Having written and released three acclaimed records whilst living in LA and London – and toured with the likes of Ken Stringfellow, Willard Grant Conspiracy, Hayden, Paul Kelly, Richard Buckner and Joanna Newsom – it’s safe to say that Toby Burke and his band Horse Stories have ‘made it’ overseas. But after six years abroad, will the Melbourne singer-songwriter’s lo-fi country arrangements and classic American musical sensibilities manage to have the same impact in his hometown? Dan Rule investigates.

Toby Burke was 23 the last time he played a gig as a Melbourne resident, but in a sense, tonight is little different. It’s cold out and the crowd is relatively small – the tables are full, but only a few others mill around the bar and the mixing desk. Squinting through stage lights, Burke sees a couple of old friends in the darkness, some old faces. But he doesn’t crack a smile. He just looks straight ahead and sings.

Burke’s beautifully smoky high-register and lilting guitar fill the room, but it’s late and it’s a Sunday and no one calls for an encore. This would have been okay if Toby was still 23, but he’s not. And tonight should have been different. His label boss had taken a seat near the stage, as had his publicist, his wife-to-be Jessica, even a somewhat noteworthy member of the press. Tonight was the hometown launch of his debut solo record Winsome Lonesome. It was his return show after six years away, his welcome back to Melbourne as distinguished singer-songwriter.

After the gig, Burke reluctantly does the rounds – shaking hands politely, thanking people, smiling. I approach the stage while he’s packing up. He clicks his guitar case shut, and with a shake of his head, takes a long slug of his Melbourne Bitter. He tells me that more people turned up in Adelaide, winces, shakes his head again. And later, he rides silently through darkened Northcote streets, in our otherwise laughter-filled cab.

Toby Burke Photograph: Felipe Dupouy

Today is different. We meet under cloudy autumn skies at a Port Melbourne studio, and Burke is in a somewhat more affable mood. He and some friends are shooting photos for the forthcoming Horse Stories record. There’s a positive feeling in the air; jokes are told, everyone’s smiling. After setting up some shots, we retire to an expansive white-walled room to chat.

“Everybody is trying to get out of here in a funny way,” Burke says of his hometown, taking a seat opposite. “I’ve done that and I’m now experiencing the reverse.”

Burke’s musical history does run a different course to most. Moving to Los Angeles in 1999 – initially to complete a television internship – Burke had barely even played live before leaving Melbourne. “I was working in a pub and I managed to talk the owner into letting me play in the corner every Tuesday or Wednesday night or something,” he remembers. “They would have all been terrible shows, I’m sure,” he laughs. “I was both singing and playing guitar through my amp because these places had no PA, and it must have been horrible. So god bless the people who let me do it.”

But Burke soon repaid any faith shown in him. After gaining some experience playing multi-billed, conveyor-belt gigs in LA, he was noticed by drummer Clinton Stapleton. “When I met Clint, he was like ‘Wow, I want to play drums with you’, and there were these people who I didn’t know from shit telling me that I should keep playing and give it a go. They were really supportive. When you go to another country, that kind of thing is really important.”

“It’s funny,” he adds. “People give places like LA shit. But the one thing I love about LA is that everybody in LA is being creative, you know. It’s the opposite of most towns, where you have your fairly conservative status quo that the town exists on, and then everything else is on the fringes. LA exists on entertainment and creativity. That’s the focus.”

The pair soon joined forces and in 2000 formed Horse Stories. Primarily an outlet for Burke’s songwriting, Horse Stories released their first record – the gorgeously unassuming and wistful Travelling Mercies (for troubled paths) – in 2001. The album was heralded by music press and exemplified Burke’s potential as a songwriter. Someone even went as far as to compare his vocals to those of Thom Yorke. His songs were simple and personal, and resonated with narrative sensibilities. Sonically, the record rang with gentle jangles of guitar and brushed drums, while Burke’s vocals shone through rudimentary production values.

Burke soon recruited his graphic artist Jeff Holmes on electric guitar and lap steel, and Horse Stories began to take shape as a band. Although Burke continued writing the songs, each of the members began offering input into their arrangement and musical direction. The band recorded their sophomore album at Malibu’s Indigo Ranch in late 2002, and released One Hundred Waves the following year. The record showed a great deal of development. The arrangements were understated but sprawling, with the band’s sleepy acoustic guitar and drifting lap steel providing a base for contributions of pedal steel, strings, piano and accordion, from the likes of Eric Heywood (Sun Volt) and Beth Balmer. The press again hailed the release, making special mention of Burke’s blossoming songwriting talent. Indeed, while still retaining its tactile, personal edge, the new material delved into more expansive metaphors – Burke’s literate, narrative lyrical phrases finding their orientation amongst ageless, classically American song structures.

Although aware of its origins, Burke has always been puzzled by the ‘Americana’ tag line. “I often wonder about that,” he muses. “I’m not exactly sure how that happened, you know. In a certain sense it’s undeniable in what I do, but I think what probably happened was that, well, America was always part of my life because I had gone there as a kid and it was a big focus of our family. It’s so romanticised. My uncle and aunt had a house in Los Angeles and that’s where I used to live when I first moved there. So we would go over there and stay at their place, and there was a this connection there, you know.”

