What do you do when you return from 18 months' touring and step into the studio to begin work on a new album, only to find you're too tired to do justice to any new material? Hit the road again.
The Territory, the fourth album in six years from Christchurch-based string band the Eastern, was meant to be released about a year ago, says singer and guitarist Adam McGrath, who, along with singer and banjo player Jess Shanks, comprises the core of a band that, at a rough count, has performed more than 1000 shows.
''We had gone in and started work on it and were really motivated, but we'd spent a year and a-half on the road following the release of [2012 double album] Hope and Wire and I think we just crashed a bit,'' McGrath explains.
Given Hope and Wire debuted at No 2 on the New Zealand charts, became the inspiration for auteur Gaylene Preston's recent six-part television series based on the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, and featured Silver Scroll-nominated song State Houses By The River, the latest album from the Eastern was never going to be a once-over-lightly effort.
''So we stepped away from it. Instead, we went back on the road which, believe it or not, refreshed us a wee bit,'' McGrath says.
Recorded (as were the group's previous three albums) by Ben Edwards at his Sitting Room Studio in Lyttelton, released on Rough Peel Records and distributed by Rhythm Method, The Territory might be rooted in the familiar instrumentation of banjo, fiddle and acoustic guitars, augmented by double bass, electric guitars, drums, trombone and bagpipes, yet it also marks a stepping-off point for the band.
The songwriting bar has been pushed higher, McGrath and Shanks' tales of people and places, the past and present benefiting from detailed observational lyricism. Notable, too, is the growing width of their vowel sounds. Having met in 2006, not long after both had returned to New Zealand following several years spent in the United States, the singers' American twangs are being subsumed by Kiwi diphthongs.
''It's been a long time since I returned from America. I'm home; I'm here,'' says McGrath, who on his return to New Zealand held down various jobs before he and Shanks decided to play music full-time.
Though there are many highlights on The Territory, there is one that serves both as a good story and a statement of intent: titled Talking Americana Cowboy Yeeha Blues, it has McGrath offering a spoken-blues reflection on both his tastes and world-view, while at the same time suggesting he is both weary and wary of musical labels.
Sure, with its array of traditional acoustic instrumentation, the Eastern does play country music (as well as folk, frenetic Celtic-tinged tunes and punkish three-chord bashes), but this is a band more interested in telling local stories than regurgitating any Americana mythology.
''Sometimes I think we'd prefer to play fast bluegrass, standing on tables and tearing it up. But I feel that would be cheating a little bit,'' McGrath says.
''There are a lot of bands popping up and embracing this sort of music but I felt no-one was really saying much with it. Everyone seems more interested in saying stuff that's already been said, but we want to sing about the here and now, where we are at.
''I had this idea of how I wanted to write. And while I was on tour I picked up a copy of Ann Westra's [1972] photographic book, Notes On The Country I Live In, from a junk shop somewhere. It really inspired me, this `dispatches from New Zealand' approach.''
Yet to pull off such an approach requires both close attention to craft and the various characters who inhabit The Territory. As McGrath notes, lyrical details, depth and, importantly, a good yarn, are more important than any chord progression.
''You have to find those subtle things about people that might connect a listener to them. It's not abstract; it's describing who those people are and what's happening to them.''
Thus he sets one song, The Stepping Razor, in a bar where romance blooms between two people seemingly past their physical prime; in another, People Like Us, he opens with the line, ''he's got a half-finished tribal tattoo from the 1990s'' and goes on to describe a working-class couple struggling to keep afloat.
In short, McGrath sees the gold in the grit.
''It's not like television where you have beautiful people doing beautiful things all the time,'' he reflects.
''Likewise, Jess' songs, including Broken Line and Rain, come straight from her heart.
''A lot of this record is about what lies beneath the things we tell ourselves: our sense of self, our place in the world. The album is both our most wide-open but also our most personal,'' McGrath says.
''I never wanted to sing Woody Guthrie songs, even though I love his music. What he - in fact, everyone I look up to - taught me is to sing my own stories.''
