Jake Jackson's moving Anzac anthem

Melbourne singer-songwriter Jake Jackson recently released 'I Will March for You', a song inspired by his experiences marching on Anzac Day in place of his father, who died many years ago. The song has become a favourite with his audiences and, now, has been released to the public. It has a rich history and great personal resonance - not just for Jake but for the people who hear it. Recently I spoke to Jake and found out more about his story, and the story of the song. 

What does Anzac Day mean to you?

It's really simple: it's an opportunity for me to involve my father in my life. He died when I was very young so I really had no connection with him and no time with him. So as I got to know what he'd done and where he'd been in his life I started to realise how important it was for me to connect. So I'm, I guess, using Anzac Day in a funny sort of way to reconnect with my father and, in turn, realising how important it was to remember all the things that he'd done. So that's what it means to me.

And that's a hugely resonant thing in anyone's life. Is this something you've felt since childhood or is it only recently that Anzac Day has come to mean that for you?

I think it's been the last ten years, it's becoming more and more part of my life. You know, what happens to a bloke – a man – as he goes through life without a father, and you don't really think about it that much – it's not as though you take on the victim role and consider yourself short-changed because I wasn't in any way, shape or form. I had a great childhood and a great life. So I guess when I got to my forties I started realising how important it was to understand how my father was, and when I started digging I realised he was quite a guy. So I kept digging further and further and felt more and more association with the Anzac movement and the recognition of what all those guys had done all those years ago – guys and girls, by the way. My mum was in the RAAF, so I'm not going to be too gender specific here. Certainly all those who served did a phenomenal job for us, and the freedom we enjoy today as a result of their sacrifice – it sounds very serious but it's true, you know.

When you consider the generational impact of those world wars, in particular, and the Vietnam War as well – and we'll probably see down the track Iraq and Afghanistan having generational impact – it's certainly part of our national story but also it's clear that researching your father is part of your own story but also having the opportunity to tell his story.

It's opened up this incredible labyrinth of stories. I've got this metal box that I've been going through and I've been putting together all these documents and letters and, you know, you find these things. A week ago I found a letter – a very small letter, handwritten letter – written from the front in the 14-18 war, of my great uncle who was killed at Passchendaele. And it's just a small handwritten note with a cutting from a British newspaper showing where the battle was and where the action was. And, obviously 'it's with great regret that we inform you of the loss of your son'. It was addressed to his mother. And there's a whole treasure trove of incredible stuff there and I think a lot of Australians have a similar history. And if it wasn't for that one letter I doubt if the poor fellow would even have been thought of again. It's an amazing thing and it does give us a chance to recollect and think about those who have done so much. And the song is that – the song is an ode to all those, and it's not necessarily just for my father, it certainly strikes a chord with anyone that has any empathy with people that have gone away to serve their country.

And you started writing this song after marching in last year's Anzac Day parade – was that your first time marching?

No, I've marched probably ten times now. I march with the 2/12^th in Melbourne. I've watched that grow, too – that's quite an amazing thing. I was a bit sceptical about it in the beginning. I wasn't entirely sure or entirely comfortable about marching as a son of a serviceman – and servicewoman, I'll go there again. It is often so gender specific. People are always directing it to the fact that it's the men who went to war, but there's a lot of women who went to war too and they may not necessarily have been on the front but a lot were too – they were in field hospitals and so on. Anyway, I've done quite a few [marches] now and I guess I was wondering if it would ever go away, but the intense emotion that you feel when you march with the group, and in Melbourne the march ends at the Shrine [of Remembrance], and that moment when you turn the corner into the Shrine and the Shrine's standing before you with a couple of Australian soldiers there literally guarding the Shrine of Remembrance, it's a very, very moving thing. [Afterwards] I always go and have a cup of tea with my mum, who's still alive, and talk about my dad, and then go home. I sat on the couch and started writing and this song came out, and I was very, very moved by the song itself. I was unable to actually believe the thing because it was just so moving, and I didn't know what to do with it, and it was one of those funny songs where I didn't even know if I wanted to play it to anybody. I kept it to myself. Then I found myself playing it more and more, and I recorded it at home just on my iPad and started to realise that I had something pretty serious. Then I remember playing it at a gig and talking about it to the audience, then playing it, and the reaction was sort of dumbfounding, really. I looked around and almost everybody had tears in their eyes. While when you're performing it's not the ambition to have everybody burst into tears …

It's not a bad result, I have to say.

No. It's about reaching into people's hearts, you know, and the song carried so much weight that people were so moved by it. And you could physically see the people who had a real connection to it and they were immensely moved by it, and I understood that I had something very special there. As I've gone into recording the song I've tried to maintain that simplicity and that emotion. I hope I've captured it. I feel I have. Certainly the reactions I'm getting from people about the song indicate that I've managed to maintain that.

