I’ve
been watching the TV series, Nashville, so now I keep thinking of it as this
very racy town – I don’t know if you’ve seen that show, but it’s certainly
gives a different perspective on the town.
It’s actually not that far
from reality, like, once you move here and live here [laughter]. It’s not that
far from reality and that’s scary [laughter]. They’ve done a really good job of it.
It
seems like it’s a real industry town.
Definitely, definitely. Everybody here is a singer, a writer,
publicist, a journalist, yeah, everybody here is a somebody [laughter]. It’s
the town of runaways, they call it, because there’s not many locals. Not many people that are born in
Nashville live in Nashville.
When
you arrived there, how do you start to find your way in, considering it is a
town where people come in not knowing other people?
I’m still trying to work that
out myself [laughter]. It’s kind of scary, because you come from being in
Australia – you know I spent 17
years performing in Australia since I was 11 years old, and meet people as a
kid and people that you knew through the people, and by the time you’ve got to
doing what I was doing with my career in Australia, you kind of have a really
good base of people around you and it’s a really good community in the bountry
scene back home. But then I get here and it’s like I’m 11 years old again, I’m
starting all over again, so it’s really interesting, I’m just really lucky that
I’ve got a great producer, Jerry Sally – you just meet a lot of people, and
I’ve got the record deal and the publishing deal, which are really kind of
helping me set things up. I’ve got a bit more support around me than what a lot
of people have when they move here, so I guess I’m lucky in that way.
And
people make their own luck, because you don’t get those sorts of deals unless
you’ve got the talent for them, and not just talent, I think, but
professionalism. A lot of people
on the outside wouldn’t realise that talent only takes you so far. If you’re going to another country and
you’re getting a record deal, and you’re getting publishing deals because other
people want to work with you.
Yeah. I come from a strong business
background in Australia, I have a business degree, Bachelor of Business, and in
my last job I ran 47 coffee houses … so I guess, from a business point of view,
I know that it is just a business; it’s a business that works in the music
industry. A lot of artists, they think that if you’ve got the talent, then
that’s all that matters. But I’m working full time on music here and I’m
singing an hour a day, I’m not singing all day every day, I’m emailing and
making phone calls, and doing all that fun, exciting stuff [laughter]. I wish I
was just singing. One day, I might
be able to just do that; that would be great.
Well
except then your voice might wear out.
[Laughter] This is true. See, there’s a hidden benefit to
everything.
So
when you’ve got a publishing deal like this, some people might think that just
means that they’re taking care of the rights to your songs, but from my
understanding, particularly in Nashville, a publishing deal means you’re
writing a lot for other people?
Definitely. I wrote 46 songs
over the summer, so 12 weeks that I was here for the summer, before I went home
to Gympie, I wrote 46 songs. Bluegrass, basically, is what I do, but most of
the time that I’m writing, I’m writing country pop songs that are definitely
not for me. Obviously some writing
sessions that I lock in, especially coming up to recording a new album, I made
sure that I had writing sessions in there with people that I wanted to write
with for my albums. But publishing
deals here, you are required to write a certain number of full songs a year –
so, say, if your total is 14, that means you need to write 14 full songs; so if
you co-write with two people, that’s only counted as half a song, so that means
you have to write 28 songs if they’re all co-writes, so if there’s three ways,
obviously that’s only a third of a song.
So Nashville is a definite song factory, and if there was no such thing
as a guitar, and no such thing as songwriting, there’d be still enough songs in
this town to last 100 years, I reckon [laughter].
This
is at odds, of course, with the idea of songwriters sitting around waiting for
the muse to strike. It sounds a
bit like you get up in the morning and you go to work as a songwriter.
Yeah, pretty much. And the great thing is, is the more you
do it, the more – like, I never consider myself as a writer and when the
publishing company came to me and said they wanted to sign me as a writer
because they heard my song ‘Miles and Timezones’, I was, like, ‘Are you sure?
Because I don’t really consider myself a songwriter.’ Then the more you get
into it, just the smallest thing can trigger you, and you write it down, and it
really is [that] you sit down and you say, ‘Hey, I’ve got this idea, I’ve got
this concept, if you’re keen on writing that’, and some days you’re writing
songs that you would have absolutely nothing to do with, and they’re the fun
ones, they’re the most challenging ones.
It’s an interesting – that’s something different from making coffee for
me [laughter].
Or
running coffee shops, as you did, but it’s still an enterprise, I guess, and I
suppose, just to go back to what we were talking about with business. It is
about relationships between people in a business context. In order for you to make your songs
work for other artists, you have to understand the whole chain of relationships
through to that artist. If you’re
writing songs with someone else, you’ve got to understand how that relationship
works with them.
