Don Walker sings songs that draw their blood and guts from this wide brown land as vividly as any singer ever has. Most of his songs are set in regional towns and the spaces between.

They're about good people, often with bad troubles and long, scarred memories that wander and fester between former wives and dead mates and the inevitable larger questions that settle in their wake.

In between the illicit drag racing thrill of his Cold Chisel rocker "Yakuza Girls" and the baleful piano blues of "At The Piccolo Bar", chances are you know some of the people Don Walker means.

Whatever happiness they find is coloured by the heat haze and medicinal grog and sheer emptiness that seeps through his songs - they're not about politics, art, culture or fashion. They’re about people and times and things that don’t change; more often can’t be changed.

It's fitting that the first track on Don's new CD 'Cutting Back' is the last one that Slim Dusty recorded. Don's reclaimed version of "Get Along" is the first leg of a trip we all recognise from some angle, from the proverbial black stump to eternity. But nobody describes the experience more eloquently than this.

It's also a classic example of Walker's gift for song as conversation: as gripping as Tom Waits or Merle Haggard only here and now, maybe on a phone on the Barkly Highway or somewhere equally as desolate and familiar.

That's why they turn up in insomniac driving songs like "Four In the Morning" and bottomless love songs like "The Way You Are Tonight".

In truth, each of those projects is part of the same 360-degree vista that Don Walker's been sketching in ever finer detail since the first Cold Chisel album of '78.

Producer Phil Punch has been in on the picture long enough to seize the right light for every scene and Cutting Back is without doubt their finest cut to date.

"The aim," says Don, "was to find a definitive performance of each song." What's more, he adds, "there were many more songs written and recorded than appear on the album." Their time will perhaps come. For now, Cutting Back is just the gold that's drifted into his pan.


Don Walker on Studio 5 Live, 7 to 8pm this Thursday July 13th