After six decades on the road, an album can almost write itself. It might arrive in the space of a few months, fully formed in vision and texture in the mind of the vigilant creator. But it takes a rare combination of talent and circumstances to realise that vision as vividly as Black and Blue Heart.

"I'd met Bernard [Fanning] years ago," Russell Morris remembers. The Powderfinger frontman came backstage at one of the Australian rock legend's countless gigs to pay his respects with a mutual friend. "But It wasn't til I moved up to Queensland last year that we sat down and started talking."

The warmer environs had already exerted a strange, organic influence on the songs Russell was writing in the wake of the platinum-selling, ARIA-winning blues-rock trilogy — Shark Mouth, Van Diemen's Land, Red Dirt Red Heart — that so spectacularly relaunched his career from 2012 onwards.