Riley Pearce Discards 'Difficult Second Album'

Perth-based alt-folk artist Riley Pearce has been winning over fans for years with his mellow, introspective songs, and on his new album, It’s Your Turn Now, he’s ready to introduce even more people to his sound.

With It’s Your Turn Now, his highly anticipated second album, Pearce reflects on the little ways and the bigger changes he’s had to make since becoming a parent. He skilfully tells stories about how circumstances change with your partner, the way priorities shift, evolving friendships, and the renewed focus that comes with parenthood.

On his new album, Pearce remains open, vulnerable, and honest and spotlights a universal experience.

Pearce elaborates, “Becoming a dad changed everything and really helped me learn to be patient. This album documents my journey through arguably the biggest shift and upheaval of my life and how I processed it all. The highs, the lows, the grand picture, and the minutiae of it all.

“It’s the rawest and most shell-less I’ve been in my songwriting, and I wanted to reflect that in the production a lot of the time too. The album was produced and recorded in my backyard shed-turned-studio, and that in itself was a deep-end cannonball as much as the transition to parenthood felt like.”

To celebrate the release of his new album, Riley Pearce has given a track-by-track breakdown of each song to The Music, which you can check out below.

The Beauty Of It All

I love starting my albums with an instrumental track. For me, it sonically sets up the landscape for all the stories I’m about to tell. The song itself is always a story too though. TBOIA is an expression of the birthing journey, the journey into fatherhood, and all that came with it – from the ultrasound heartbeat voice memos to the moments of laughter later in the song.

How Will I Know

How Will I Know was born out of uncertainty. I’m a serial planner and organizer and hate the feeling of regret, but there’s a certain element of sacrificing control to the forces of the universe, and that’s been a big journey for me that I’m only feeling comfortable with now—that feeling of being okay with uncertainty and actually embracing it.

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Any Day Now

This was the first song I wrote for the album; I remember it so vividly. I wrote it over Zoom with the amazing Canadian artist Sam Lynch. She really helped me piece this song together to say everything my wife and I were feeling. The song was written at around the 37-week mark of Al‘s (my wife’s) pregnancy, and we were caught in the moment of wanting to savour our last moments together as a duo but also excited about what waited on this new horizon.

Slow This Down

I’ve always been brutally aware of how fast time moves, but when you are holding and visibly seeing changes so quickly, it really sets in. The song isn’t necessarily sad; I’m privileged to be able to experience this in the first place, so it’s more a call to myself and the universe to keep me aware and present through all of these moments.

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Come Up For Air

Parenthood is an adjustment, anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. If someone was to ask me what I wasn’t prepared for, I’d say the 24/7 nature of it. My wife and I’s relationship changed, mostly in a massively positive way, but it meant we were both drowning, juggling work (she’d just started an amazing postpartum meal delivery business – The Baby Days, look it up, thank me later) and didn’t have as much time for each other as we once did. Especially in the early weeks, where the chaos is constant.

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Losing Light

This song is all about checking in with someone and assuring them that you’ll be there. You are there for them whenever they need you, no matter how small the gesture (offering you water), until you find your way back.

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Human

I definitely felt a whole new perspective shift becoming a dad, a bigger purpose to live for, that I often felt was missing from my life. Human is a song all about connecting to the human experience and feeling more alive than ever, as if all the colours, sights, and smells are rapidly more vivid.

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Only You

Throughout the album-making process, my wife and I got married. Charlie was nine months old at the time, and Only You captures this feeling of having your person, or people (now that my pack’s growing) and everything feeling right, like the pieces have fallen into place

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Indefinitely

I wrote Indefinitely in about three or four hours. I had just caught up with a friend of mine who was on a vastly different life trajectory to myself and I couldn’t help thinking that our time as friends might be taking a small hiatus. Not a goodbye forever but a goodbye for now. It was a real test for my falsetto and I was so honoured Liang Lawrence agreed to sing on this song, her voice is heavenly!

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Youth

Just as saying goodbye to friends is hard, saying goodbye to a chapter in my life was just as hard. I’m not sure if there’s such a thing as being hopelessly nostalgic (is that a thing?), but I feel like I might be. I love reminiscing about my youth, and while I look forward to reliving aspects of that with my kids, I needed this song to fully tell the story of this album.

Forever

This might be my favourite song on the album. I love playing it live, it feels like a campfire song that everyone can sing the chorus to. I wanted to finish the album off with a raw love song, rounding out the main theme – unconditional love, seeing that living proof of my and my wife’s love, and knowing that we have so many new adventures ahead of us.

It’s Your Turn Now is out now. You can catch Riley Pearce on tour across Australia this August.