Pretty much. So sometimes you’ll sit down and you’ll
have an artist in mind who you want to write for, other times you sit down and
you write a song and you go, that would be really good for this artist – and
then you pitch, or you demo it and it gets pitched out with the 15,000 other
songs the artist is listening to and maybe, in 15 years’ time, I might get
a cut, that will be great [laughter].
Well,
since you’ve mentioned you write for yourself, you write bluegrass-tinged-Country.
Is bluegrass your first love?
Old-time country was my first
love. I grew up listening to the likes of Merle Haggard, Conway Twitty, Emmylou
Harris, Loretta Lynn – pretty much anything before 1980 was the kind of country
that I grew up listening to, and that’s still the kind of music that I really
love, and bluegrass is, these days, really heavily influenced from the skills
and the melodies of that kind of country, so bluegrass has really progressed
into what I do. Contemporary bluegrass
has progressed from traditional bluegrass, where it’s just great tunes and
really simple melodies and great harmonies; it’s kind of progressed into almost
acoustic country. The more
contemporary stuff is really country influenced. I tried the country pop scene, and as much as I love to
listen to it, it just really didn’t sit at home with me; I just was never truly
happy performing country pop. And I got to know the Davidson Brothers quite
well, and they introduced me to this thing called bluegrass. I’d heard a few bluegrass
acts – Alison Krauss and that – but I’d never really sat and listened to it,
and it’s definitely 90 per cent of the time the music playing in my car is bluegrass;
I’m pretty heavily into it these days, I’m completely obsessed with it, it’s
good [laughter].
[Laughter]
It sounds like that’s almost an emotional response to bluegrass, as opposed to
you as a musician picking it apart and thinking, I can see how this works for me.
Yeah, bluegrass musicians, I
would say, would have to be some of the most talented musicians on the
planet. I just don’t understand
how they play that fast and the songs are just really well structured
musically, and it’s a little bit above my head; I was never good at the serious
side of music, but the lyrics and the harmonies and the vocal lines really drew
me in, and I guess, coming from a traditional country background, I was like,
this is the kind of music that I need to be doing now; I don’t want to be doing
country pop where the melodies are quite catchy but don’t challenge me as a
singer. So I moved away from what
the grind is, I suppose, what everybody else is doing; I kind of just naturally
moved away from it because of where I come from and what I grew up listening
to, basically.
I
think though from a career point of view, it could have been a difficult
decision, because bluegrass isn’t the most well-known sub-genre of country, and
certainly, both here and in the United States, country pop or country rock
predominate. So you could have been putting yourself into a strand that wasn’t
going to get as much airplay or get as much fan attention – but that doesn’t
seem to have been the case, so it was obviously the right decision?
Yeah. I was really nervous.
My first bluegrass album, Breaking New
Ground, it was … my title to my albums are always kind of summing up where
I’m at in life, and Breaking New Ground,
the first single from that, ‘That’s Where the Faith Comes In’, that song, the
whole reason I believed in that first was because I was really scared, I was
[thinking], Is this going to work? Is the industry going to go, ‘What is
she doing? What is she doing?’
[laughter] And not play me. Because this could go one of two ways: either I’ve
completely destroyed my career, or I’m carving out a niche that nobody else is
hitting in Australia, and I guess I’ve just been lucky. When you’re true to
yourself and you’re 100 per cent happy with doing something yourself, and
you’re positive about it, then I guess the power of positive energy, I guess,
the other people kind of jump on board, and I think it was the best decision
I’ve ever made; I’m making music that I want to make and that I love doing. With
this album, I’m a little bit nervous, it’s happening all over again. This album
is a lot more bluegrass than the last two, so it will be interesting to see how
the Australian market takes it, but it should be good [laughter].
There
are a couple of ways I could go from that, but since you mentioned that your
songs reflect where you are in life, that’s a nice lead-in for me to ask you
about your new single, ‘One Heartbreak Away’. So I was wondering if you could
just talk a bit about the inspiration behind that song, or not inspiration, if
that’s what it is, and also a bit about recording the album?
I guess it’s a song about
love that could go wrong, or it could go right, and it just really depends on
whether the guy wants to get his stuff together, basically [laughter]. It seems
to be a common theme with my girlfriends these days, that they’re in relationships
and they’re always ready to take that extra step a lot sooner than the other
half, and sometimes it happens the other way around – the guys are the ones that
want to take the step sooner. And I guess it’s just that time where I’m ready
for you to put me first and if you’re not going to put me first, then I’m
sorry, but I’m only one heartbreak away from leaving if it doesn’t go right. It’s a catchy, up-tempo bluegrass song
that sums up, pretty much musically, where the album is going, and it’s definitely
the first ever song that I’ve released that is as bluegrass as this one, so I’m
nervous to see how it goes, but I’m excited because I think it’s a strong song;
I really enjoyed recording this one, so yeah, we’ll see how it goes.
