Toby Mobbs – Man With A Plan

Toby Mobbs.

When it comes to describing Albury musician Toby Mobbs, words like dedicated, organised, and passionate really don’t do him justice. After all, how else do you sum up someone who is actively living out their musical dream and realising their own ten-year-plan?

He’s an unassuming person, too. Describing himself as a librarian by day and pop-folk singer-songwriter by night, Mobbs has been a lifelong fan of music, and creating his own work for almost as long. However, it wasn’t until 2016 that the world was introduced to his talents.

After a couple of private releases in high school which will stay hidden in the archives, Mobbs began to share his craft in 2016 by way of an open mic performance. Before long, he was composing and creating in earnest, going so far as to release a solo instrumental titled ‘A Letter To Glenroy’ in 2019.

But 2020 was when the floodgates opened. Having crafted a plan for his own artistry and the myriad steps it would take to make his musical dream a reality, Mobbs put things into action, releasing a number of singles and beginning a journey that would result in the release of his first album, Placid In The Rough, in 2022.

While albums are fine, the other side of the coin is Mobbs’ dedication to touring. With each October featuring either a national or a regional tour, he piles into his Mazda3 hatch and doesn’t let up until he’s either pleased his fans around the country with his artistry, or converted a few newbies with his serene sounds.

As his press release puts it, “His 2022 national tour to promote his debut album saw him solo drive 14,500km in 28 days to play a show in every Australian state and territory.” No matter how you slice it, that’s an impressive undertaking.

This year, Mobbs has proved his ten-year-plan of constant singles, albums, and tours is not simply a crazy dream, and he’s released his second full-length record, In Between The Words. It’s a blissful piece of work, with its eight songs among some of the finest and most accomplished you’ll hear this year.

Co-produced with Matt Cross (who also took on arranging duties), the record is rounded out with the talents of Simon McKenna on engineering and mixing duties, mastering by Forrester Savell, and Kate Cossor crafting the beautiful artwork. Together, what is a team effort arrives as a stunning testament to Mobbs’ artistry and his impeccable ability to pen a tune.

Now, he’s getting ready to hit the road again in October, with a ten-date tour kicking off in his birthplace of Wagga Wagga, and wrapped up in his adopted home of Albury-Wodonga. With shows in Canberra, Newcastle, Mount Gambier, Launceston, and more in the middle, there’s hardly an excuse not to catch him out on the road.

In celebration of In Between The Words’ release, and in anticipation of his upcoming tour, Mobbs was kind enough to spend some time for an in-depth chat, going deep into his musical journey, using rotary phones to record, recruiting one of his musical idols for the album, and everything in between.

Tyler Jenke: When did you first actually start playing music or getting interested in the world of music? 

Toby Mobbs: I wanted to be cool in high school. That's the reason everyone gets into it. Isn't it? I'm not going to bush about it; I just wanted to be a rock star. Who wouldn't? 

I had musical heroes like [Jimi] Hendrix and [Joe] Satriani, and I wanted to be the best guitarist. I'd spend hours every day playing, and that's all I did in high school – my other grades kind of suffered a little bit.

I did very well in music and then it went into uni and work life. I actually applied in year 12 for the ANU jazz course just for a music degree, not because I love jazz. My playing was fine, but my theory was terrible, so I didn't get in and I thought, “Maybe I'll teach music and maybe I'll get an education degree?”

And then I thought, “I don't want to teach what I love doing. So I'll just do teaching.” I was doing this double degree at Charles Sturt University in Wagga, it was a double degree in English literature and modern history – both of the subjects that I did reasonably poorly in uni at high school. I was on track to be teaching and I started thinking, “What am I doing?” And that's when I started working in libraries. 

I applied for ANU in 2009, and it wasn't until 2016, after I'd moved to Albury for my permanent job here at Charles Sturt, that I felt really anxious about getting back on stage. Two of my closest friends gave me a push just to do an open mic because I was even nervous about that, and I haven't stopped since. Thanks again to Jarrod and Kate for pushing me to do that open mic.

I made music the priority again – it hasn't stopped and it will maintain as the priority. It was one open mic in 2016 that pushed things and so that's pretty much the short version of it.

Toby Mobbs. Image: TrewBella Photography

TJ: Had you been writing a lot of your own songs before that and just not sort of sharing them with people?

TM: Well, I was writing songs in high school. In 2008, I did this little instrumental album, and then in 2012 I did this EP which I thought was fantastic because I could record from home. I was of course able to mix and master it…

TJ: And let me guess, in hindsight, it sounds awful?

