Just turned 69, Hunt’s tired of airports and hotels, and keeps his tours short. ‘When I was younger I wrote a poem called ‘Hitting 40’, and the last lines are about the road going on forever,’ he says. ‘But when you get older you realise the road doesn’t in fact go on forever. It’s a one-way fucking road. No exit. Hahaha.’

Not for loan: thieves and gifts

Sam’s books are in my local uni library in Melbourne, I tell him, but most are sternly marked ‘NOT FOR LOAN’ – perhaps, I joke, because homesick Kiwis steal them. ‘I’ve had some strange experiences with stuff getting stolen,’ he says. ‘Some fucker stole my favourite mic stand, which I’d had for 35 years, and listed it on (sales website) Trade Me. ‘For sale: Sam Hunt’s mic stand’!’ Equally inconvenient is that people often souvenir his set lists. ‘They sneak up to the stage, and you’ve got a rough set list written out, then suddenly you find it’s disappeared.’

This seems an apt opening: I screw up my courage. Sam, I say, I poked through your personal stuff when I was a kid. I’m sorry for being such a nosy little bastard. He hears out my apology, then graciously brushes it aside. ‘They’ve found their way home to me, all those things. I didn’t mind. In fact, I’m very pleased that you did.’

A week later, as I’m typing that last paragraph, hunched over the heater, the postman drops off a package. Inside are two gifts: an Auckland lit mag and, wrapped neatly in a cardboard square cut from a wine-bottle box, a copy of Sam’s new album, the dedication dated 4 July. I realise he took the trouble to post it on his birthday.

The opening track, ‘Rainbows (and a Promise of Snow)’, is a sweet-sad ballad, that unmistakable voice chanting the lines over a melodic wash of guitar:

Winter means one side or other of the shortest day… / It matters not. A good mate dies, / another goes abroad, or mad, / it matters neither way. What does, / what always will, is that we load / the fire high with logs.