Demons.

The father of two has had to overcome an army of them to get to where he is today.

You might be familiar with Cavaleri's "child prodigy" story. It made him a household name worldwide in the 1990s.

His father Frank was a bricklayer with a passion for playing guitar, and from the age of three Cavaleri was playing along with his favourite blues albums on a ukulele. He moved on to the electric guitar when he was five and played his first gig at the age of six - a 90-minute busking set that added $270 to his piggy bank.

Then a shock leukaemia diagnosis rocked Cavaleri's world. He began an intensive course of chemotherapy and, as part of his treatment, the Starlight Foundation set up a meeting in London with his hero Mark Knopfler. It attracted the attention of the media and the rest, as they say, is history.

By age 10, Cavaleri was making regular appearances on Hey Hey It's Saturday and had toured the country playing sold-out arenas with Jimmy Barnes and Diesel. By age 12 he'd toured the world and played with BB King, Etta James and Bonnie Raitt, and had made guest appearances on all the major US talk shows.

He even performed for then US president Bill Clinton and was the subject of a bidding war between Prince and Madonna. Cavaleri eventually signed to Michael Jackson's MJJ Records.

At the age of 13, seven years after his diagnosis, he was given a clean bill of health and recorded some records, filmed Disney's Camp Nowhere with Jessica Alba and Paws with a young Heath Ledger, and even appeared in an episode of Baywatch.

After one final tour with BB King, though, Cavaleri decided to take a break. He returned to Australia and spent most of his 20s in Newcastle as part of a blues rock band with Col Hatcham from The Screaming Jets, touring extensively before suffering adrenal fatigue and severe anxiety which spiralled into depression. Collapsing mid-performance due to a panic attack one night, Cavaleri stepped away from the stage and the guitar. He worked as a brickie's labourer but never stopped writing music. In fact, he established an alternative career writing soundtracks and jingles.

"I had to call it quits with the band because with the insomnia and the anxiety, I could barely even function to get through the day," he explains.

"I would have a panic attack over whether I should brush my teeth before or after I had a shower. I can laugh about it now, I guess.

"Not only did I pull away from music, I pulled away from lots of things because they all scared me. Each experience I had where anxiety would pop up, I'd veer away from it, and I ended up having to dig myself out of quite a hole."

Cavaleri had for years shied away from his early success and fame. It made him cringe. He has spent years working on his health but he has now dealt with and learned to manage his personal demons and has a newfound appreciation for his unique story.

Returning to the stage, though, was a gradual process and took a lot of soul-searching.

"For the best part of two or three years I was tentatively dipping my toe back in the water and testing my mind and my body out again. I'd lost all of my confidence," he says.

"But, bit by bit, it started to become a joy again and I realised it was possible to make a return. When I'm on stage now, playing, I feel more connected than I ever have because I had hit rock bottom. I knew how that felt."

Cavaleri says writing music, as opposed to playing the guitar, was "a bit like an anchor" and enabled him to express his emotions and heal.

"It also reminded me of what I love about music because I wasn't complicating the creative process by thinking about how it was going to go when I released it, if it was going to resonate with people and so on.

"It was literally just an exercise in self-expression because I wasn't intending to go back out there. When writing a song I started to think about what I wanted to say, whereas before it would have been all about the melody or the riff."

Instead of letting his guitar do the talking, Cavaleri had found his own voice. He also discovered, for the first time in his life, that he had something to say.

"Thinking about what I wanted to say in a song spilled over into me actually talking and telling stories in-between songs on stage," he continues.

"That came about because I did a corporate gig where they wanted a speaker from the creative world and asked me to put together a bit of a story about myself. And, keep in mind, I have never been comfortable with a mic in front of me on stage - I always sucked at talking to the crowd. I just wanted to play music, and I didn't really have anything to say either.

"So I had to put together this talk broken up by a few songs. I was really nervous but it went down so well for them and for me. I found it really cathartic to share my experiences."

Cavaleri had made a habit of burying his achievements and his past. School wasn't a happy place for the child star, and he was bullied and ridiculed for growing up in the public eye.

"Culturally, Australians are not really in the habit of celebrating our wins. And because I wasn't celebrating them, I wasn't really reflecting on them. I didn't realise this at the time, of course," he says.

"Growing up the way I did was simple for me at the time - it's how it sat with me as a memory that started to complicate things.

"Sharing my experiences in a relatable way on stage has been good for me."

Cavaleri has always lost himself in the moment when playing his guitar. He says he has always played "from a really deep place, even as a kid" but now realises his confidence back then was naive.

When he walks on stage now, the confidence "feels real".

"I'm doing things differently when I walk on stage now - the load is not shared by a really loud band on stage like it once was," he explains.

"I really am putting myself out there and there are no other distractions and there is nowhere to hide."

The same applies to his solo album, Demons. It's Cavaleri, laid bare.

"What matters to me most is that I have a body of work that expresses messages that I'm deeply passionate about on a bed of music that is built on a lifetime of writing, recording and touring," he says.

"The bulk of Demons was created during a time when I didn't believe that I'd be mentally and physically stable enough to return to the stage.

"All of the songs were written from a place of catharsis and the lyrics fall one way or another under the theme of how humans crumble, melt, face, overpower, surrender, run or dance with our demons."

The album boasts a diverse mix of songs from Cavaleri who manages to bend genres, intertwining blues with indie-rock pop and soul to create a vintage modern sound of his own. Most of the album was produced, engineered and mixed by Cavaleri himself, excluding five tracks that were co-produced and mixed by Tony Buchen (Montaigne, The Preatures) and mastered by Viking Lounge.

New single Before You Check Out was written for a cousin who lost his battle with mental illness a few years ago.

"I strongly identified with what he went through and wished I had reached out to him," Cavaleri says.

"Having battled my own demons, I wondered whether my experience would have helped. I contemplated what I'd share if time could show mercy.

"I would share how our thoughts and beliefs colourise our experience and skew our perception of the world, giving us a false sense of reality - a notion that helped me to expose the root of many of my physical and mental health issues that were mistakenly believed to be out of my control."

While waiting to embark on his national tour, Cavaleri has been enjoying connecting with fans on live-streaming entertainment platform Twitch.

"A lot of artists out there are really confused about how to make money and spend so much time on YouTube and Facebook and Instagram creating content for people," he says.

"It might convert to making money indirectly through streams or ticket sales but on Twitch, they use subscriptions and tips and it's more direct. I love it.

"I believe that a lot of people want to support artists, they just don't know how on social media.

"Realistically, when a punter hears about crowd funding or making a donation they think 'OK, someone needs a leg up' but the statistics say they will only do it once or twice and they won't do it again because they're subconsciously like 'How much help do you actually need?'."

Cavaleri can't wait to share his story on tour. He's come a long way from the days when he was too fearful to step outside his front door, let alone step on to a stage.

"We've booked a tour optimistically because we can't just wait around. I'd rather be in a position where I had to cancel shows than to wait around for another two years," he says.

"As a kid I had something to play, now I have something to say."

Demons, including new single Before You Check Out, is out now. For tour information and tickets head to nathancavaleri.com.