And
so the album is in the can, so to speak – it’s been recorded, it’s been mixed,
it’s ready to go. Because you’re going to release the first copies of it in
Tamworth?
The official album launch
date is the 18th of February, but I’ve got exclusive copies that are
going to be available for Tamworth, so the label over here is letting me bring
the physical – they’ve pushed printing so that I have it for Tamworth, and so
that I have it for my fans, and the industry back in Australia, because Australia
is always going to be home for me, and the market back home is always going to
be a priority in my mind. I haven’t moved to Nashville and recorded and found a
deal over here to forget where I’ve come from; I’ve done it to widen my market and
broaden my market, because bluegrass is so small in Australia … I was pretty
pushy with [the label], I’m like, ‘We have to have this thing ready for
Tamworth’, so it’s not going to be ready for worldwide release, so it won’t be
on iTunes or anything until February, but I will have physical copies with me
at my launch party in Tamworth.
And
just in regards to that launch party, I’m curious about the logistics of
putting that together, so how much time you allow to come back and rehearse
with the band you’re going to play with, and how much time you give yourself in
Tamworth when you’re there?
I fly home just before New
Year’s, so I’m going straight to Adelaide to visit my family, because I won’t
be home again to tour in Australia until August/September, so I’m going to go
straight home and see my family for a few days, and then we’ll be up in
Tamworth on the 13th of January. So I’ve got nine days of running through songs and doing all
of that with the band before the launch.
But the launch night is going to be a great time; we’re going to have an
opening act, which I’m still narrowing down; I’ve got a few small bluegrass
bands that are just starting out that are full of really great young singers,
but I’m just trying to pick which one I want to put in there, and they’re going
to open the night, and then I’ll do two full sets of mixing them up with songs
from the new album and going through the last couple, so it will be good. It will be just a lot of fun; I just
want to have a good fun night.
I’m
sure you will with that much preparation, that’s quite a few days’ rehearsal. I
would imagine that you’re making sure that you’re rehearsing enough so that you
can go to that night and relax?
Yes. It’s kind of nerve
wracking, because my guitarist that I’ve always used in my band is going to be
there, but my mandolin player isn’t coming to Tamworth this year, and my bass
player is going to a holiday in Thailand, so I’ve had to put together a band of
people that I’ve played with in the past and that I love working with, but I
haven’t been on stage with as much.
So it’s going to be a lot of fun, I’m really looking forward to it, but
it’s also going to be a lot of work for these poor guys that have to learn 25
new songs before Tamworth, so I feel sorry for them [laughter].
Oh,
that’s nothing – I find with Tamworth, one of the interesting things is the
amount of professional musicians, not necessarily even working as musicians,
but certainly during Tamworth they do a huge number of gigs and the standard of
playing is always so high that I think you can probably be confident that
whoever you’ve got will know what they’re doing.
Yeah, yeah. There’s just so
many good musos, I wasn’t even concerned when half my band couldn’t do the gig,
because I was like, ‘Oh, no, there’s, like, a hundred other people that can
play, they’re all so good [laughter].’
Given
that you’ll be rehearsing for a lot of the time before your Tamworth gig, do
you have time afterwards to run around and see other acts and see who’s new,
see who’s changed?
Yes. We’ll probably only have
maybe three or four rehearsals before the album launch, I mean, they’ve already
got the material, so it’s just a matter of tying it together, the guys will
learn the stuff before we get there.
So I’m going to be out and about. I’m doing the Country Music Cocktail
event on the Sunday. I’ve got a bunch of PR stuff that I’m doing just before
the launch, and I’m always out watching other music. I’m a big believer that
you need to support the industry that you’re in, so I’m one of the first people
to download most of the new albums on iTunes. I’ve got most of the albums that
came out in the last 12 months, [they’re] on my phone. So I try to get to as many shows and
gigs as I can, support other artists with what they’re doing, and it feels good
when it’s turned back around, like my last album launch, Kasey Chambers rocked
up, and Aleyce Simmonds, and all of these artists were sitting there watching
me, and it does feel good to know that you’ve got peers that support you and
what you’re doing, and I really like to make sure that I get out and do the
same. So my diary will be full;
I’ll be up from 8 o’clock every morning. I’ll make sure I catch at least one of
the Bluegrass Breakfasts, and probably won’t get to bed ‘til 3.00 am, that’s
the normal Tamworth drill.
It’s
an extraordinary festival, but I guess, to an extent, maybe living in Nashville
is like permanent Tamworth, because there’s so much music around all the time?
Yes, it’s still – you know,
it’s funny, I always thought – I came to CMA Fest this year for the first time,
which is obviously the big festival here in Nashville, and I thought, This is going to be huge. Compared to Tamworth, it’s not a whole
lot different, like at Tamworth, we really hold our own over there, and the
amount of people we’ve got is fantastic.
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