In a serviced apartment overseeing the city of Sydney, Kevin Mitchell looks down at the streets many, many miles below. “There’s where we walked last night to get to the gig,” he murmurs, referencing the You Am I show that they attended. “There’s where Mundine and Green fought.”

Put it this way: you wouldn’t want to be in this room if you suffered from vertigo. The management team reckons that it’s alright to look across to the bays…but looking down to the ground ain’t such a grand thing, but seeing the planes taking off is quite a sight.

Speaking of which, Kevin literally believes that he’s been on planes pretty much non-stop for the last year. “I’ve spent so much time flying around,” he says. “It’s been good.”

The second Bob Evans album, Suburban Songbook, was recorded in Nashville. Given that, you could expect it to be a far more country-flavoured affair, but it’s an album that surprises with its diversity of sound – there’s pop songs with twang, certainly, but there’s also a variety of other elements on show that come on like a bolt from the blue, such as the strings on “Flame”.

“I was never going to make a record that was entirely country from go to whoa,” Kev says. “But it’s certainly more country than the last Bob record, but it’s not a country record. But it depends also on how you feel about country music – some people perceive it to be more country than it actually is just because the country-ness comes through on a couple of tracks.”

There’s certainly pedal steel and other elements on it, but the decision to record in Nashville had less to do with wanting to make a country-flavoured album as much as it was, as Kev puts it, “a beautiful lucky accident that seemed to pepper the lead-up to this record.

“Lots of things happened perfectly,” he says. “That gave me the assurance that I was doing the right thing.”

Suburban Songbook was recorded by Brad Jones, who topped the band’s wishlist for whom Kevin wanted to record the album with, with a shortlist being drawn up and then contacted – as is usually the case, many were contacted and never heard back from again. “But Brad came back straight away,” he says. “It was so quickly I couldn’t believe it, and he was really interested and asking lots of questions. He just happened to be based in Nashville, and had a studio there, and it was the perfect backdrop to make a record. I’d never been there before, and it was just really great.”

In total, around a month was spent crafting Suburban Songbook, from recording to mixing. In reality, that’s a very short amount of time, especially so considering the layers that can be found on the album. “We didn’t actually finish it on time,” he explains, “and Brad finished a little bit of the mixing after I left, and had flown out. I’m used to spending a month just on the recording part, and I think it’s the quickest I’ve ever made a record. The only way I was able to pull it off in a short space of time, apart from the fact that Brad was at the helm and making sure that it was going to be delivered on time, was that I was more prepared for this album than I ever have been before. The demo-ing process was so intensive, and the songs were so fully formed and the ideas of instruments and the melody lines for the brass and strings, so much of that I’d already written on my little synthesizer. So much of that background work had been done that we were in the position where we could walk in there and bash it out; we weren’t having to come up with ideas on the spot.”

One of the distinct advantages of recording in Nashville is that the parts could be recorded not by some Johnny-come-lately, but instead by vastly experienced studio musicians. So, when Kev hadn’t confirmed the ideas as to how he wanted a certain part or what have you sound, they could come up with it of their own accord. “They were such pros,” he confirms, “and they’d nail it straight away – they were so quick.”

Having worked on many, many records, you well might expect that. Of course, it would be natural for Kevin to feel some hesitance over working with session musicians – while they are undoubtedly talented freaks who know intuitively what’s a minor seventh, they can sometimes lack the ‘feel’ that a band generates. “I was worried, as I didn’t really know what to expect,” he confirms. “Brad made the experience a lot easier for me. He made me feel like everything was going to be okay, and I didn’t need to stress about anything. He was a good influence like that. In that sort of situation, with the wrong people around you, and because it was such a new experience for me and doing it on my own, it could be very easy to stress out and get bigger and bigger, and I can see how people could lose it.”

It was always the intention that this second Bob Evans album would feature session musicians, especially so once a producer and studio had been settled upon. Indeed, the drummer used on Suburban Songbook was former Wilco skinsman Ken Coomer. The other genteman involved had all played on literally hundreds of albums each – but nevertheless Ken and another asked for a copy of the record; quite a feather in Kevin’s songwriting bow.

“Most of them do so many records that they don’t even bother asking for a copy of the record. I took it as a real compliment, and Brad said that when a session buy who plays on hundreds of records asks for a copy of it then that means that he really likes it, because it’s just work for them most of the time – good work, fun work, but work nonetheless.”

Bob Evans’ Suburban Songbook is out now, and the man is touring the nation accordingly. Dates:
June 14 – In-store @ Big Star Records, Adelaide
June 16 – In-store @ 78 Records, Perth
July 6 – Prince of Wales, Bunbury
July 7 – Three Bears Bar, Dunsborough
July 8 – Fly By Night Club, Fremantle
July 9 – Fly By Night Club, Fremantle
July 22 – Splendour in the Grass, Byron Bay