Number 8 – My Friend The Chocolate Cake’s Home Improvements

Man, this song is a beauty. There aren’t many that hit so close to home for me at this point in my life as this one. It’s the modern Australian dream in the most pipe-dreamy sense of the word.

Few singers have voices as warmly evocative as David Bridie. That wryly frayed timbre is unique. Bridie could sing the phone book into poignancy. Here, it’s garnished with a beautifully organic chamber pop arrangement, lush harmonies, a surging, keening melody, and one heck of a lyric.

So many of us lead lives of ‘quiet desperation’ – to borrow from Henry David Thoreau and Roger Waters – but here it’s as much determination as desperation. Once you’ve got a wife, kids, a mortgage, a home, a mobile phone contract and a cat, you’ve got commitments that both ground you and anchor you in the best and worst of ways. The routine of living can so easily become a grind. ‘Home Improvements’ is a song in which the narrator yearns for escape; to travel overseas or round Australia. Yank the kids from school and just GO. God, what parents out there haven’t yearned to do this at some point?

 The song itself springs into life with birdsong pizzicato, and the song’s spritely melody finds the narrator at a point of optimism; not about the life being lived but the one in his imagination. First, it’s off overseas. Then it’s the thought of buggering off around the country. Trigger one are the home improvements – or ‘renovator’s blight’, as I like to think of it’, then it’s the telly. (Yes, that dates the song a bit, but not so much as to stop it resonating.)

So many wonderful details. Bridie’s annunciation of school almost gulps at the end; there is desperation here that speaks to the overwhelming nature of the life being lived. It's not an unloved life; it's just bloody hard work. The title of the song is key; the home improvements are really just house improvements, revealing the truth that an improvement of the ‘home’ may actually require something more radical than an upgraded bathroom. Maybe it requires a canopy of stars and detachment from the soul-eroding news cycle. Maybe? No bloody maybe about it. Modern life can really suck sometimes. As 2025 would say to 2007 - hold my beer.

The song is most urgent - surging on pulsing strings - when it gets to the Shakespearean ‘therein lies the rub’. I love that. The Dad just wants to BE. He’s rocking a bit of a different vibe than that indecisive Dane, but he knows that there’s more out there. But what does it really mean to be a husband and a father? Can one shun one’s commitments? After all, once you’ve bought stuff, you’ve 'got to pay it back'. It’s Fight Club meets Bluey, set the harmonised beauty of the band’s strings and the backing vocals of the wonderful Helen Mountfort.

And gosh darn it, the song just makes me grin. I know I can’t bugger off round the country. Well, perhaps I can, but I feel like I can’t. But in the confines of this magnificent tune, I can get to Spain and back and circle a nation the size of Europe in four minutes. And that’s pretty great.

I know I'd have liked the melody of this song if I’d heard it when it came out in 2007, but I wouldn’t have ‘got’ the song. That took a marriage, three kids and another ten years. Now, it’s a kind of domesticated spirit animal that restores my spirit. Listen to it next time you’re driving to work. Hopefully, you’ll feel what I mean.