I try to just let it be pure and just be a vessel for it. I have this huge amount of respect for the spirit in the music, but the way I treat it… It’s like if you were to take your grandmother to church – you just take her to church, you wouldn’t tell her what to wear, y’know? It’s kind of like that for me – I let the music come through me, and I try not to let my ego get too involved. But y’know, it’s so hard to put that into words – what that is, or who that is, or whether it’s related to me – those questions are always there, but I kind of treat it like it’s separate to me. I think the spirit of this country resides in all of my music. I attribute that to spirit, ancestors, whatever – and I respect that. It feels like it comes from another place – it’s relatable when I’m writing music that’s about, or comes from an emotional place in me, and it’s pretty clear that it’s me, or something that I’m feeling, but then sometimes there’s all this other music that comes through me, that just feels like it comes from somewhere else. Often, the spirit that comes through my music doesn’t feel like me. I definitely feel the presence of my culture in the music, and I am very connected to Country in a way that speaks through my music. It’s a personal search that I’m on, to find our history there. My great grandmother was taken from a Wurundjeri country, but we don’t know anything about her – it’s an ongoing journey, but it seems to get misprinted all the time from that story. It’s been printed that I’m Wurundjeri, but we don’t know that. Having made this record, do you feel like you now have an even stronger bond with your culture and heritage? It was a very ‘full circle’ kind of thing, and that’s when I thought, “Yeah, I’m going to call this record Jan Juc Moon.” So that was kind of cool for me – it was like this new breath, a new beginning for a new decade – all that stuff really came into focus around that song and my re-recording of it. I recorded his heartbeat from ultrasound, when he was still in the belly, and I actually used that throughout the track. And when I recorded, my fourth boy was in the womb. It was taking me away from my son, and that was tough there was a lot of family stuff happening then. It was like this big moon was just dragging me away from everything I knew. I was going through a bit of a tough time, and just staring up at that moon, I felt like everything was getting pulled away by it.

I was down in Jan Juc at the time, I was living down there and there was this massive moon – the scientists were saying back then that it was the biggest moon we’d ever seen at the time. But when I wrote that song, it was a difficult time for me. I had already been writing a bunch of music when I revisited the old recording of that song. So did the rest of this record sort of bloom from the revitalised ‘Jan Juc Moon’?

Xavier rudd to let full album