Nick Murphy (FKA Chet Faker) announces 40-date world tour behind second album

Nick Murphy (FKA Chet Faker) hits the road in earnest behind the April 26 release of his second album Run Fast Sleep Naked.

He and his band will do 40 shows across three continents over six months throughout 2019.

He starts off in Australia, on the national Groovin’ The Moo festival and three headliners through Frontier Touring at Melbourne’s The Forum on Wednesday, May 1, Brisbane’s The Tivoli on Wednesday, May 8 and Sydney’s Enmore Theatre on Tuesday, May 14.

He also does Darwin’s BASSINTHEGRASS on May 18.

He then heads to North America for 17 dates, starting in Chicago on May 29 and winding up in New York on July 12.

The shows take in Minneapolis, Vancouver,  Los Angeles, Toronto, Boston and Washington DC.

After a three month break, Murphy does another 17 dates through Europe and the UK.

These begin on October 1 in Lisbon, Portugal and finish up on October 25 in Dublin.

This leg also takes in Turin, Italy, Munich, Prague, Warsaw, Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, Manchester and London.

Murphy has also debuted a live video for ‘Sanity’ the soulful lead single from Run Fast Sleep Naked, which was written at Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La studio in Southern California.

Directed by Oscar Zabala, it features footage from his 2017 European tour, and has already been added to Spotify’s New Music Friday playlist in 33 countries.

The official video was directed by BabyBaby and filmed in the Canary Islands.

Run Fast Sleep Naked (issued through Downtown Records / Future Classic / Opulent) follows the widely praised 2014 debut, the Australian platinum Built on Glass which he released as Chet Faker and won him seven ARIAs.

It led to him playing sold out shows on five continents; appearing at major international festivals including Coachella and Glastonbury; performing on TV’s The Ellen DeGeneres Show and Jimmy Kimmel Live!; and hundreds of millions of views for his music videos including over 180 million for the Hiro Murai-directed clip for ‘Gold’.

To make Run Fast Sleep Naked, Murphy spent four years travelling the world solo with a microphone in his suitcase, recording his vocal tracks in whichever spaces and environments most inspired him.

These included his grandmother’s living room, a studio in Tokyo, a vacation rental he shared with his family in New Zealand and his own New York City apartment.

During that time, the singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and record producer immersed himself in intense self-examination, a process aided by his reading of Joseph Campbell’s theories of the artist’s shaman-like role in modern society.

The album was primarily recorded at Figure 8 in Brooklyn, for which he enlisted 15 musicians and a full orchestra.

“It’s almost like I was finding different shapes and colours from around the world, and then bringing them back and putting them all together,” Murphy says.

“If you sit in one space for a long period of time, you get settled and stop experiencing the world in a new way,” he adds. “There’s a kind of power in leaping into the void without set structures and systems in place.”

The album was co-produced with Dave Harrington.