Given that you have marched several times before, what was different about last year, or did you notice anything different in yourself last year that flicked that switch, I guess – because it sounds very much like the song just came to you or came through you. So something changed.

I guess there were a few years there where I was questioning my right to be part of that movement, as the son of an Australian army person. While some took that role quite lightly and they just enjoyed the day and saw it almost as an opportunity to be part of something, I was always questioning it. And I guess last year I realised that I really was part of this thing, and it took a few years for me to get to that point. I really embraced it and felt that I had a responsibility to it, which up until then I was just sort of going along. And I was very private about it too – I wouldn't tell too many people ... What I noticed last year was the sheer weight of the movement now and the number of people who are moved by what we've done over the years. The streets were lined five, six deep this time, as opposed to some years when there'd be – obviously many thousands turn out but now it feels like its fivefold on what it used to be. Tenfold what it used to be. There's a lot of people standing on St Kilda Road now jostling for a front-row spot to be able to see people walk past wearing the medals of those who have served. My father had an OBE, New Guinea, and he served in North Africa, so consequently I feel very much part of it now. So it gave me a position where I felt like I had a right to write an anthem and this came out. That's how I view it – as an anthem. It's a melody that reflects an emotion that's saying 'I will march for you, I will remember you, I won't forget'.

Does it take a toll on you to perform it?

Massively, yes. It's a massively emotional song. Some songs I've written over the years, they've all got emotional content, they've all got feelings and they take you back to times gone by. But this one is something else, it just seems to awaken a real sense of responsibility to those who have gone.

Just in terms of performance, if you know you have a song like that which is going to take a toll, how do you manage your energy output so by the end of the night you're not completely depleted?

The nice thing about it is that people come on board with it. At my shows I always sit down and talk about the songs and introduce the songs and tell a story of the songs, so that I've got a preamble that people can grab onto and so they can understand what I'm trying to say, rather than just blasting through a set without any regard for what people think. And the nice thing about that song is that you know when you get to the end of it that 80 or 90 per cent of the audience are completely with you, so you have this sense of empathy with them, so it makes it easy to move on, to keep going. So in some ways you draw energy of the crowd that's with you. When they understand and they hear the emotions you're portraying, then it doesn't drain – it sort of adds. It's uplifting to realise that people are on the same page.

From a creative point of view, to have a song like that which you wrote and then you wrestled with it for a while, did it have an impact on writing other songs?

Definitely. It created a writer's block, for sure, because it stood up above everything else I've done so dramatically, like a shining light. It became my whole focus in terms of where I was going. In some ways I'm really looking forward to how it goes over the next few weeks because it will really give me an opportunity to move on. It's been a big part of my life, this song, for quite a long time. And I've been writing – I was away again last year, I've been writing for another album – and it's not been easy to get past this because of the effect it has on people. When you sit down and you sing a song in front of somebody and they burst into tears, it's, like, 'Oh, okay – this is pretty serious.'

And it would feel like a responsibility.

It is absolutely a responsibility, because you know that what they're doing is recollecting their past or their thoughts about their loved ones, and you know how serious that is for you, so all of a sudden you're just lighting this candle for everyone and they all light up. I do have a responsibility with this song, I really do. And you know what, it's difficult because there is a back story, there is a reality about this song – it's not something I've sat down and manufactured, it's not something I've sat down and tried to write, tried to force out, or got a group of people together and tried to do an Anzac Day song. I'm not being cynical there. That's what it's not. It's a song about my experience and my family and my experiences with having servicemen in the family, and an opportunity to remember that and respect it.

I think Lee Kernaghan's done a really good job with Spirit of the Anzacs but your song is a really good balance to that project, because the stories and  songs on that album are mostly completely impersonal, because they're letters that were found in the Australian War Memorial archive. It's actually not that common to have the sort of story you're telling in relation to war, I think. I don't know whether it's because there aren't that many people with experiences of either marching or in war who write songs.

Yes, I think it's unusual. Lee's done a great job. He's certainly got in there and done what he set out to do and done a beautiful job with it – there's no question about it. But, you know, I've got that box of letters at home that are all from my family – they're all my uncles and their mothers. So it's a very personal thing for me.

I do want to ask you about the production on the song, which is relatively simple – I say 'relatively' because it has a big sound especially building towards the end, but the dominant instrument apart from your voice really is the cello and it's used to great effect. How did you come to choose the cello for this track?

