"I think this is the best album I've ever done. It's definitely the best singing I've ever done. And I know why: cause it was done on a small budget. When you've got binding restrictions you get creative, and you also keep to first takes a lot more, which are very often the best ones."

 

Clear Blue In Stormy Skies is a watershed album for Jenny Morris.

Between a dozen remodelled radio hits of the '80s and '90s is an overdue reaffirmation of her rare gifts as a singer and songwriter.  More importantly, in the act of reinvention are the seeds of a revitalised future.

 

It was a spontaneous, gospel piano version of Paul Kelly's Beggar On the Street of Love, she says, that became the benchmark for an inspired flight of musical imagination. "After that I was really keen to make new songs out of everything. It was incredible how it happened. They all worked like a dream."

 

Surprises include the Keith Richards raunch of You're Gonna Get Hurt, a cosmic soul version of Body & Soul and an ingeniously skewed retake of You I Know, kindly rewritten by its author, Neil Finn, in Auckland late last year - that's him on guitars and backing vocals too.

 

The rest of the album was made fast and loose in February '06 with Jenny's long term road partners: Steve Balbi (Noiseworks, Electric Hippies) produced and played guitars; Paul Searles (Skunkhour) played a range of vintage keyboards including piano, Hammond, Wurlitzer and Rhodes. Backing singer Josh Quong Tart completed a small, close-knit ensemble.

 

Jenny's especially warm and intimate vocals were caught with a vintage valve microphone once used by Frank Sinatra. "We also used a lot of this old spring reverb," she says. "It crapped out a lot and it was very frustrating, but man, when it worked it was amazing and I think that's why this album has got that special earthiness about it."

 

This combination of sonic classicism and fresh discovery reignites Jenny's first hit of '84, Everywhere I Go, as well as her biggest subsequent singles, Break In The Weather and She Has To Be Loved.

There's an instrumental arrangement of her most requested song, Little Little, and a languid INXS cover, This Time, in tribute to her friend Michael Hutchence.

 

The title, Clear Blue In Stormy Skies, comes from the sole new track, The Time. It's a song with the kind of mature and reflective tone, emotional integrity and musical excellence that only comes with years of experience.

 

"That's why this Liberation series is so good, cause it's actually commending people who have put work and time into their craft," Jenny says. "All these songs were a dream to sing. They fell together like a jigsaw puzzle. We just let ourselves go wherever they led us."