“When you record a song it’s kinda naïve, there’s always things that need to settle in. It’s like sometimes you’re trying too hard. You have to become someone who’s playing the song rather than someone who’s trying to manipulate it. You have to let go of it, and that takes time.”

Fifteen years ago, prodigious singer-guitarist Mark Lizotte launched a hell-for-leather road trip from Perth to the world with Australia’s biggest selling album of ‘89 and Best New Talent ARIA. From Johnny Diesel and the Injectors to a phenomenal solo career, his fluid feel for blues-inspired guitar and instinctively soulful voice soared beyond multi-platinum to somewhere far more valuable.

SINGLED OUT is a stripped-down recap of Diesel’s journey so far, a document of an extraordinary talent supremely comfortable with his past, and looking forward with a couple of exceptional new tunes. It’s a portrait of a gifted and impassioned soul man in the simplest strokes.

“I’ve been doing so many solo shows these last few years it seemed obvious to record that way,” he says. “It was me, an audience, an acoustic guitar or two and that’s it. Sometimes you can end up with the quintessential version of a song that way. I think Cry In Shame and Come To Me turned out like that.”

Early Injectors hit Soul Revival and lost solo classic 15 Feet Of Snow resonate profoundly through the passage of time and experience. All Come Together and One More Time are “bigger than I am,” Diesel says. “They’re these things I prop up every night and look at in different ways. I can’t imagine how many times I’ve played Tip of My Tongue but it’s still a challenge to play it well.”

Diesel turned to the studio to do justice to his debut Top 10 hit, Don’t Need Love, as well as a ringing slide guitar instrumental, Would I Want You, and a lush new ballad, She Won’t Need Words, which finds him playing piano and cello as well as guitars. He also covers Fred Neill’s classic Everybody’s Talkin’ like a man who knows what it is to drift from city to city for his entire adult life.

“Every night you find a different lilt playing solo,” says Diesel. “Your playing changes, the arrangement wanders this way or that. Some of the songs on my other albums I’m happy with but the majority, to be honest, are just OK to me. It’s like some of these songs have really found their place now.”

www.DieselMusic.com.au