Mushroom Music Publishing

Dan Parsons’ debut album is less a case of boy meets girl but rather boy meets world. It's a snapshot of someone who after spending his high school years emulating seventies heroes on a reel to reel eight track, leaves his bedroom and begins tumbling through one blinding, visceral experience after another.

The album’s title track, for example, is about a girl but it's also about a moment taken by surprise, that doesn't know whether or not it will be a one night stand or something more - the freedom, fear and elation that comes with giving someone else the power to choose your fate.

What Parsons could grab hold of and pin down from experiences such as this, and his first brushes with the Brisbane music scene after growing up in country Queensland, inspired a drastic change to the primarily acoustic sounds that were on his 2008 mini-album Old Brown Shoe.

These new experiences convinced him to, as he puts it "let go of the wheel" to some degree and he brought good friend James O'Brien (The Boat People) on board along with producer John Castle (Washington, The Boat People) to record the album. He was left with an album split in two in terms of material and, in what would prove to be a cathartic experience, he jettisoned his older material in favour of new. What wasn't lost with his acoustic tunes was the sense of someone singing from the heart. The result is Firestarter - ten tracks of sincere pop that go straight for the jugularindcluding 'Back Off', written about Parsons' short lived career in labouring hell and 'Cedar Creek', a bittersweet tune about his hometown. Others shift and change in the light, music and lyrics pulling against each other. pener 'Run With Me' wears a melancholic demeanour, but glimmers of hope are felt through its understated enthusiasm. The optimistic indie flavour of 'I Can't Watch You' is shrouded by its scathingly judgemental lyric. It's the sound of a new world, at first vast, shrinking into itself as your eyes adjust.

In Parsons own words: "If you're not careful a group can become like a strange 'family' in which people become reliant on each other. They think they're going somewhere but they're actually just comfortable inside the social incubator, too scared to live their lives without escaping reality. I basically smushed all the people around me into one person." Hearing the song played back, which also happened to coincide with a brush with the law, caused an epiphany. "Soon after I wrote the song, I realised that hypocritically the song was actually VERY applicable to my own life. In fact, I was convinced that I had indirectly summarised my own lifestyle ...maybe it was a message or something. But before I came to accept that, I considered not keeping the song because it really painted my life in a very average light; plus I was embarrassed that I'd been so brutal with my judgments about others."

So, boy meets world, world embraces boy, smacks him around some but boy doesn't hit back. He just stays brave, keeps singing, with neweyes yes, but with the same heart that's on all those eight track reels back home.