Listening to The Steadfast Shepherd’s self-titled debut album is like dropping in on someone else’s black and white dreams and lying there for a beautiful half hour. You pass the time staring at the ceiling and taking in stories the folk duo weaves of people and places it seems you should remember. If longing has a sound, this is it.

Incidentally, singer and guitarist Nathan Collins admits that he was homesick when they were writing it. He tells Dressed in the Dark: “It’s an album written in England, about a story set in Australia in the early 1900s. I was reading a lot of Patrick White at the time, and was really missing home, but was also feeling really liberated by not having to be in Australia.”

Nathan and his wife Fairlie (vocals, organ, piano and flute) started The Steadfast Shepherd in 2006 when they moved to England for a couple of years to travel. Leaving behind a room full of instruments and effects pedals, they bought a cheap acoustic guitar and started writing.

“I usually come up with the basic idea of the song, then hum it or sing it incessantly for a few days,” says Nathan, “Before I know it, Fairlie’s singing along and has her own idea on the next step in the development of the song.”

That their songs develop from such skeletal beginnings into an album that tells an intricately connected and profoundly emotive narrative is nothing short of masterful. “I wanted to write an album that could take the time required to explore a theme and a sound more deeply than what is easily achievable in a singular, three-minute song.” That explains away our only negative comment about the album – we wish it were longer!

So what’s the story then? “The story is a true story from Blackwood, Victoria, an old gold-rush town we lived in for a while. It’s located about an hour out of Melbourne and sits in the middle of a state forest.

“In 1908, a gold-miner, fuelled with mistaken jealousy, shot a lay-preacher as he sat reading a Bible on the veranda at the front of his house. The bullet passed through the Bible, hit him and killed him. That Bible now sits in a glass cabinet in the little wooden church in Blackwood. I have my doubts about it being the actual bullet-pierced book, but it makes a pretty good story.

“It’s a way of writing that we hadn’t tried before and it opens up having different layers of meaning through the lyrics: the lyrics are about the characters in the story, but sometimes they’re about us too.”

The gentleness of their melodies belies the violence of their lyrics. On close listening, ‘Shot at first light’ is especially unsettling because a less attentive ear would find it soothing.

Actually, a few of Nathan and Fairlie’s friends have admitted using their music to settle their children to sleep, spurring The Steadfast Shepherd on to its new concept piece. “The idea is to create a continuous 20-minute piece, that allows us to explore a more spacious and droney sound, and might be more suitable to play to your infants than an album full of jealousy and murder!”

On the topic of children, we wonder whether they expect that their almost-15-week-old daughter Ada will one day join The Steadfast Shepherd. “We’ve joked about it a few times! For us, the music is such a natural part of our home life, that it would seem strange for her to not somehow be a part of it. I’d love her to be involved, but I’d also love her to find her own path, express her own thoughts, and create her own art. There’s no obligation, but it would help if she could carry an instrument or two!”

The Steadfast Shepherd is currently based in Hobart, Australia’s most southern city, and is taking its time piecing together another album and may be supporting friend Tamas Wells on his tour through Japan and China in November.

In the meantime we’ll all have to content ourselves with buying their mp3s on iTunes. Click on the button below.

Adele Jarrett-Kerr