. It’s like a very expensive journal entry basically.”

Ripe Dreams, Pipe Dreams is out March 10.