TWENTY five years has come up fast for Diesel (aka Sydney-based musician Mark Lizotte). With 13 studio albums under his belt, four ARIA awards and a steady stream of shows racked up across the globe, he's rarely had cause to look back and reflect.
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However the 25-year milestone has prompted Lizotte to embark on a stock take of sorts, a rummage around the back-catalogue to see what's been left on the shelf.
And he discovered something of a treasure trove: 35-odd singles that had once been major milestones along his musical journey, but due to his ongoing musical progression, had found themselves languishing in the past, old music that had made way for the new.
His latest Diesel tour aims to rectify that. Named 'The Singles Tour- 89-14', Lizotte will be revisiting some of the hits that made him a star, including a show at Canberra's Street Theatre next Friday night (September 19).
It's a solo show in a theatre-style venue, and Lizotte told The Queanbeyan Age that he'd breathed new life into some of his best-loved songs.
"It's almost like shepherding: bringing the flock all back into the one area," he laughed.
"It'd got up to around 35 singles, and inevitably there's been songs that kind of drift off into the abyss for no particular reason. And some of these drifters have been charting and had a lot of radio play and I don't play them. And I don't know why."
While songs like Cry in Shame, Come to Me, Tip of My Tongue and Never Miss Your Water were written by a much younger man, Lizotte, now 48, said he's enjoying being able to bring the decades he's spent developing into a masterful musician, songwriter and arranger to bear on reinterpreting these songs.
"When you look at songs that you haven't played for a long time and you listen to the way they were recorded and the production values, they can freak you out. You think 'How the hell am I going to do that? I was on a totally different wicket then, how do I go back to that moment?
"I just look at the song and extract the essence of the song. There's always that essence to the song, whether it's a groove thing, or just finding the right lilt of what's going to propel a song along.
"It's just finding a shift in power, a shift in axis," he said.
-Catch Diesel play 'The Singles Tour- 89-14' at The Street Theatre in Canberra, next Friday night (September 19). Tickets are $55 via www.thestreet.org.au.
