For those who are sadly unaware, Sydney’s Richard In Your Mind peddle the kind of dreamy psychedelic Beatles-type (Strawberry Fields era) pop that, let’s face it, we can all do with a dose of now and then. The polished cheer and palliative ease with which the band gel into fantasy indie-pop band is what is making head honchos and punter alike stand up and take notice.

Richard Cartwright, otherwise known as the “Richard” that lives in your mind and sings like John Lennon, is having a loverly day off. His voice is cheery, as if he is constantly smiling; chilling out in his sunny Blue Mountains home, he waxes lyrical on Richard In Your Mind and its sunny future.

“The band, we’re doing really well. We’ve got a bunch of exciting things coming; Jordy [Lane, guitarist] has been in Vietnam for a month and gets back early week. We’ve been sad to not have him around, we’ve missed him! Got some shows, we’ve got the AMP award and we’re working on a third album…busy little interesting things popping up everywhere!”

Richard In Your Mind are currently nominated for a prestigious AMP [Australian Music Prize] Award for their My Volcano [2010, Rice is Nice] album, alongside Aussie partisans like Pikelet, Cloud Control, Tame Impala, to name but a rockin’ few.

“It certainly is ace” Cartwright says on the nomination, clearly grinning on the end of phone line. “It’s a wonderful honour and a big surprise! It’s really encouraging; it means someone listened to our album and discussed it with someone else and decided it was a good album. The other people on the shortlist are friends of ours, who we admire and enjoy their music. We really forgot we were going for it, in a way (laughs). It’s been a lovely start to the year. Now it’s just trying to find the fine balance of being optimistic but also trying not to get your hopes up. It’s good to have hope; maybe the hope influences the outcome! People say there is some merit to thinking positively. You just take it as it comes. It was very nice just to be included on the list”

With their career trajectory looking steady-as-she-goes and confident, Cartwright chats about the next album.

“Richard In Your Mind has always been …we do it because it’s really fun. We just try to write more songs; personally, I always feel more relaxed if I’ve written, thank God I’m not barren of ideas. By this stage, I reckon we’ve got a nice sounding album on the way, still need to mix it properly and I guess there are a lot of little things that need to happen before it’s a finished work, but it’s a well sketched out work at the moment”

Cartwright sounds happily like the creatively productive type. With news of another no-doubt blissful-pop album on the way, Cartwright lets us into his brain box for a look at his creative process.

“It’s a bit different for each song, sometimes. Usually my first port of call is Conrad [Greenleaf, bass player and synth] who is so much more than a bass player…he’s almost like my greatest fan and my harshest critic (laughs), I get little bits of stuff and show him everything and the ones that Conrad thinks are good…I always know what he means when he says one song over the other, so that helps refine where we head with it. It’s about trying to find the balance between having a song that resonates with people, a lovely song, and also exploring the imagination. We even had Alyx [Dennison] from the band Kyü has become one of our good friends, she was around over summer, so we got her to sing backing vocals. It’s always a bit of an experimental approach, trying things until they sound good”

“It’s always changing” he muses regarding his approach to lyricism. “Such important parts of the music, making the song mean what it means. A bit more on the newer stuff it’s a bit more improvised, had a bit more of a play around; looping and recording myself making up lyrics and going back. There’s something in the spontaneity, it seems to make some good sense sometimes. I’ve got a little book with hundreds of scribbles in from train and bus rides, where a lot of writing happens (laughs)”

With the AMP award nomination on their back and a mighty J Award nom last year (up against heavyweights like Midnight Juggernauts and Grinderman), Richard In Your Mind are climbing the rock and roll ladder. But as with most of us, Cartwright has some hesitations about the current local music climate.

“I think we make good music, so there’s gotta be hope (laughs) and I think there’s other good music. It’s hard; Australia’s not the greatest flourishing music scene. I don’t even know what the world music scene is like now with the Internet. We make sure we’re following our own personal artistic growth. It makes it harder when you can’t make a living off it. There’s so many issues with the Aussie music scene; there’s a lot of average music going around but there’s been a bit of hope of late”

“There is good music being made and sometimes it’s easy to complain about what we don’t have…sometimes it feels like such a battle, but, at the time same, we’ve been nominated for this award, we’re getting the music made, a lot of positive things. The list of people on this AMP award all do deserve to be there, we admire them all for various reasons and it’s good that it’s not the same old same old, not those people led by an industry machine or something. You’ve got to hope for it or you get too sad”

At the risk of inadvertently opening a Pandora’s Box of sorts, I query Cartwright as to his childhood. Was he always the affable band leader type? Was he the studious nerd many of us were?

“I was an only child, sort of. But then both my parents remarried and so I had half-brothers but my first ten years were as an only child. I spent a lot of time in an imagination-y kind of place. I liked dinosaurs, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I did often spend a lot of time on my own, making weird stories with toys, travelling around on adventures. A moderately inquisitive kid who was fairly stable (laughs)”

Chatting to Cartwright is a breeze (a pleasure…a breezy pleasure, even) but his closing words, I feel, best condense the Richard In Your Mind ethos to a simple, friendly optimism:

“Nothing is a drag today”

My Volcano is out now on Rice is Nice.