The last song ever written by Powderfinger, ‘Daybreak’ is a soulful summer track with all the hallmarks of Powderfinger at their prime. It would’ve surely seen the light of day as a single had it not been for its timing.
‘Daybreak’ arrives on the 10th anniversary of the band’s final concert, and a fortnight before the release of their highly anticipated new album, ‘Unreleased’, on November 27.
“The mix of ‘Day By Day’ and ‘Daybreak’ – they’re two of the best sounding songs we’ve recorded,” Bernard explains. “It sounds like a studio record… Coincidentally, it kind of wraps everything up really well. It’s the last thing we did and it has elements of most of the things that we did.”
“I don’t know if we were tired at that point but I would say we were a little bit at the end of our rope, for me anyway. [But I’m] super glad we can actually do something with this song now”, said Darren.
For a short stint in March 2019, the band found themselves together again at LaCueva, the picturesque studio co-owned by singer Bernard Fanning and longtime collaborator Nick DiDia. The band had gathered to compile outtakes for the 20-year anniversary reissue of their game-changing album, Odyssey Number Five. That’s how the happy accident of Unreleased came to be. An album of recently unearthed material, it spans a 12-year period from Internationalist (1998) right up until the band’s swansong Golden Rule in 2009.
Nick DiDia’s role in plucking these songs from the fire cannot be underestimated. The American-born producer – who collaborated with the band on Internationalist, Odyssey Number Five, Vulture Street and Golden Rule – adopted Unreleased as his pet project, tinkering with it in the studio until it met the band’s high bar. The band’s WhatsApp was as active as its ever been in this period, but aside from a small change, the collection remained pretty much as Nick had sequenced it.
“There was actually a spirit of cooperation among the five of us that hadn’t really been there since Odyssey Number Five,” explains Bernard. “It was pretty smooth sailing and no one had to fight red, tooth and claw for their idea.”
Powderfinger’s highly anticipated new album ‘Unreleased’, their first in a decade, arrives on November 27, and features previous single ‘Day By Day’. Many of these tracks were initially filed away for a proper release, but for whatever reason they never ended up seeing the light of day.
“Some of the songs were always earmarked for a release at some stage, and they were purposely not used as b-sides as we thought they were too good. I feel like this is how we ended up looking through our old material, where we discovered other unreleased gems”, said Bernard.
