Sam Cromack describes Like Love as “a pretty record.” Certainly, the quiet, measured approach of Ball Park Music’s eighth album owes more to folk than the effervescent indie rock on which the Brisbane quintet forged their reputation, but it’s something of a full-circle moment for the singer/guitarist. “I grew up with a huge appreciation of folk or singer-songwriter music, so in many ways that feels like my first building block for creating music,” he tells Apple Music. “And ever since the beginning, when we’d have a pretty moment on a record, we’d go, ‘That’s a nice thing we sometimes touch on, we should explore that more someday.’ I guess that feeling finally bubbled over.” Dialing down the bombast and stripping back the instrumentation offered space to explore more intricate vocal arrangements and presented Cromack with a challenge. “I felt like the songwriting was going to have to do the heavy lifting on this, and I tried to see it as a creative sabbatical—open yourself up, broaden your imagination, go down roads you haven’t gone down, and see what happens.” For Cromack that involved incorporating a character-based approach to some of his lyrics, straying from the first-person storytelling he’s favored in the past. “As it was coming together, this record seemed primarily to be an exploration of love songs, and some did start to take on a bit of a character sort of thing,” he says. “I think I was subconsciously writing a few things where I was living vicariously through friends whose relationships were going up and down.” “We’re seven records in, and we were really eager to get out of our comfort zone,” he adds. “We felt more than ever that we wanted to drift to some places where we were feeling less experienced.” Here, Cromack takes Apple Music to those places, revealing the stories behind most of the songs on Like Love. “Coast is Clear” “I wrote the song when I was pretty new to parenthood, and I felt like I was having real difficulty adjusting and being present as a father and a partner. The original lyric in the chorus was ‘Someday I’ll appear’—this hope that someday I’ll get better at this and I’ll truly appear and be here like you need me to. But as the song developed it just didn’t roll off the tongue as well. I think perhaps Dean [Hanson, guitarist] suggested, ‘Why don’t you try “Someday you’ll appear”?’ Suddenly, it took on this mysterious new quality and had more of a possibility of romantic notions to it, and it all fell into place. In the past, I might have been like, ‘No, that’s compromising my true story’ or whatever, but I was trying to be more open to letting changes like that be part of the song.” “Overwhelming Sound” “My wife and I were having our morning coffee and talking about our favorite cups, and I started writing a song about your favorite cup. I started imagining a situation where a family breaks down and all you leave with is your favorite cup. It was all very silly. But the melody stuck, and I thought, ‘I really want to stick my teeth into it.’ So I just dived right in. This is probably the most character-y song I’ve done in some time, where it really does imagine that hypothetical of a family falling apart.” “Please Don’t Move to Melbourne” “I guess I would have been in my late twenties when I wrote the chorus; that period of change where you’re shifting from being kids to slightly being adults. That stereotype of people abandoning Brisbane usually for Melbourne was always this running joke. But when a bunch of friends did it, it felt like this big change and the start of a new chapter. Suddenly, you’re like, ‘Do I like living here? Am I going to stay here forever?’ It doesn’t have a direct, clear narrative that’s totally based on my own experience, it’s this mishmash of feelings. It ends up having more of a romantic notion—I’m sure more people imagine it in a relationship context of a breakup. I guess I was touching on a few friends’ relationships or just touching on [my] own pain or difficulties or past experiences.” “As Far as I Can Tell” “I’ve always loved Simon & Garfunkel, and I got obsessed with their song ‘The Only Living Boy in New York’ in the lead-up to making this album. I loved how they used the big [vocal harmonies], and I was like, I want to do that. I want to have a song that opens up into nothing but voices. Singing ended up being a big theme musically or productionwise on the record. This one is a straightforward love song. I guess it’s one of those moments of reflection, of being grateful for what you have, and having a desire to do better and try harder and pick yourself up.” “Like Love” “Moving into our thirties, a lot of our friends are settling down, people are getting married or starting families, doing adult things. In some ways, I foolishly thought this is the beginning of this long plateau that goes until the day we die, and maybe there is no more drama or chaos, but apparently that’s not true. So this song kind of starts there. Again, one of those modes where you’re like, I am in chaos, I am capable of fucking up so much, and really the one consistent good thing which I’m noticing and which I should strive for more of is something like love, which is a net positive force in your life.” “NORK” “‘NORK’ stands for ‘No One Really Knows,’ which was the song title for a long time, and is the opening lyric. I always thought ‘No One Really Knows’ was a terribly generic song title, and at some point on our lists we wrote it down as ‘NORK’ and were like, ‘Now we’re talking, that’s a song title!’ There are so many love songs [on the album] with some arguably pretty generic or straightforward titles. We need to have a little spice in there somewhere.” “Pain & Love” “Isn’t that the crazy beauty of family that you’re essentially trapped in this relationship with these people that you’d otherwise never spend any time with, and you do feel love, but you can also feel pain? You have to honor and nurture both those feelings and accept that they’ll always be there. We were thinking The Beach Boys, let’s swing it, make it a bit goofy, have some fun with the arrangement and the instrumentation. Having this marching feel to it almost added to the absurdity; it almost gives me family catch-up vibes.” “Fast Forward” “I always worried that that group vocal at the end singing ‘only love will save you’ was a bit on the nose. But the band were like, ‘That’s absolutely the final word.’ It’s got very similar themes to ‘As Far as I Can Tell’ and ‘Like Love,’ just reflecting on your relationship and what you’ve got and how you could be better.”