By now, you know where you stand. Music is either a casual accessory to your life or a fire in your guts. It's a cosmetic to be applied and removed at will or a big, fat tattoo branded into your flesh. You're a day-tripper or a lifer, a dabbler or a true believer.

If you're the lifer type, the first raw, plaintive notes of Dan Brodie's second album are like a siren's song tugging you into a gritty whirlpool of terminal rock'n'roll turmoil. "Jesus, try and save me from myself," he pleads in a voice a hair's width from hysteria. "It's all about how much it moves me personally," says the 26-year old Melbourne rocker. "Certain melodies and phrases just hit home. If you're writing a song and it's shifting you around, getting an emotional response from you as the writer, you kinda know it's working. That tends to multiply out of sight when you get on stage."

Dan Brodie ought to know. He's been a "Highway Lovin' Man" since he first stepped on stage at a Richmond pub, aged 15 - alongside brother Chris in a band called Blue Velvet. This kicked off a rock'n'roll journey which soon reached boiling point at the formation of The Broken Arrows, where once again Dan hooked up with brother Chris on guitar. After their debut EMI long-player, "Big Black Guitar", was released - Dan along with his shit-hot rockin' roots band The Broken Arrows took on a tour schedule which saw more stages than snapped guitar strings.

They bonded with Paul Kelly, You Am I and Tony Joe White, brought the house down at the Byron Bay Blues and Roots Festival, drew blood in Paris and London, even stood their ground with Midnight Oil's famously one-eyed crowd along Australia's east coast.

"It was a rewarding year," Dan says. "When we first went up to Sydney and Brisbane we were pulling maybe 80 people a night. By the end we'd built it up to 300 or 400. It felt good cause that was without much radio airplay at all. It was just sheer hard work."

The blistering slide guitars and ravishing melodies of "Big Black Guitar" found critics doffing their caps from Sydney to Europe, where French label Last Call brokered a licensing deal and set up a launch gig on a pirate ship on the river Seine (no, really) - the ship was called La Guinguette Pirate.

The punishing road toll fed into Dan's songwriting like a blood infusion. A cathartic EP, "You Make Me Wanna Kill", was slammed down during a rare two days off in Melbourne in October, clearing the decks for the slapping rockabilly and heartbreaking delicacy of the Broken Arrows' new LP, "Empty Arms Broken Hearts".

"I wanted to make a rock'n'roll record," says Brodie, whose rich musical background draws as much from Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan as Nirvana and The Gun Club. "To me, rock'n'roll is not really a volume thing. It's more the attitude of it, the passion involved".

"I wanted more guitars, used in a cool, rootsy way. When I made 'Big Black Guitar' I just wanted to listen to country, acoustic guitars, and be really reflective. Now I've rediscovered rock. Come full circle really." Joining Brodie on the trip is Scottish/American producer John Wooler, renowned blues fanatic and the man at the helm of Capitol Records' roots label, Point Blank (John Lee Hooker, John Hammond, Ry Cooder).

"I felt like Bob Johnson may have felt when he was working with Dylan in the '60s," Wooler says. "Here's a young guy with styles stemming from country and blues, but mixed up with his own sound and lyrics that mean something today. I love Dan's songs: lyrics that make me smile as well as making me think. He has a great sense of melody and I like the instrumentation he uses. He takes Americana and makes it more edgy. Gospel, country, rock, he makes them all sound great sitting next to each other."
Brodie admits he was initially wary about sharing his soul with a stranger, but he was quickly won over when Wooler offered to bring an associate to the party. Dan knew Oz Fritz as the man who recorded Tom Waits's "Mule Variations" LP, as well as sessions with the raw power king, Iggy Pop.

"I put together in my mind a guy that's experienced with roots-based instruments like lap steel, dobro and mandolin, and a guy that's into really original, spacious takes on vocal sounds," says Dan. "I thought yeah, that could work"

"John's main thing was that he wanted to record most of it live with as few overdubs as possible, to go for takes with good feels over any technical prowess. That was fine with me. That's what I do."

For all the naked glory of "Big Black Guitar", "Empty Arms Broken Hearts" takes sharper aim and draws more deeply from Dan Brodie's life source. The hellfire gospel stomp of "Jesus, try And Save Me" emanates from the pit of his stomach. The astonishing tenderness of "You Fell From The Sky" bleeds from his veins. The rockabilly slap of "Bullet" channels Elvis Presley's Sun Sessions and "Footstomp" takes on Steve Earle at his dirtiest.

"I think it's a more cohesive bunch of songs," Dan reckons. "I've relied on more real life experiences in my lyrics so it cuts a bit closer to the bone. Even though any reference to people alive or dead is purely coincidental," he adds

The rich array of guest artists speaks volumes about the esteem the Brodie brothers command in local music circles. That's You Am I's Tim Rogers singing the high harmony on "Hope That We Get Home". Former Beast of Bourbon Spencer P Jones plays the 12-string Rickenbacker on "You Fell From The Sky" and country chanteuse Sherry Rich co-authored the album's darkest tune, "Too Much Of You".

"Too Much Of You' happened in minutes," Dan remembers. "I was in the studio with Sherry for a different session, about a year before and she had her headphones on to get the levels right and she said 'There's too much of you in my head'. I said 'That's a great title for a song'. It literally took 10 minutes from there."

Another snap decision shaped the album's exquisitely fragile closing track, "For Me And You". Sherry Rich might have been an obvious choice as Dan's foil on the winsome duet seeing as it was her urged and helped Dan complete the song. But he opted for the freshness and immediacy of newcomer Emah Fox, an engineer's assistant at Melbourne's Sing Sing Studios. "I kinda like the way it all fell into place on the day," Dan says with typical understatement.

Other tracks have been maturing for longer in the Brodie vaults, including the wry, upbeat character portrait "Sarah" and the country-swinger "Highway Lovin' Man" - complete with its good-humoured nod to the late King of Rock'n'Roll.

"It's funny how that happens," Dan says. "Sometimes a song or a line will gain meaning as it gets older. I'll come across something I wrote years ago and suddenly it feels right to record it. The title of the album, 'Empty Arms Broken Hearts', was a line from an old song I found in one of my lyrics books from quite a way back. It just struck a chord with me for some reason."

And so history is written. All that remains is for Dan Brodie and The Broken Arrows to hammer these tunes home on another few hundred stages throughout 2002 and beyond. As always, The Broken Arrows features Brodie's older brother Chris on lap and pedal steel guitars, but new drummer Ewan McCartney (who also plays in Snout), bassist Pete Cicciari and Hammond player Steve Hesketh promise an even more intense live experience.