“I spent so many years running from myself,” Jimmy Barnes tells Apple Music. The Scottish-born Australian singer, and legendary Cold Chisel frontman, has been writing music for more than four decades. But for most of that time, he actively avoided singing about anything truly personal. It’s why Flesh and Blood, his 20th album, feels different, and so intimate. Themes of family, honesty, life lessons, and self-discovery tie the songs together, while the production itself was a family affair: Barnes’ wife, children, grandchildren, and extended family members sang, played instruments, engineered, and even contributed to the songwriting on the album. “These songs were very emotional, and so close to me,” he says. “The journey through the quagmire that's been my life has only been successful because of the support I've had around me. So I wanted my family to be heavily involved in this record.”
The opening title track homes in on that main theme: family. “Sometimes I look into my children’s eyes and I can literally see myself in them,” Barnes says. “Sometimes you see your really good traits in your kids, and sometimes you think you see something scary. But these kids are a product of both of you, and Jane didn't have the same problems as I did, so they’re like me—but with updated software. The song is about seeing the darkest things, but having the strength to let go and let your children do the right thing. People are always going to make their own mistakes—but the most I've grown in my life is when I've made mistakes and learned from them.”
“I Move Slow”—a soft, emotive, harmonic rock sing-along—was written by Barnes’ son Jackie, and features Barnes’ daughter Elly-May. “I just loved the lyrics about the world spinning around and everything getting out of control,” he says. “There’s Jackie, who's a gentle giant. He plays drums like a maniac, but he’s moving slowly through the world, finding his feet. And I found it quite funny that someone as hyperactive and intense as myself would be singing about how everything's moving fast and I move slow. It was a lesson I had to learn.” But the song has two meanings for Barnes and his kids. “Elly-May moves slow for different reasons,” he says of his daughter, who was born with cerebral palsy. “She’s in chronic pain, so she moves slow, too. There’s such a beautiful soul among all the pain, and that's what this song's about.”
“One of the recurring themes of the record is the truth,” he says. “This Is the Truth” was “given” to Barnes by Cold Chisel songwriter Don Walker, but it chronicles something that’s deeply personal, and at the album’s core: “When you talk about flesh and blood and you talk about relationships, and you talk about family—unless you have the truth, it's going to get messed up. It took me a long time to be able to sit and speak my truth, and more importantly, to hear the truth back at me without reacting.” Within that truth came the need to not only accept, but share Barnes' own vulnerabilities. “'Til the Next Time” is a soft and tender examination of fear and self-doubt, written during “one of those nights during the writing process when you just can’t sleep and your mind starts working overtime,” he says. Barnes had looked over at his wife, Jane, while she slept. “I started thinking too much. 'Am I really a good person? Am I good enough for this family?'” he recounts. “I remember singing into my phone at four in the morning, really quietly; I didn’t want to wake anyone up. Eventually, I went to bed and fell asleep, and everything was perfect again when I woke up. That's what the song is about. It’s all perfect again until the next time you doubt yourself.”
Barnes credits his relatively new experiences as an author—he released three autobiographical books between 2016 and 2020—with that newfound openness and truth in his songwriting. “Literally until I wrote [2016 memoir] Working Class Boy, I never wanted to face or analyze my life,” he says. “I did everything I could to not feel or not to remember it. So when I turned that key and unlocked the door, it really gave me not just a world of things to think about, but also talk and feel and write about.”
Though some of the ideas for Flesh and Blood had been “floating around for a while,” it was mostly written over a week or so in the middle of the 2020 lockdown, partly inspired by the nightly performances Barnes and his wife had been entertaining fans with on Instagram. They’d sing an array of covers, and quickly found it resonated with fans who were stuck at home. “I've always stood in front of a band, but for about 15 months, it was me and Jane with an acoustic guitar,” he says. “I found all these new ways of singing, new ways to use my voice, whether it was just subtler, or falsetto, or finding a lot more depth and a lower register.”
One of those covers—The Everly Brothers’ “Love Hurts”—appears here as a husband-and-wife duet, a reflection on not only the period during which the album came into being, but the themes in their relationship, and the record as a whole. “Relationships and family aren’t meant to just be easy,” he says. “Love isn’t easy. There's a big difference between love and falling in love—all that eye-batting is all well and good, and my blood still rushes when I look at my girl. But it takes a lot more to have a family and to have a relationship. To sing ‘Love Hurts’ with Jane felt very poignant. It’s a bit of a message for the family, for the kids too. This is what it's about. You have to struggle, you have to fight.”