Powderfinger had no shortage of anthems, but “Passenger” is one of the quieter ones. It doesn’t explode, and it doesn’t demand a fist in the air. Instead it drifts, a spacey, horn-flecked song about being carried along by the machinery of ordinary life. It arrived in August 1999 as the last single from the album Internationalist, and it went on to win one of the biggest songwriting prizes in the country. What makes it interesting is how much it says about routine, about restlessness, and about the strange guilt of having a good life. Here’s a closer look at what the song is really doing.
A band in full flight
By 1999, Powderfinger were already one of Australia’s most reliable rock bands. They formed in Brisbane in 1989, took their name from a Neil Young song, and spent the nineties building a loyal following through relentless touring. Their third album, Internationalist, was recorded at Sing Sing Studios in Melbourne with producer Nick DiDia, and it came after a year in which singer Bernard Fanning spent much of his time writing in Brisbane, drawing on a band trip to the United States in mid-1997. The group arrived at the studio with a large pile of candidates, somewhere between thirty and forty song ideas.
The record cemented their place at home. It went five times platinum in Australia and won the ARIA Award for Album of the Year, although it didn’t make the same impact overseas. “Passenger” was the final single released from it, and by then the band were in the middle of a tour of clubs and universities, and the single’s release gave ticket sales a noticeable boost.
Older than the album
One detail that often gets overlooked is that the song had been around for a while. Powderfinger played it as their opening number when they supported Crowded House at the Farewell to the World concert in November 1996, well before the album came out. That’s an extraordinary stage for a new song, in front of a crowd that had gathered for an emotional goodbye, and it suggests the band had real faith in it.
When it was finally released as a single on 9 August 1999, it came with a generous set of extras, including two live tracks recorded at the Sydney Opera House. The most significant bonus, as it turned out, was “These Days”, which appeared on the single for the first time. That song went on to overshadow almost everything around it. It topped the 1999 Triple J Hottest 100, the same poll in which “Passenger” scraped in at number 100, which makes for a neat bit of trivia. A B-side outranked the A-side by ninety-nine places, and the single ended up as the best-selling release from the album partly because of it.
What the song seems to be about
The word at the centre of the title tells you a lot. A passenger doesn’t steer. A passenger sits in a seat and goes where the vehicle goes. The song takes that image and applies it to a life that has settled into a pattern, a life shaped by a house, a salary and a daily timetable. One writer in Esky magazine pointed to a line contrasting the many places you’d rather be with the neat suburban frame of a picket fence and a pay cheque, and it’s a good example of what Fanning keeps returning to.
One account of Fanning’s writing describes a recurring fascination with the banality of routine, and when he was asked about it, he offered no grand explanation. He said it wasn’t a conscious theme and suggested it might be a part guilt-complex, given his own relatively carefree lifestyle. I like that answer, because it explains the song’s tone. It isn’t a complaint from someone trapped in an office. It’s the unease of someone who has been lucky and is a little suspicious of how comfortable he feels.
Sound, horns and Elvis
The arrangement is much bigger than you’d expect from a Powderfinger song. It features backing vocals from the Victorian trio Tiddas, appearing with the band for the first time, plus horn parts that gave the track a warm, almost celebratory glow. Drummer Jon Coghill explained that elements of the arrangement, including the horns, were inspired by Elvis Presley and his big-band sound, and that the band tried to approach it the way Elvis might have.
That contrast is part of the song’s charm. A wistful lyric about routine sits on top of something that sounds like a party. The band even joked, years later, that the guitars are slightly out of tune at the start, and guitarist Darren Middleton shrugged it off, saying the band had no regrets about imperfections like that. It’s a human, unpolished detail in an otherwise lush recording.
The video that went off the rails
If the lyric is about routine, the video is about the opposite. Directed by Brisbane production company Fifty Fifty Films, it shows the band members packing themselves and their instruments into suitcases. The cases are carried through an airport, loaded onto a plane with a bomb, and blown out of the sky. They’re then swallowed by something resembling a whale, ejected from its blowhole into zero gravity, and finally left floating in the ocean.
It’s absurd, and I mean that as praise. The clip takes the idea of being a helpless passenger and exaggerates it to ridiculous levels. The clip’s success encouraged the group to direct future videos themselves, and you can see why. It proved that a band known for earnest rock could have a sense of humour about its own image.
Awards and afterlife
The song’s recognition came quickly. It reached number 30 on the ARIA chart and was nominated for Single of the Year, Best Group and Best Cover Art at the 2000 ARIA Awards, though it won none of them. It did win Song of the Year at the 2000 APRA Awards, a prize voted on by fellow songwriters, which is arguably the more meaningful honour. It also placed at number 100 in the 1999 Triple J Hottest 100, and years later Max television ranked it number 48 in a list of the top 500 songs of the nineties.
Final thoughts
So what does “Passenger” mean? I’d say it’s a song about the discomfort of drifting, written by someone honest enough to admit that his own life is hardly a hardship. It captures that quiet moment when you notice you’ve been going through the motions and wonder where you’d rather be. Powderfinger wrapped that thought in horns, harmonies and a lovely sense of movement. More than twenty-five years on, it still sounds like a long drive with the windows down, thoughtful and a little unsettled, and that combination is hard to beat. If you only know Powderfinger for the bigger, louder moments, this is the song that shows how well they understood restraint, and how good they were at turning an everyday feeling into something worth singing about.