Jedd Hughes describes life with transcendental precision: a sleepless night in Modesto; a childhood on the edge of the sprawling Australian desert; an old friend whose wit is still razor-sharp, finally at peace. Listening to Hughes, you don’t just picture a place or a person. You experience them.

It makes sense, then, that Hughes’s technicolor world has often felt too formidable for three verses and a chorus. He couldn’t settle for making music that was anything but all of him, and so we waited – waited on the kid legends befriended and believed in – to find a way to capture the smoky stories and sounds that danced and beckoned to him, just out of focus.