I'm going to lighten up the conversation here. I went to the Conservatorium of Music when I was young and did a degree in music, and we used to do these lunchtime concerts, and the girls playing the cello always stole my heart [laughs]. There was a very beautiful cellist at the Conservatorium who used to always get up and play the Bach Cello Suites every few months and that place was packed – everybody wanted to hear her play. So the cello left a big impression. And I did the Bach Cello Suites as well as one of my exam pieces, so the suites were pretty important to me – I spent six months of my life working on that one piece of music. But the cello's a lovely thing. If any of the stringed instruments encapsulate the human voice, it's the cello. It's a very similar range. That instrument speaks to you. So for me it was the only choice. I could have gone to the fiddle, as I normally do, but I chose the cello. Caroline came in and did a lovely job for us. And, of course, the Australian Girls Choir was lovely too – that youthful sound of those girls singing, it's just so special. It sort of juxtaposes with the sincerity and antiquity of the song's message, and then we had eighteen late-teenagers singing these beautiful parts, and they were amazing. Sally Gawley is the musical director of the choir. We wanted to keep [the production] really simple. Robyn Paine did production for me again and she did a lovely job. She's such a talented player and producer. The agenda was to keep it really nice and simple. Even the mastering that Martin did – just keeping it really simple, not trying to take it to some other place. Try to keep the purity of the message there and not disguise it with a whole lot of other instrument and other sounds and heavy arrangements.

Watch the video for 'I Will March for You' on

www.jakejackson.com.au

Interview: Jake Jackson

I had so much fun interviewing Jake Jackson last year that I decided to do it again, in honour of 'Josephine', his second single from his forthcoming album. Our conversation ranged across a whole lot of topics, including making a boat - all will become clear when you read the interview - and Johnny Cash. 

            

So it seems like just the other day that we spoke, and now you have your second single, ‘Josephine’, out. Time just flies.

Exactly right – exactly right. It just flies. This year – this year has flown with the two singles. I mean, just from a musical perspective it’s just – it’s just every day there seems to matter and, sort of, days that you try and stay on top of rehearsal and stay on top of gigs and stay on top of all the bits and pieces we’re doing this for, trying to get organised for another album. So it’s – it’s a bit of an art but it’s all good, it’s all good, I’m not complaining, having a lot of fun.

So when you say – and it’s good to be popular, as I like to say – but when you say another album, because this one hasn’t been released yet …

Yeah I know but you’ve got to be thinking of the follow ups, you really can’t afford – because it’s such a timeline. Like, I mean, realistically, you’ve got to be looking at another year to produce an album, by the time, and the film clips that go with it, the film clips are the ones that take the time. I get – I reckon I could sit down and write another album, I’ve got – I’ve got a second album, sort of, probably about six songs, seven songs in, so I’m pretty good with adding maybe three more songs, four more songs I’ll be fine, but the film clips to each one of them, sort of like an eight-week exercise, it’s a whole other – whole other problem.

Let’s talk about “Josephine” because this is your second single off the forthcoming album, which I note still doesn’t have an exact release date.

It’s not really far away, so I guess I’ll be uploading into iTunes and then changing the dates as it comes up.

Because it’s – even though, I mean, it must be slightly frustrating and you may or may not want to say, but I know that you’ve had this album in the can for a long time now and so it must seem to you like it’s just – you’re really, really keen to get it out.

Look absolutely, I’m dying to get the thing out there and say, well, here it is, this is it and we can start working on promoting our album in its entirety because the album in its entirety has a lot of colours in it, so it’s – it’s not like just promoting one song. I mean, which, of course I love too, but to – to be able to sort of show the whole – the whole palette of what we do in – in – with the album is exciting for me. And you’re right, it’s been – it’s been a year or so at least since we’ve really finished the album but, like I say, I think when you start getting into the – all the add-ons like the film clips, et cetera, they take time and, gee, before I do the next album I’ll have all the – all the film clips ready to go before I even think about it, because that puts so much pressure on us to get them finished. But we’re there and so we’re just a matter of – matter of weeks away before we get the album out and “Josephine” is going well and “The Hired Hand” went famously so it’s all – I couldn’t hope for more really, I couldn’t be more excited about it.

So how did you choose “Josephine” as the second single?

It’s just one of those songs. I’ve got a – I’ve got a mate and he’s got a – actually I’ve got a few mates funnily enough – but I’ve got a mate and one of them in particular, he said to me, he said, “I never want to hear that song again”, because he said whenever the kids get in the car – I gave them an early copy of the album and – and he said whenever the kids get in the car all they want to hear is that bloody song. And I mean it’s like – it’s a problem in one way and of course he liked it, but you can only play a song so many times. And the funny thing is another friend of mine put up on the Facebook site, “You’ve got a new fan with my eight-year-old, all she does is sing your song all day,” which of course is “Josephine”, so it’s obviously a really catchy song that I really love and – and I think it’s a song that people will – will be – find very accessible, it’s not a difficult song to get around. It’s a really happy song and it’s a song about the summer and hey, that’s where we are.

