Andy Bull Pays Tribute To Late Friend Jack Colwell’s Album

Music Feeds’ Love Letter to a Record series asks artists to reflect on their relationship with the music they love and share stories about how it has influenced their lives. In this very special edition, Australian alt-pop music icon, four-time ARIA-winner and seven-time Emmy Award winner Andy Bull pays heartfelt tribute to his recently passed friend Jack Colwell, and his 2020 album, ‘SWANDREAM’.

It comes as Andy celebrates the release of his new album ‘Collapse In Bliss’, a soulful and introspective pop, electronic and synth-heavy record written, performed and recorded by Andy alone over the course of 40 nights in mid-2024, using a small selection of synthesisers, drum machines and recording equipment. The singer, songwriter and producer is also simultaneously marking the 10th anniversary of his acclaimed 2014 album ‘Sea Of Approval’. Read his touching tribute, and stream ‘Collapse In Bliss’ down below.

Jack Colwell – SWANDREAM

“I’m just a lisp with flailing wrists but if I cut them do I not bleed the same blood as you?

I know I make you laugh, its masking the fear inside you

While I’m making you laugh, I just know that I’m making you cry, too” – from Jack Colwell’s song ‘Weak’

Jack Colwell was a good friend to me. I first met him over a cup of coffee, a good handful of years before he recorded the music I will talk about here.

At that time, he was summoning up the will and confidence and vision to embark on a new project- a project that would later coalesce as the album SWANDREAM – and so, to my good fortune, he reached out for a chat.

Even the fiercest of artists have to do this intermittently; to reassemble between adventures. We all do, in the valleys that follow the peaks, whatever they look like to us.

Jack was all the things you may have read: smart, sensitive, funny, refreshingly honest and irreverent, generous in conversation. When I met him, Jack was quite young, but I could see immediately, he was not naive, and he had lived the full turn of life’s wheel more than once. It’s possible to become life-long friends with people like this in the time it takes to finish a coffee.

Jack, like his music, had broad shoulders and a lisp.

These are the spirits that animate his music.

The last time I spoke to Jack was the beginning of October, 2024. We were texting, joking about both owning a particular type of outdated digital piano which the manufacturer made so physically large and heavy that you couldn’t even give it away: you had to own it for life. A few hours after those text messages, Jack passed away.

I have been upset by his loss and the nature of his death.

Because there is a risk here of me continuing to write a kind of eulogy to my friend, and because I have been affected by his passing, I am going to herein try to write more briefly and matter of factly about his 2020 album SWANDREAM. I will fail in being matter-of-fact, of course, but the following is me trying.

When you press play on SWANDREAM, know this; that was Jack, or at least a genuine view and expression of his experience. This album has a power and authenticity that many artists simply cannot even willingly touch; and most would be afraid to even try approaching.

The depth of his lyrics and subject matter; the scope of his voice and arrangements soar up from the earth with the widest of wingspans.

Even gifted artists can become, at inopportune times, concerned with how they appear to be doing things while they do them, perhaps assuming a protective play-act or carapace of to manage the risk; SWANDREAM however, is purely untouched by any such trivial conceit- it creates and destroys without prejudice. The music is primordial as it is baroque. The instrumentation is in moments searing and intense on the one hand, and then nuanced, delicate and ornate on the other; but the effect, however, is always immolating and raw, sometimes jarringly so. Within this paradox of sensibilities resides the character of this music.

Sometimes in my mind, while watching Jack record or perform, or while listening to his music, I have felt my inner afraid voice want to say “Jack, hold back a little won’t you! It’s too far!”. And that is why me, and most other artists, will never touch the kind kinetic force that Jack masterfully wields on SWANDREAM.

Jack would not hold back though. Jack did not have time, and I think in the back of his mind, he was always aware of this possibility.

And from this place, SWANDREAM yields, authentically, all the screaming ferocity and punk of PTSD; the tender forgiveness of Sound of Music; the stunning piano and strings driven masterpiece of Weak, who’s vocal refrain is as powerful as any ever put to record; the bittersweet wall of sound that is Don’t Cry Those Tears; and all the rest.

There is not a passive or uninspired moment on this masterwork. Jack experienced a great depth of things; he possessed also an immense sensitivity to those experiences, and through a lifetime of dedication he honed a ferocious talent that allowed him to transmute all of that into genuine art with a beautiful and unique flair.

It is not easy being born as a channel for this kind of power.

It is a burden that takes broad shoulders to carry. And a lisp.

One further thing I want to say is that I think we have lost Jack as he was only just approaching the peak of his artistic powers. Perhaps this is intertwined with why we lost him.

Not too long ago in my home studio, he and I had worked on demos recently for a new album of his, and so I heard some of the earliest iterations of those songs. The album proper was then very recently produced by another mutual friend, who has told me that the new material came out stunningly. I have no doubt.

For now, listen to SWANDREAM and be humbled.

PS. By the way, if you own a 2020 vinyl copy of either SWANDREAM, or my album Sea of Approval, then check the insert. You may have one of the first run of copies of either of these albums that, following a printing mistake at the factory, were both accidentally shipped with the lyrics to SWANDREAM on one side of the LP insert, and the lyrics to Sea Of Approval on the other; a happy accident that delighted me and Jack both.