TM: Oh, you have got no idea. I gave them no headroom room, and so when I got it mastered, I don't know what they were thinking. They were probably thinking, “Oh, this guy doesn't know what he's doing.” So they don't exist, except for lots of copies still available in my bedroom cupboards. 

I get asked a bit; people say, “How long have you been playing for?” And, to a degree, I find it an odd question. Because I don’t think it's always relevant, if that makes sense?  I get it, because I've been playing since 2004. but I've only been doing it properly since 2016/2017. I loved all the old Battle Of The Bands and stuff in high school, and I’d play covers then, but since 2016 I haven’t played covers – it's all my own music. 

I think one of the songs that I played at that first open mic is one of the ones that's on this current album. It's not new music, but it's been re-imagined with co-production with Matt Cross.

So when someone says, “How long have you been playing for?”, it's like, “Well, I've been playing a long time, but it's not always been good.”

TJ: That makes sense, people do usually want that easy narrative that they can remember and latch onto. But when it comes to releasing music, I think it was 2019 that services like Spotify have for your first song. Had you recorded any music before then, or was that three years spent honing your craft and getting things ready?

TM: I think I actually wrote a song for Tropfest’s scoring competition, which was called Tropscore, and after that I reworked some songs, but I think you might be referring to ‘A Letter To Glenroy’. That was an instrumental. and I think that was, for me, a test of getting back into the studio. 

So there were no plans of any albums or anything, it was just me wanting to record something and seeing how it goes. So I wouldn’t really call it a single. It wasn't until 2020 that I started putting out singles and working towards albums and that kind of thing. 

TJ: So what made you go from writing songs like that to actually releasing songs that were more representative of you as a musician?

TM: I think as a musician, and in; general the more you know, the more you know that you don't know. Music recording and performing and writing is such a journey of getting to a stage where you think you’re good, you’re proud, and then you learn more and realise how much you didn’t know.

But I set myself a project. I believe it was during COVID in 2020, because we were all at home, but I wanted to write, record, mix, master, and release a single song from a home studio and release it. I wanted to put out a song where I could say, “I do everything on that song”, as a lot of upcoming musos do. 

So I did that and, and that was like an Easter project while I was home. So I released that and I thought, “that's cool”, but that was before I learned that people have specific mixing and mastering roles for a reason, and it's not as big of an accomplishment as you think it is. Well, unless you're at a certain level and you know what you're doing.

I started working on another single, ‘Moments’, which I think is my favourite track off the previous album. I really like that song because I wanted to put something out that people didn’t respond to by saying, “Oh yeah, the singer songwriter”. I wanted people to say, “Wow, I didn't know he had that in him”. So it's kind of like a hard rock, ‘90s indie track and I love it. 

But after that I was like, “Where do I go from there?” And that's where I started getting an idea for an album, but I decided every three months I'd keep releasing a single and it just culminated in eight tracks. It was about halfway through that process that I started looking at things more critically; where I was as a musician, looking at my age, and that big lot of time that I kind of lost.

I'm not sure if you felt the same way, but when you have this big gap of time that you haven't spent honing your craft, you kind of think, “Oh, I'm trying to catch up with myself.” You feel like I should have been at a certain point.

Now, I'm one of the most organised people you'll ever meet, and halfway through the last album I put together a plan. On my desktop, I’ve got folders where I set myself a 10 year plan from 2020 to 2030, which is four albums, four national tours, and four regional tours.

So each time an album comes out, that same October, I'll do a national tour, and the following year, I'll always do a regional tour, where I can always drive and then come back the same day, so I'm not paying for accommodation.

The albums, the national tours, and the regional tours will all have related artworks, too. It's very flowy, and there's lots of symmetry between all of them. For example, track four and five have always got featured artists, the name of the album always comes from the first track of the album, iIt's always four words and five syllables to the name of the album. So there's lots of that kind of symmetry.

Something else worth mentioning is that, with this new album, I’m at the halfway mark, so the Italian operatic part that’s being sung at the end of ‘Surrender’, the translation of what they’re singing is; “Now we're at our halfway mark, and the curtain starts to close, we'll be back after a short break with the final two to go.”

So it's saying this is our halfway mark. It's a ten year plan of four albums, four national tours and four regional tours. It's basically me saying, “Look, if I haven't gotten somewhere in ten years then I don't know what to do”. And that is ten years to put everything into it and just at least then say that I gave it a really good shot and if nothing else, I've got eight tours and four albums to look back on.

TJ: That’s honestly such an admirable way of doing it, and it’s a nice watermark against which to see how you’re faring, isn’t it?