I actually think children are the hardest audience to crack, so I reckon if you’ve got kids wanting to hear it all the time, that’s – that’s a sign of how well constructed the song is. Because I think children, because they – they just respond purely to what they’re hearing they’re not thinking is it cool, am I meant to like it, am I not meant to like it, I think children actually respond to really good pure song structure, accessible lyrics and also especially the melody. So you might have a side career going there, school visits.

Look, I’m not putting on the colourful T-shirts, I’m doing that, I’m not doing the Wiggles, okay, they’ve got their own audience, they’ve got their franchises going. I’m all cool with that thanks. But no, look, you’re absolutely right what you’re saying, children are – are unencumbered with all those things that seem to get in the way of liking things, that doesn’t have to be cool, it doesn’t have to be this, it doesn’t have to be that, it’s only got to be if they like it and there are – they just pick up on melodies and if you can get a child to sing a melody, well then, you’re away.

And so “Josephine”, even though there is a boat in the song, “Josephine” is not the boat, despite what one might think.

No, no “Josephine” is not the boat and it’s not a place, it’s a girl and well, in the film clip, some producer came up to me and said, look it’s a great idea, let’s do the film clip and Josephine can be a place, and I said no, no, no, you’re missing the whole story, this is a – this is a true story. This is about a time in my life when I was building this boat and – and – and it’s a song about the girl of my dreams that’s the take on the boat, that sort of thing. So let’s not – let’s not confuse – not confuse the story. But yeah, no, it was amazing time, I mean I – I had this – I was only 23 and I came back from Queensland and I had this idea of building a boat and sailing around the islands and I didn’t have a lot of money but I somehow manage to do this thing, three years in the making, then I launched it and – and I went sailing and I had a lot of fun. And I never sailed it around the world, but, gee, I did a lot of sailing and I did a lot of the things I wanted to do, which was fantastic.

Did you have any idea how to build a boat before you started?

Absolutely none – absolutely none.

So how does – probably like making an album, you do it for the first time once, but still it’s a huge endeavour.

It’s having been on the farm and, sort of – being on the farm is all about being totally resourceful and being able to do things that – and work things out yourself. There are not many people who work on the land these days that aren’t that sort of person; you need to be a resourceful, intelligent person who can work through problems on your own. Because most people on the land are on their own, and I had a long period of that where working in the country and then working out in the outback and then working – and fundamentally, I became very adaptable and practical and I could deal with problems and I could work out how to build things and a boat didn’t look like a complicated thing to make. You know in retrospect, it isn’t a complicated thing to make, they really – as long as it floats and you don’t sort of damage the integrity of the hull and you keep this thing floating, they’re not that complicated and I didn’t need to win an America’s Cup or anything, I was just happy to go plodding around, so – so it was no technological masterpiece, but it was certainly a very nice sail boat and I had a lot of fun with it.

Well and you managed to sell it to someone else, so clearly it was a good enough boat that someone else felt they could sail it.

Look, I had the opportunity and I sailed the thing, I loved it, I did all that and then I think I had this moment when somebody really wanted to buy it. And he did buy it and it was a beautiful boat, I mean at the end of the day I was pretty handy with carpentry and – and I did a lot of lovely work on the boat and obsessed over it for three years, and you can only do – there’s only – the thing was only 33 foot long, so if you can imagine obsessing over something that’s 33 foot long for three years you can do a lot of work on the thing. So it was a beautiful thing to be on and then – and so this guy bought it and he sailed it off into the sunset with his girlfriend and they did sail it around the world. But you get that and he’d send me these postcard from Mauritius and it was like – it was almost like he was doing it with his – with his tongue poking out, but it was great, it was great.

Well, especially as he seemed to have his own Josephine with him.

Exactly right. No, he certainly had a Josephine and he certainly went off sailing with her, but I mean I did too and I just didn’t go as far as he went. He was a lot braver than me. Maybe I knew more about the boat [laughs].

Or maybe you had other things to do, that’s what I think that happens too.

Look, that’s absolutely right. Look, I sort of did it and was into it and loved it and was all over it and enjoyed it. And then – and I just got to the end of it and I thought, well, I’ve done that and no, I’m not going to sail around the world because I don’t mind the stops but those oceans things in the middle, they’re not so much fun, and the islands are a lot of fun but I had a lot of things to do, I had a lot to get on with and I wasn’t ready at, sort of, 25 to, sort of, settle down into sort of just lying around on a boat for the rest of my days, I was pretty keen to get on with music and keep things rolling.