“But as far as the music goes,” he continues, “I think what appealed to me about that Americana stuff was that there was a certain honesty and simplicity about it, that was just me. I never wanted to be American – I never sing in an American accent – but it just so happens that the instruments I’m drawn to are those instruments, and the style which I’m drawn to heads in that direction. It’s an overall thing. I think a friend of mine once said to me that: ‘This is you. You are this person; you dress in these old clothes, it’s what you do’. And it just so happened that when the first two records came out, it was at the point where it was becoming interesting to people who hadn’t found it interesting before.”

Photograph: Dan Forde

Burke considers literature to have had the most prominent bearing on his artistic direction. “I’m inspired by good writing, definitely,” he says. “Everything started because of writing. Like, reading literature is more how I come to writing songs than listening to music. Music happens, writing doesn’t. If you’re not tuning your head to how to structure words, you’re fucked; you have to just keep reading.”

Encouraged to study the classics as a teenager growing up in Prahran, Burke can perhaps thank a somewhat legendary distant relative for some of his more literary tendencies. Indeed, Burke is from the Hemingway family. And while he shifts, perhaps a little uncomfortably, in his seat, he is willing to trawl through the story just one more time.

“My mum is a Hemingway, that’s her maiden name, and her dad looked remarkably like Ernest,” he explains. “He was mistaken for him a couple of times, and he was very Hemingway-ish. He was into hunting and he was a very big part of the hunting movement in Victoria. He was very involved in the legislation of hunting, to make it a much more organised sport.”

“Mum is involved in this very slow, ongoing process of finding out what the exact connection is… It’s not that far-off, like five generations or something, but I’m not sure exactly. I’ll get to the bottom of it one day.”

“So I used to read a lot of Hemingway when I was in school,” he continues. “Because when I started studying writing my mum just started giving me Hemingway books. It was like: ‘You should read all these; you’ve got Hemingway blood, and you should know how he wrote’. So Hemingway was a big deal, and feeling that connection was a big deal to me when I was learning to write.”

Following the release of One Hundred Waves, Burke and his partner Jess moved to London, where, between tours with Horse Stories, Burke began piecing together what has now become his solo record Winsome Lonesome. “When I got to London, I had all these little bits and pieces, and I thought I should do something with all this stuff now I had some time on my own.”

Recorded in both LA and London on an old Tascam four-track Porta-Studio, the album sees Burke at his most hushed, atmospheric and stripped-back yet, with moments of banjo, harmonica punctuating subtle acoustics and warm, delicate vocals. It also sees him delve into some of his most personal and introspective moments. He sings of giving up cigarettes, of losing love, of being jealous of the waiter serving his female companion.

“A lot of them are early songs, and I think that when I first finished my writing degree I was still very much into a narrative approach,” he explains. “If you’re going to do a solo record – just you and a few instruments – you’ve got to be saying something. You’ve got to be giving people a bit of a story or it’s not particularly interesting, I think. If the music isn’t particularly layered then the song has to be in some way, otherwise it’s just boring.”

“Winsome Lonesome is just me in my home environment, whether it be LA or Melbourne or London with my tape recorder, and that’s what I think of. Every time I sat down to do one of those songs it was at that machine, on my own, always on my own – that’s how that record feels to me.”

We get up from our table and take a walk around the studio, our voices echoing throughout the cavernous space. In an adjacent room, a collection of Burke’s old family effects sits cluttered in a corner for the photo shoot. A decrepit wooden chair sits amongst old suitcases, a pair of taxidermy geese, his grandfather’s shotgun lamp. He begins to tell me about the heirlooms, smiling as he recounts their significance. History and family are important to Burke, and this begins to explain his decision to come home and effectively postpone a thriving musical career overseas.

“Living in cities like London and Los Angeles without your family and stuff gets pretty hard, you know. We needed to have the option of, you know, going to my brother’s place for dinner or something. Just those little things that I missed.”

“I need a fucking community around me,” he continues. “I didn’t feel that in London at all, you know. It was hellish. You know, like I rang Vic Roads the other day, and it was like the operator was on ecstasy compared to people in London. People don’t give a fuck in London. This old thing of this great cockney, friendly attitude is a load of old shit. Here, everyone’s up for a chat, you know, and I fucking need that. I need someone to remember who I am when I’ve been into a place for the tenth fucking time. I’m starting to feel like I don’t exist,” he laughs.

But in a way, Burke has yet to break this sense of anonymity. While he’s returned to his hometown at 29, armed with his most bare-boned, introspective and personal artistic gesture to date, it may take his hometown some time to rediscover his wonderfully literate, emotive and poignant song craft.

“I got to be who I am when I moved,” Burke tells me as he walks me back to my car. “It’s so hard to get that across to family and stuff. Certain people in my family still think I’m a kid.”

“It’s the same with music,” he pauses. “You come back with all the experience, but I don’t know… I’ve played so much overseas, but I’m tired of that and I just want to have a following here. And I feel like that’s something I’m going to have to earn, but it would be nice.”