TM: Honestly, I do feel though that sometimes it's too organised and I mean, don't get me wrong, when I've got a new album out, it means that I've gotten somewhere.

I'm a list guy, Tyler; you should see all my spreadsheets. When I've got a release, I've got these 90 steps that I follow in order, and that relieves some stress because as an independent artist, you've got to do everything that a normal signed artist is doing. 

So I'm making sure that I'm ticking all those boxes and little things like surveying with ARIA and ringing them up and seeing where on the charts you were, even though you weren't on a visible chart. I'm going to be calling them up on Monday and just saying, “Hey, look, I'm just really curious,” and little things that a manager would be doing.

I'm just trying to treat it professionally. I kind of think that I'm more like a manager than an artist. So I'm not as go-with-the-flow as an artist would usually be, I'm more like a manager staying on top of artists. 

TJ: Just going back a little bit to your first album, Placid In The Rough, that was the first one you released to the public that you’d done by yourself, had been mixed and mastered properly and everything. Given you had this plan, was that a daunting process to get this plan underway?

TM: I should caveat that by saying there was only one track, ‘Making Lemonade’, on the previous album was mixed and done by myself. But it was a slow transition because on the previous album, my audio engineer would have loved me to go in and get everyone to record everything.

But at that point I didn’t know how to get a drummer in to record, so I just bought EZdrummer 2. This current album, it takes everything I learned from the previous one and starts me off on a high already. It already starts me off there and ignores all the stuff ups and things I did incorrectly so it's already at a high level.

So I wouldn't say it was daunting because I knew that I had to do it. It was just like, “No, we're not going to go the easy route for things”. I mean, financially an album is absolutely daunting, and it's very tricky. I got a small grant from Murray Arts specifically to cover the drumming.

Also, I'm not sure if you've seen my story about the rotary phones? I collected 24 rotary phones and my dad and I converted them into microphones. His soldering is much better than mine, and he recently retired after decades of fixing electronics.

We recorded the whole album with them alongside studio mics. So, that’s the reason why if you're wondering why it might have a bit of a retro feel. That's also included the insert that we use for the artwork for the actual CD and the vinyl.

Part of that grant, part of the way I wanted to add interest to that grant is by saying, “Hey, we're doing something no one's done before”. I mean, using a rotary phone mic as a microphone is something people do, but I've never seen someone record an entire drum kit using it or using that many in one go.

So it was quite daunting only having received that grant and nothing else. It took a little while to record getting the vinyl done, but because it's part of this plan, it's just something that will get done. Things like this aren't a question of, “Am I going to do it?” It's just like, “Well, it's part of the plan”.

TJ: So there’s this nice and symmetrical plan, where each album has the eight songs, then you’ve got the regional and national tour each October. So I should ask, why is the tour in the tenth month and not the eighth month? I thought you were organised!

TM: [Laughs] I can balance that out for you. The reason it's in October is that it's the Goldilocks zone. If I'm saying a national tour, it's a national tour. For my national tour in 2022, it was every capital city in 28 days in my hatchback, 14,500km for me. This upcoming one is roughly the second largest city in every state and territory. 

So a national tour in October is not quite as hot as it could be in the Northern Territory, it's not too cold in Tasmania, we're not quite at our flood season in Queensland, or if we are, I'm just ahead of it. So it’s a sweet spot, temperature-wise.

I forgot to mention, too, the cover artwork for the album always features eight native flora species to represent the eight songs on the album. For the national tour, we use those eight and we add two more species to represent the ten shows.

The national tour is always eight large city shows, but it always starts off in Wagga, where I was born, and ends in Albury Wodonga, where I live now. So even the national tours are eight shows, plus two other local ones. [Laughs] Does that make up for it?

TJ: I just appreciate the amount of thought that's gone into it, if I’m honest. Plans like this, with their symmetrical nature, very considered lifespan, and admirable concepts, it’s the sort of thing that I have always aspired to, if I’m candid.

TM: Thanks. If I do another one, it's going to go completely away from all the rigidity and it's going to be like, “Okay, let's try something new”. 

TJ: So, nine songs? Still has to be a satisfying amount, right?

TM: Yeah, this is a really good plan and there are great steps for the ten year process, but after that, I just want to break free of it and be a bit more loosey-goosey, experiment with things, and also not have deadlines. That's the main thing. If it takes me another five years for a new album after that, that's fine; so be it. 

TJ: These regional and national tours, that’s a very hefty undertaking. What are those shows like for you? I’m assuming it can be a bit of a mixed bag, especially as a smaller artist going to smaller locations where they don’t necessarily know you?

