Josh Pyke To Find Happiness

The world may have been in lockdown while Sydney singer-songwriter Josh Pyke was working on his seventh full-length, but To Find Happiness is an album concerned with life’s bright spots. “To find happiness, you must always seek the warmth in every sun,” he sings in the pastoral title track. “I’ll be that circle of light in your mirror,” he adds in the harmony-laden “Circle of Light”. The LP is not, however, an exercise in one-eyed optimism, with Pyke approaching the concept of happiness with the knowledge that it can be fleeting and often coloured by loss: “We are alive in as much as we’re dying,” he sings atop gentle finger-picking in “That Light, That Glow”; the rousing “Your Heart Won’t Always Weigh a Tonne” offers hope in dark times. Mixed by Wayne Connolly, with whom Pyke recorded his breakthrough 2007 debut, Memories & Dust, To Find Happiness finds the singer drawing on the wisdom, bumps and bruises he’s accumulated over the years, and further consolidates Pyke’s standing as one of Australia’s most revered singer-songwriters.