Dean Lewis was on a plane when he heard a phrase that struck him like a bolt of lightning. “An in-flight-radio DJ said, ‘I wish that was a place we’d known about’,” recalls the Sydney singer-songwriter. “I went to my notes and wrote ‘A Place We Knew’ and was like, that’s the album title. That ties everything together.” For Lewis, the title encapsulates the bittersweet memories of past relationships. “All the songs were written through relationships I’d been in and houses I used to live in and hotel rooms,” he explains.

That mood resonates through the title-track, a song of hope and heartbreak built around Lewis’s passionate voice, deeply personal storytelling and his familiar, raw brand of acoustic songwriting. The slow-building, anthemic “7 Minutes” recounts the first few moments after an argument he had with an ex, as the gravity of the situation dawns. “Be Alright” – the devastating song of romantic betrayal that became his first Top 40 hit in America – is indicative of the honesty with which Lewis addresses those bittersweet memories that inform the album’s title. While Lewis may have made his name as something of a balladeer thanks to the success of “Waves” and “Be Alright,” A Place We Knew demonstrates far greater breadth and depth to his songwriting. Case in point is horn-laden opener “Hold Of Me,” an uplifting, joyous antidote to some of the album’s sadder songs.

Despite its forlorn subject matter, the title track also finds Lewis in an ebullient mood musically, as does “Stay Awake,” its shuffling chorus and stabs of horns lending the song a celebratory feel. The climactic chorus of “Straight Back Down,” meanwhile, is tailormade for festivals. On an album that clearly hues close to the bone, Lewis pinpoints two songs that capture him at his rawest and most vulnerable: “Don’t Hold Me” and “Half A Man,” both written during a period where he “didn’t feel great about life or what was going on.”

Lewis sought out several producers to collaborate with on A Place We Knew. The British team of Edd Holloway andNick Atkinson are ever-present, while he traveled to Byron Bay to record “Time to Go” and the title-track with Dann Hume (Evermore, Matt Corby). John Castle (Vance Joy, Cub Sport) worked with Lewis on “Don’t Hold Me” and “Chemicals,” the latter originally featuring on Same Kind Of Different. Helping to give the record a cohesive sound was Sydney-based producer Dylan Nash, whom Lewis refers to as “almost like the co-producer for the whole album,” tying a thread between these songs that he’d written and recorded all over the world.