The 33-year-old Australian musician, Nick Murphy, professionally known as Chet Faker, has opened up about his fight with Covid-19 and how this ailment has turned out to be a blessing in disguise for him.
Just after a few days of releasing his new album, Hotel Surrender, the Talk Is Cheap singer appeared on Triple j’s Richard Kingsmill’s podcast. During the chat, the 33-year-old singer revealed that he suffered from Covid for a long period, and recovering from it was a challenge.
Initially, Nick “didn’t know it was COVID”, he said, but he did know that there was something “very wrong” with him.
He went on explaining that he was “sick in bed for three days” and he was then “pretty sure this is COVID because this is nothing like the flu or anything ” that he had before. Murphy said that he was confident because he always had “a good immune system” as he has travelled around the world. However, “October/November last year… there was something wrong”.
He had issues keeping food down and he had reduced B12 levels and symptoms of long Covid. Nick said he had “Brain Fog” and he wasn’t able to think about anything.
While speaking about his Brain Fog, Nick said,
“That for me was the scariest part of it, basically my brain didn’t work.“
He mentioned that he had issues while doing the basic house chores as he would — from time to time — zone out and forget things.
“I thought brain fog was when you wake up in the morning, ‘oh, I need my coffee’. It’s not like that at all… It’s more like you know you’re awake but every time you try to think something smacks the thought out of the way.”
He continued,
“I remember standing in my kitchen for like 15 minutes, trying to figure out if I was going to sit down or what I was doing. It was really hectic. I wasn’t scared by the physical sickness…But it never occurred to me that it would mess with my brain…I could not have played music. I had a hard time choosing what to eat.”
However, ever since Nick Murphy got the vaccine jab, he has been feeling better.
Nick’s battle against Covid, his isolation, and the lockdown, turned out to be a blessing in disguise for him. During this phase, Nick wrote almost 90% of Hotel Surrender in 2020 and it helped him pass this difficult phase with ease.
Nick stated,
“Through that process, I found a lot of happiness and a lot of freedom from the darkness of a lot of what’s going on in the world,” shares Murphy. “I found this newfound joy in the moment in front of me, and that was kind of where this, this concept of Hotel Surrender came from, this idea of checking your reality, and the moment. I found through these songs that I was chasing my current reality.”
He added,
“It felt good to play and to write, and I wasn’t trying to achieve some lofty, abstraction. I wasn’t trying to be an artist or anything. I just found solace in the music itself and the musicality of the process.”
After his first breakout album, Nick released ‘Hotel Surrender’ with his pseudonym ‘Chet Faker’ because it was successful for him when he released his debut album ‘Built on Glass’ in 2014.
Soon after Nick Murphy announced the release of his new album under his old pseudonym, it caused a buzz on social media.
His new album is out now, and is available on Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music and Deezer.
Let us know in the comments how you like it when you hear it!
