This song recalls a favourite memory from my early 20s––a precarious climb onto the roof of my best friends' share house in East Melbourne, and the sunset-soaked city vista we would be rewarded with for our bravado. This was in 2015, our last year of jazz school together, which was a wild period in our lives. This particular group of friends spent all our time together playing music and partying and hanging out. You couldn't pay me to go back, but nor would I ever sell the memories. I actually wrote this piece that year and performed it in my third year recital at Bennetts Lane. It feels right to give it a new life many years later.

Climbing takes courage and care! You have to be totally in your body, conscious of your balance, weight and purchase, and aware of the significant dangers of a fall. Reaching for anything worth having is the same skill transposed into the domain of deep work, a relationship, emotional labour, honest communication, spiritual striving, the pursuit of mastery, etc. There is a fall to be reckoned with. But it's the fear of the fall that will push you beyond yourself. I love the sequence in The Dark Knight Rises when Bruce Wayne has to climb out of a prison dug into a deep well in the desert, and he learns that the only way he'll make the critical jump is without a harness––to truly take his life in his hands. The harness holds him back. The fear propels him forward.

I want to be careful here and stress that I am by no means encouraging you to leap from buildings like Batman. Know your limits, be sensible. But in some way, in your own way, to your own degree, you MUST take risks. Sometimes you will fall, but the greatest rewards lie beyond a leap of faith. And as Bruce's father Thomas reminds him, the fall teaches us to pick ourselves up.

At the start of this recording Niko, Angus, Lewis and I laugh about this being our ninth take of this tune, a point past which creativity is often drained in recording session, but to me this was easily the best version because it has that reaching quality, that bravado. There are some lines in my solo that I don't quite stick, but I remember (and can point to the moments) the feeling of actively deciding to embrace those fumbles as part of my human musicality, and pushing through them to something beyond. Music is a great game because (by and large) you are safe from serious harm when you take these leaps. Both the risk and the rewards, are in your mind, in your heart. It is a great imaginative testing ground for ways of being. And it has certainly taught me the value of reaching for something out beyond the bounds of perfect safety––out in that heightened, brittle, brilliant place where you might fall.

Albert St Rooftop Views is the second single off my forthcoming debut album Home In Space.