Robyn Habel is a woman of many talents. She teaches jazz at Adelaide University, as a bass player she has backed people as diverse as Stevie Wonder, Crowded House, Midnight Oil, Rolf Harris and Matt Monroe, and as a singer songwriter she has garnered a clutch of awards.

So what can we expect of her latest album Sun Come Shine? Why, vintage pop rock, of course!

I have to ask about her musical influences, because listening to the track ‘It Is So’ I immediately think of Burt Bacharach.

“That’s it!” she laughs “I’m a huge Bacharach fan!” So huge, in fact that she brazenly sneaked in back-stage when Bacharach was in the country a few years ago and wangled a meeting with her idol. “It was nice to meet one of my heroes.”

“The thing about me is that I have a lot of strings to my bow. I teach jazz, but I also teach contemporary music, bass guitar, rock and songwriting, so I do a lot of different styles,” she explains. While her first two CDs were acoustic rock, this time out it’s a different story.

“My real passion has always been pop-rock style,” she says. “In some ways I feel this album is the most ‘myself’ I’ve ever been.”

Like classic albums of the 60s Sun Come Shine has exactly 14 songs (seven a side in vinyl terms.)

“I tried to make it a classic ‘album’,” she says, “These days so many people are caught up in, you know, you just buy one song. I wanted it to sound and feel like a whole experience as an album. There’s not one song that’s four minutes long on there.”

The sound is enhanced by using authentic vintage instruments, courtesy of producer Michael Carpenter. “He just understood where I was coming from. His work on the arrangements was just a joy!”

Does Robyn consider herself a confessional songwriter? She laughs, “Confessional? I like that! It’s been 36 hours since my last confession!”

“They’re definitely very intimate songs from the heart,” she says. “When I’m writing for writing’s sake, because I feel the need to express, then it just pours out of me based on what I’m feeling at the time.”

I have to ask, is ‘Dear Abby’ which closes the album a love song for a real Abby? “Well, I’ll leave that interpretation open. You can take it both ways. There’s Dear Abby, the American ‘agony aunt’ but I do know an Abby as well. That song is one of my favourites. I deliberately made it very simple to the point that every line can be interpreted a couple of ways.

“There’s a quote: ‘If you give a man a mask, he will tell you the truth. Take the mask away and he can only lie.’ For songwriters, the song is the mask. It’s a wonderful thing to be able to express so much about yourself honestly through the medium of song.”

Robyn Habel plays the Wheatsheaf Hotel on June 20 at 9pm (Entry free)

Sun Come Shine available through www.robynhabel.com

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