TM: Originally, before I did a national tour or anything, I thought, “I'd feel like I'd made it if I could book a national tour that is just ticketed events or book any tour that is just ticketed events”. I felt like I’d never do that. It's funny how you look back at what your ultimate goal was, and you then remember what your ultimate goal was before you reached that one. 

The tour in 2020 was incredibly nerve-wracking because we were still in COVID. I was going to be shaking hands, meeting heaps of people, and the idea of getting sick was terrifying because on that tour, there was no wiggle room. I think the biggest day was ten-and-a-half hours of driving.

And that wasn't uncommon. There were a couple ten-hour days. Most of the time I was driving eight or nine hours a day. So I'm either driving, playing, or sleeping. So the thought of me getting sick was incredibly daunting. The thought of my 20-year-old Mazda3 hatch breaking down was very daunting. 

Then there was the fear of – knock wood – any thefts, because that's something a lot of musicians have to deal with, unfortunately. And when you're moving so much gear around in a car, going so many different places, it just seems inevitable. 

At the time, October 2022, we had huge floods in Queensland. I remember an ABC News article said something like the wildest weather events are basically encompassing the entire country; the worst weather we’d seen in a decade. I'm like, “Great!” So I was like a day ahead of all this stuff happening, and I was looking at what to do. My parents were quite worried about roads that were going to be cut off. And they were. There were roads that were being cut off because of flooding, there were fires in different areas, and I don't know how it happened.

It was incredibly stressful, because I'd spent the previous nine months paying for booking, and when you're doing it all yourself, you don't have a manager to rebook everything and take care of that. So It was incredibly daunting and I wasn't relaxed until the whole thing was over. I've learned a lot from that one. 

This upcoming tour made me feel more confident in how to do it. There are new places. I haven't played in most of these places, and I kind of think there's two schools of thought with it. I've heard other people say that they feel very strongly that you should play to your current base and build from there. Go where you know you have a following and that's where great gigs come from. 

I'm kind of doing the opposite. I'm diving straight in to where I don't know anyone and making it hard for myself basically because I want to reach new people. And that's hard to do.

So it may not be the best way, it may not be what everyone else sticks to, but it's diving in the deep end. I've set myself a challenge, and I want to see how I go. Silly or not, it's happening.

TJ: I feel like I haven't actually touched on the new album much. You’ve mentioned continuously growing as an artist, and learning from what came before. This one is indeed a bit different because you’re co-producing for the first time, but it also feels a lot more cohesive too. So, how do you view this record? How do you differentiate between this album and your first effort?

TM: The main reason it’s more cohesive is because it was produced and recorded as an album, whereas the last one is a collection of eight singles that are completely separate from each other. There was a plan of attack. 

When I was doing the previous one, I hadn't written some of the rest of the songs, but I was already releasing them as singles and they're very detached. Don't get me wrong, I'm still proud of it, but on this one, Matt Cross and I spent six months co-producing it.

Before we even started looking at recording, I did some draft demos. I spent two weeks recording here at home, and I sent them to Matt and we worked through each one, and that was a six-month process. 

Working with him was fantastic, too. He has talents in areas that I am not equipped with. He has a fresh outlook, fresh ideas. He took a lot of songs in a very different direction than I had expected. And because we were both co-producing, he would give me an idea and I said, “No, look, I want to push it in this way and I want kind of like this element here, and then we tweak this,” for example.

He also arranged the album, too, so by the time we got to recording, we were working off a very solid road map. We were basically re-recording for quality, not for ideas. So everything was already there and then of course moving it on to getting, getting it mastered.

Previously though, my audio engineer, Simon McKenna, did an in-house master, but this time we got it mastered by Forrester Savell. It was also interesting because there was a very long gap of not putting any music out, whereas with the previous one, there were always new songs coming out. But I'm so proud of this one and it really is a step up.

TJ: Something else I want to mention was the Gang Of Youths connection. Talk me through how this came about?

TM: So, I'm the biggest Gang of Youths fan you'll meet. I was watching a documentary by Winterboune with my best friend, Kate, and in the credits, I was like, “Oh, hang on, I think I just saw [drummer] Donnie's [Borzestowski] name in the credits”.

Then I realised he worked on their album and on the documentary, and I said to Kate, “Geez, that would be amazing.” Imagine just reaching out and just saying, “Hey, can you just play four seconds of tambourine? Let me loop it.” I just want to have you part of it. And I thought, “Wouldn't that be amazing?”

