Religion, love, death and misfits — all make top songs

The five songs competing for the 2007 Australasian Performing Right Association’s coveted song of the year gong are a sample of what good pop tunes are written about.

One is about religion, another about misfits, one inspired by a famous death and the rest are about love — discovering it, losing it and celebrating it — and none stoops to creaky old “moon in June” rhymes.

The latter celebration of lurve is Funky Tonight by John Butler Trio, who won the top APRA award three years ago with Zebra.

Butler says he wrote the single from the Trio’s No. 1 album Grand National for his partner, Danielle Caruana: “We love dancing and it’s a great way to give the relationship a reminder of the simple reasons of why we’re together. The song is about remembering to appreciate rather than taking for granted.”

Butler joins fellow WA band Eskimo Joe in the race for the peer-voted song of the year award, which will be dished out in Melbourne next Tuesday.

The Eskies are nominated for Black Fingernails, Red Wine, the title track of the Fremantle band’s third album which is still in the Australian Top 50 a year after its release.

Frontman Kavyen Temperley says the song was inspired by the various “subcultures” he noticed at inner-city music venue, the Rosemount Hotel.

“Later I was watching the 7.30 Report and all of these religious people were talking just like the subcultures were,” he says. “They were arguing about the meaning of God but they all agreed about the idea of hell.”

Likewise, the genesis for Wolfmother’s Joker and the Thief came from the diversity within our society.

Singer Andrew Stockdale recently told MTV that the rocker was about misfits, “people who don’t really fit into society. They have their eccentric personalities and are intriguing people to talk to, but they just don’t function (in society)”.

Melbourne’s one-man band Gotye reckons he is better at “moving little bits of sound around on a computer than writing lyrics”. Nonetheless, the 15,000-plus songwriters who vote for the APRA awards thought his song, Heart’s a Mess, was among the best written in the past year.

Gotye says the Triple J favourite revolves around a relationship breakdown and subsequent “rebound searching for emotional connection with something, anything”.

More Triple J listeners connected with the final nominee than any of the other potential APRA winners. One Crowded Hour by Melburnians Augie March won the broadcaster’s Hottest 100 poll and is a big favourite to take out the song of the year trophy.

While misperceived as a love song, One Crowded Hour was actually inspired by Tim Bowden’s biography of wartime correspondent Neil Davis, who was killed in Bangkok while covering a coup attempt. Augie March songwriter Glenn Richards read the book while house-sitting for singer songwriter Deborah Conway.

The song, off their Australian Music Prize-winning album Moo, You Bloody Choir, was written in San Francisco during a short break in a US tour.

“I didn’t see it doing much more than providing the label with at least one song . . . that would have, of all things, a chorus,” says Richards. The APRA song of the year, along with genre-based, songwriter of the year and most performed work awards, will be handed out at Tuesday’s event.