Third album's a charm for Gotye

His work paid off. In its first week of release, "Making Mirrors" hit No. 1 on the Australian ARIA albums chart while "Somebody That I Used To Know" reached the top singles spot. De Backer was the first Australian act to do so since Silverchair accomplished the double-crown feat in 2007. In America, "Making Mirrors" charted at No. 7 and has hit gold status.

Even though "Making Mirrors" is a hit, De Backer is still unhappy -- specifically with the song "In Your Light."

"I wrote and rewrote it and now I still don't like it," he said. "Sometimes I can feel the energy of it. Sometimes I feel like I didn't get the energy I wanted from it at all, lyrically or in the recording of it. I feel like I don't believe the exuberance that I wanted it to represent, that I wanted it to capture."

As a whole, the album was inspired by "life" and his travels along the way.

"I just do a bunch of stuff and a whole bunch of different songs come together," he said. "I paste them into something I feel means something hopefully greater than the songs in isolation, through their sequencing or the way they comment on each other or relate to each other. The inspiration, I don't know. Different songs, different stories. Friend's stories. Past relationships. Musings on the way I feel about different things in the world today, today, blah, blah, blah."

He has yet to start writing new material; that'll occur after his world tour, which he is thoroughly enjoying after a questionable start.

"It took a lot of working out at first," De Backer said. "But I'm having a lot of fun with it now, which is great. I had to dissect the songs and work out how to make them make sense on a live stage. It took a lot of rehearsing and a few shows to make sense of it all."