Then I found out that Donnie and I have a mutual friend, so I messaged him, asked him about my idea, and it turns out they went to school together. So I asked for an email so I wasn’t just sliding into his DMs and annoying him or something, and then we made contact. It took a while, though, because he was recording the most recent Gang Of Youths album.

So he recorded some percussion for me, and then a bit later on I said, “Do you want to play drums on one of the tracks?” and he said, “Yeah, I can do that.” So he was a session musician on it and having him on the album was amazing. 

I first saw Gang Of Youths live, back in 2015, I think, and the first time I heard them, I think it was hearing ‘Poison Drum’ on triple j. I remember being in Wagga, I was driving and I was like, “Goddamn it, this is the kind of music that I want to write, that's in my head, and they beat me to it.”

It's a really weird feeling. It's like it was so good I was getting angry. Ever since then, they've been my absolute biggest musical influence because of how they make me feel. No other music makes me feel the same way as Gang Of Youths does. 

TJ: That must have been a bit of a life-affirming moment for you, then?

TM: It was crazy, and Donnie got back to me on my birthday, too. I mean, don't get me wrong, he was just a session musician for me. But still, to have that connection, I will always have that and it will always be a part of that album. It’s crazy, because I just wanted him to play tambourine for four seconds and so I could loop it for a bit.

TJ: With this larger plan that you have, do you find it hard to look at the albums as individual entities, or do you view them as smaller parts of the larger plan?

TM: I kind of think about how audiences are thinking about them. They'll see this new album and they'll be like, “Oh, that kind of looks a little similar to the last one.” I'm really looking forward to the end of that ten-year period and then saying to them, “Hey, I've got something to show you in case you didn't notice. Did you ever notice that every album has eight tracks on it?”

In my head, they are all separate entities, because I can be like, “Okay, that one’s done, let's move on to the next thing.” After the attached national tour, I can say, “Okay, job done.” So they’re all separate. I really enjoy crossing things off the list and not looking back on them for a little while, but I do like memorialising my achievements, too.

TJ: With the release of this recent album, as someone constantly growing, evolving, and learning, what does In Between The Words say about who you are as an artist at this current time?

TM: I kind of wish that I started at this point, to be honest. But you can't, it's all a process, isn't it? What it says to me as an artist is that I guess that I'm capable of this step up from what you've heard already. 

And it's hard, I'm not sure if you feel the same way, but if we look at it like an actor, an actor sometimes has terrible roles and sometimes has great roles. But I think there's more leniency there. Whereas with a band or an artist, it's kind of like you can always judge them by their lowest quality output. 

Maybe I'm reading too much into that, but it's hard when you make something and it lives on online forever. It's scary to look back on something and think, “Oh, I wish I would have done this. I wish I would have changed this.”

When someone's got you on Shuffle on Spotify, they could listen to anything so far back, and they might think, “Oh, I'm not sure about this artist.” You want it to be cohesive as well, you want it to be able to sort of sit alongside everything, and I feel like if you're making great music now, then in your mind you're almost thinking that the last album is not of the same quality.

I mean, this is how I'm sort of feeling at least. You sort of feel as though everyone is feeling the same way you do and they're judging it very critically even though you know they're not, but you do.

This album, for me, I want people to see it as a benchmark and my new benchmark. The last one saw me learning and at each point, I thought it was great until I learned more about certain things. I wish I could have done this album. I'm doing everything that previously I wish I would have done, and I'm proud of it.

Toby Mobbs’ In Between The Words is out now, with physical copies available via JB Hi-Fi He’ll be hitting the road on October 2nd, with tickets on sale now, and full details available below.

Toby Mobbs – In Between The Words Album Tour

2nd October, 2024
Duo show with Matt Cross
The Curious Rabbit, Wiradjuri Country/Wagga Wagga, NSW

3rd October, 2024
Duo show with Matt Cross
The Baso, Ngambri/Canberra, ACT

4th October, 2024
Duo show with Matt Cross
The Press Book House, Mulubinba/Newcastle, NSW

8th October, 2024
Elixir Music House, Gimuy/Cairns, QLD

13th October, 2024
Godinmayin Rijard Rivers, Emungalan/Katherine, NT

18th October, 2024
Regional Arts Gallery, Goomburrup/Bunbury, WA

23rd October, 2024
5290 Bar, Berrin/Mount Gambier, SA

25th October, 2024
Beav’s Bar, Djilang/Geelong, VIC

27th October, 2024
Valentino Safe Co, Kanamaluka Country/Launceston, TAS

3rd November, 2024
Full band show
The Lincoln, Bungambrawatha/Albury-Wondonga, NSW

Tickets on sale now via Toby Mobbs’ website.