Don’t expect anything from Nick Murphy, and the two of you will get along just fine.
Or, maybe you should expect everything.
The Australian artist formerly known as Chet Faker will perform his electronic dance music Thurdsay at the Ogden Twilight Concert Series in the Ogden Amphitheater. Murphy promises the show will be unlike any other he’s done.
Asked what an Ogden audience can expect from his upcoming concert, Murphy answers playfully.
“I’ve spent most of my so-far short carer trying to make sure people don’t expect anything. … Or, that they expect everything,” Murphy teased in a recent phone interview with the Standard-Examiner. “I’ve never really played the same show more than twice — and I never want to do that.”
Murphy said he does guarantee to bring to the stage an abundance of improvisation and energy.
“It’’ll be a bit of everything, he said. “One thing that’s important to me, I’ve been very lucky to have a connection to fans of all ages. And with the younger ages I feel a responsibility to show them what live music is and can be.”
Murphy says he combines an electronic background with the musicality of instruments to propel his shows forward.
“I give kids the electronics and lights, but also show what happens when human beings work together on a stage,” he said.
Each crowd is “distinctly unique,” according to Murphy, and he says part of his job as a musician is to be able to read a crowd and give them what they need.
“I think there’s always a give and take in a show,” he said. “Sometimes we seem to forget that, and there’s just a lot of take, take, take.”
Murphy believes there’s a reason that in this digital age we still come together in an old-school live-audience setting.
“We have all this technology, but there’s just something we can’t replicate by being in the same room,” he said. “I think it’s a psychic connection.”
Murphy’s latest album is his sophomore full-length release “Run Fast Sleep Naked,” out April 26. He made the record over four years of traveling the world with a microphone in his suitcase, then recording vocal tracks whenever the moment felt right — in his New York City apartment, his grandmother’s living room, a vacation rental in New Zealand.
The album, Murphy insists, is quite different from his 2014 full-length debut, “Built on Glass.”
“And hopefully, I get to say that about every album release,” he said. “I want it to be completely different, I don’t want to be one of those artists who repeats and flogs a dead horse.”
That can be a fine line to walk, Murphy admits, because some fans just want music to remain the same from album to album.
“But I have to keep exploring, that’s my job,” he said.
Murphy’s first full-length album was released when he was 25 years old. Now he’s 30, and what a difference five years can make.
“Those are two very different ages, and somewhere in there you figure out some reasonably important s— for yourself,” he said.
And that’s what “Run Fast Sleep Naked” was about, Murphy says — searching and asking questions, and developing one’s spiritual needs.
Special guest for Thursday’s show will be the Brooklyn, N.Y., electronic duo Beacon. Opening as the local spotlight artist will be synth wave/funk musician David Moon.
In a Standard-Examiner story published earlier this month, Ogden Twilight co-founder and curator Jared Allen explained that the Nick Murphy concert has been the slowest-selling show to-date. However, Allen believes there’s a reasonable explanation for this: Murphy originally made his name under the moniker Chet Faker, and Allen doesn’t think some folks in Ogden realize Faker and Murphy are one and the same.
Murphy took the Chet Faker name — a nod to one of his influences, jazz artist Chet Baker — early in his career to avoid confusion with a more established artist also named Nick Murphy.
Murphy said it makes sense the promoter would worry about such things, since he needs to sell tickets to the concert. But the artist says the return to his real name was important for him.
“Obviously, I need to make money, but what worries me more than ticket sales is fulfilling that spiritual role for myself and what I think is a sacred responsibility,” he said. “I hope that one day people will understand, in their own time, that the name change was part of that journey of being honest and making sure that what I’m putting out is absolutely true.”
Murphy concedes that it may take a few albums for fans to pick up on the two identities, and if they’re annoyed with the name change, he hopes they can understand and remember why they fell in love with his music in the first place.
“It’s really about the music first, so if I lose a bit of that marketing or branding, so be it,” he said. “If people are upset or whatever, I hope they know that nothing has changed in terms of what’s driving my creations. That’s really important.”