Since the early 1990s he’s played what he describes as ‘disturbed folk’, a melange of influences and tunings which combine to create his deeply identifiable style.

Jeff Lang is launching his 13th studio album Alone In Bad Company in Ballarat on Saturday March 25. He spoke to The Courier about his music.

Can we have a little bit of a chat about a few things in your extensive career. I'm interested in why you went down this path – and I'm loathe to call what you play blues, because it’s not really, it’s different – with music. What inspired you, got you, into the style that you play now?

It's been a sort of a continuing evolution. I mean the earliest things that grabbed me were hearing people like Bob Dylan and Ry Cooder. These were on recordings that my parents played on car trips or around the house. I heard a lot of that stuff growing up.

At a certain point I think, when you're a kid, you don't really particularly pay that much attention to who it was. You heard music and you liked certain things and then there are other things you might not like. I didn't really pay that much attention.

But once I got to around 10 or 11 or so, I started actually remembering, 'ah that's this person; that's that person'. A short while after that I got that bitten by rock'n'roll bug. It's not like there's not rock'n'roll in Bob Dylan or anything, but it was more contemporary stuff.

I saw clips by AC/DC and Cold Chisel and Led Zeppelin on the TV and got excited by those, and it was kind of separate to music my parents liked. 

That sort of independent breakthrough in Australian music in the 1980s. Did that have much effect on you?

I think so. I think there was a certain way of writing lyrically that had an influence. There were quite a few writers - Paul Kelly, Don Walker, Mick Thomas with Weddings Parties Anything; and in the bluesier side of it, Matt Taylor with Chain. They were writing songs that were unembarrassed about any Australianness. They had an unselfconscious Australian storytelling aspect to them.

Whereas with Matt Taylor, it would have been a conscious choice to go, "Well you know, I'm not from the Mississippi South and I'm playing blues music, so I might as well try and be honest about who I am." And I guess it was a similar thing for people like Paul Kelly and Don Walker. 

You grow up listening to American stuff and there's almost a casual arrogance about it. You can call a song Memphis, Tennessee and everyone will go, "Yeah man!" 

Whereas here we're a little bit more reticent to claim that type of stuff. Those guys were integrating that in what to me felt and still feels like a pretty natural way. If the story is based somewhere and those place names have a good rhythm and metre to them, then you just use them. You don't question it.

If you bought a Cold Chisel album based on hearing a couple of hits on the telly, and then you hear names like 'Nambucca' in the lyrics, ‘Woolloomooloo’ and ‘King's Cross’ and stuff like that, it just becomes like part of the natural landscape of how you might write a song.

It's distinct for you because - not in an idiosyncratic way but certainly noticeably - you don't shy away from using the Australian vernacular.

The native slang? That's the thing. I think those sort of people laid some groundwork for a lot of us with that, because you grew up hearing it, it was it was a natural thing. If you grow up and that stuff is just around you, then you don't really question it. It's one of those things that feels available to you.

Can we talk a little bit about your style of playing? You’re self-taught. How would you describe your approach to the guitar? 

In a lot of ways it's pragmatic. I use open tunings a lot. I started out on a guitar that was in an open tuning. It was really because it was a discarded guitar from my older sister and two of the tuning pegs were broken. And those two strings sounded relatively harmonious against each other, so I just twisted the others around until they sounded OK next to those two. 

It ended being just stumbling around and finding something that seemed to sound OK, so it was an open tuning. And I sort of played around like that, by ear, for a year or so. I was pretty aware that it wasn't the legitimate....legitimate isn't the right word, but the the standard guitar tuning, the flamenco tuning, that most people are used to. 

I was listening to slide guitar players early on as well and and reading stuff. Once I got into the idea of playing guitar then I was absorbing information and influence from wherever I could get it. There were magazines; you could read an interview with Ry Cooder talking about being in an open tuning. I'd think, 'Wow, this isn't completely stupid, this is something that people do!'

