Colin Hay would like you to know he’s busy. “It came upon me a day or two ago, I thought exactly the same thing,” he says, half-surprised at his own schedule. “I thought, I’m quite busy at the moment — it’s a little too busy, but you take it when it comes.”
And what’s come is Fierce Mercy, the 2017 album that reminded everyone the ex-Men at Work frontman still makes records that sound like sunrises over Paris — literally. The opening lines of “A Thousand Million Reasons” land there because, well, he saw it in a magazine. “The first photograph was the sun coming up over Paris and there it is right there,” he laughs. “Sometimes those things, you know, as they say, hide in plain sight.”
Hay’s got this way of making every love song feel half dream, half practical joke. He credits his songwriting partner for sparking the tune’s “beautiful piece,” which he then slowed down and fattened up with orchestration. “The song just really started to bloom a little bit, you know?” Hay says. “It ended up being quite the piece.”
But the real subtext of Fierce Mercy is right there in the title — an album “from being a certain age,” as Hay puts it. “You feel the pressure of time. The last 20 years went by pretty quickly… so I think, maybe on a good day, if I look after myself, maybe I’ve got that much time left.” He shrugs off any notion of retirement: “I’ve tried to avoid working for the last 40 years, you know, in a straight world. So this is basically… what I’m doing now, even if you retire you still kind of do it.”
That sense of time creeping up, gently but insistently, seeps into the songs. But don’t worry, he’s not about to shuffle off stage any time soon. Tony Bennett still being Tony Bennett in his 90s gives Hay some perspective. “He’s an extraordinary person, isn’t he? Very creative and smart — and there’s that pragmatic aspect. You don’t stop working because if you stop working people forget about you.”
If you want to know what keeps Hay working, it’s not nostalgia. He’s mostly over the “What’s Vegemite?” questions that have dogged him since “Down Under” first taught Americans to be confused about Australian breakfast spreads. “It’s amazing, people still say to me, so what is Vegemite?” he says, barely rolling his eyes. “I mean, on one level it is funny, but you think to yourself, why would they think that’s a question you’d really want to hear 40 years later?”
The same people probably don’t know he’s also the subject of a documentary, conveniently arriving alongside Fierce Mercy. “It wasn’t necessarily planned that way,” Hay says. “It seemed synchronistic to combine them in some way, you know?” The film, for him, is a weird mirror: “It’s a document of the fact that you have been doing stuff and you do still exist… it’s some kind of affirmation of the work you’ve been doing.”
Does he miss the Men at Work days? Not exactly. They’re right there in the back of his head, in that personal archive he carries around like a battered suitcase. “You never really leave it behind. You never think, ‘I’ll go back into that room and reminisce.’ It’s not something I ever do, because it’s right there in front of me. All you gotta do is remember.”
So, yes, Colin Hay is a certain age. He’s also perpetually 26, still working on his version of Rubber Soul. And no, he doesn’t want to talk about Vegemite anymore.
Listen to the full interview above and then watch this earlier interview from backstage Bonnaroo below.