But I was also aware that there was a lot of stuff that was in the regular guitar tuning, and about a year after someone showed me what that was, and I ran with that, alongside playing an open tuning. 

What I end up using, it's often driven by starting with a certain tuning and then twisting a couple of notes on the guitar to make certain chords and and chord melody ideas easier to play. That's the kind of pragmatism of it.

I’m thinking, 'while I'm singing this melody line. I wouldn't mind the guitar answering, it but I want to have those chords moving underneath it, so to make that not so much of a stretch I'll tune that string down and then I can grab those things while I'm going past...' 

And then I’ll start improvising around it. It's good to be able to branch out and explore on the instrument. I tend to think melodically, not so much in terms of a pattern, like a physical pattern that you play. So a lot of different tunings make sense to me in that way, because you're thinking about the relationship, the intervals between the notes based on how they sound, not just purely on muscle memory on the neck of the guitar. 

The new album… I’m trying to think of the word to describe it... 

What the hell do I think I'm doing?

It’s a bit of a shift from your earlier work? It’s a bit ‘darker’, I suppose.

It doesn't feel to me like it's a dramatic shift from other stuff that I've done, to be honest. I'm just into telling stories in the songs, getting some kind of movie going, so I can sketch out the movie of the character's point of view in a song, and hopefully take you in there with the way it's presented, the mood of the song. That's what I've always been into – the sort of stuff that I like in songwriting. 

Can we talk a bit about the guitars you use? Some of them are made in Ballarat, the David Churchill guitars.

Absolutely. I’ve been using his guitars as my primary instrument, especially for touring but also for recording for... well, the first guitar he made for me was back in 1992 or 1993. You wouldn't have seen a Jeff Lang gig in that time where I wouldn't have had at least one, if not a few, of his guitars up there.

What is it that appeals about them? Is it the timbre?

It's a tonal richness. It's very subjective but they feel to me like there are songs waiting in them. You feel inspired. You can just sit there with a guitar on your lap and hit a chord and just get off on the sound of that chord ringing, and you don't feel like you have to do something else straight away because it just sounds so good in your hands. 

They amplify really well; they record really well. They inspire you to play better stuff. The first time I played one of David's guitars... I'd 'made do' with other instruments. I was playing electric guitar primarily until I started playing solo.

I've grown up playing in electric bands, and I'd just play other people's acoustic guitars, picking sessions around the house and stuff like that. I didn't have an acoustic guitar of my own when I first started doing solo gigs, I was always loaning other peoples, and with mixed results. It's especially noticeable with acoustic guitar when you're playing solo - you're so exposed, you're on your own.

When I first played one of his guitars, it was at a guitar show in Melbourne and I was on the road and I was booked to play there and I stopped. A friend of mine, a former Ballarat guitarist named Don Meander, a great player, he was demonstrating David's guitars  So I was listening for a while thinking, 'Donnie's sounding good! That guitar he's playing sounds real good too! That's like a real acoustic guitar sound, like on those records I listen to.’

I started playing it and I had this light bulb moment – ‘Holy crap! THAT's the sound I want to hear coming out of the guitar in my hands...’

You should be able to work with anything, but this was an inspiring sound where you went, 'Oh God, I want that sound to happen, let me use another chord...'

Do you have a relationship with David Churchill where you say, 'I'm looking for this' in a guitar?

There have been a few things that I've had him make for for me that became regular instruments in his offerings to people. There's this acoustic lapsteel that I use in every show. It's got an enlarged hollowed chamber up the neck. It's made specifically for playing Hawaiian style.

It's not the same - there were instruments with hollow necks made in the early part of last century when the Hawaiian music boom was happening – but these are a different design to that. I talked to him about what I was after with the shape that I wanted.

It was more a description of, 'I don't want it to be like these ones that have THAT quality; I want it to have THIS kind of quality', you know certain a certain type of thing I was going for, and he just nailed it.

Jeff Lang launches Alone in Bad Company this Saturday March 25 at Sutton’s House of Music in Sturt Street, Ballarat at 8:30pm.