Well to me the story of the boat and – and – and – of “Josephine” is – the boat was a dream and then you made it a reality and then the song’s about this dream girl, but also building a music career is a dream that you’re making a reality. So I’m actually wondering about the role of dreamers in society, because I think it’s – it’s – it’s been maligned in the past, being a dreamer when you’re a small child and school teachers will sometimes say stop day dreaming, don’t be such a dreamer, but I think dreamers are really valuable people to have in society and you seem to be one, so I was wondering if that’s true and if you have other dreams?

You’ve got to dream, you’ve got to have dreams, otherwise where you’re going with all of this, this one life that you’re given to you and this one life – I don’t want to give too esoteric here – but you’re given all – too philosophical – you’re given one life and if you don’t have dreams and aspirations, wow, I don’t know what you’re supposed to do with … but I’ve always had dreams about the things I want to do, but the main thing is, I’ve got up and really had a good crack at following them., I’ve been playing the guitar since I was a little kid and never stopped playing and always – always enjoyed the fact that I always seemed to get better at it, and always sung and always enjoyed singing and always sort of kept it up, and so the dream of having an audience … and once upon time somebody told me that my record was going to be played on the radio for example, I think I made that quip to some – to a – during some interview at some stage and, “Hey Mum, my record’s on the radio.” It’s pretty cool, like it’s – that is the culmination of some people’s dreams. I mean for me the dream is to – to be playing to audiences that really want to hear the music and that’s – that’s the beauty of where I am at the moment. I’m – I’m now getting a following of people that actually want to hear the songs that I’m singing and playing and writing and that is the dream come true, as opposed to a lot of musicians, spend a lot of time playing other people’s songs and – and never really being able to express them because they haven’t written them. And to be able to play your own songs and to audiences that want to hear them, is – is a pretty special thing.

Do you think it’s hard being a dreamer in the modern world though, in – in the life of being a householder and having to manage things – is it difficult to keep dreams alive?

Oh look, I think being a dreamer is a fantastic thing, so long as you actually act on it. I mean for – to be simply just dreaming and not doing anything about it would be a really frustrating process I reckon. But I’m a committed dreamer, there you go, so – so I get a dream and off I go and have a good go at it. I did that with music in so many ways. I dreamt of being a Flamenco guitar player about 15 years ago, and ten years ago, I committed myself to the instrument and I was playing the bloody thing the whole time, and learnt how to play Flamenco guitar, went to Spain, did the whole thing, and sort of, lived the dream, and that was a great experience. And I never would have got – never would have done that if I hadn’t had that – that dream of wanting to be a Flamenco guitar player at some stage in my life. I’d always been attracted to that sort of music and I was – I’d always been a country player and country singer and it was such a great challenge to, sort of, have a go at a whole different genre and then actually go to the country where it lives and breathes and take it on head on, and that’s what dreaming gets you I guess.

Do you think – do your songs start as dreams or do they start as ideas or memories or a collection of different things?

Look, every single one starts off as a feeling. Every single time you write a song, it’s a feeling. You have an emotion that you’re trying to convey and it comes out and sometimes, often what you’ll do is you’ll sit there and you hear about these guys that write, they write nine to five literally, they go into work and they’ll start writing songs at nine o’clock and – sort of get into Nashville being a bit like this at times where they’ll start at nine o’clock and they’ll finish at five o’clock and they’ll go home to their family and they’ll help cook dinner and they’ll get up in the morning and do it all again. I can’t relate to that. I just don’t know how it works, but – but I don’t do that. I find that I’ll sometimes sit down thinking, oh, I need to write and I’ll be at this time when I’ll start to write and – and then I might play for an hour before anything comes out whatsoever and then all of a sudden I’ll get into a feeling, into a vibe, into a musical sort of expression and all of a sudden I start writing a song, and they just come out. It’s not always quite like that, I must admit. “Hired Hand”, I think I wrote that on the way to a rehearsal. I got the guts of it in the car on the way to rehearsal, I was, sort of – I had the feeling of a song that I wanted to write and I sort of - I was humming it all the way to rehearsal, and I sat down there at rehearsal, I’ve got this thing, so I started playing it and then of course wrote a couple of verses quite quickly and because it was a story that was easy to tell because it was my story, so it was easy to sort of get it down and get it out. But I tend to write in a more emotive state rather than a sort of purely constructed state, the songs – when people write in a very constructed way, they tend to sound like that I think.

Well, and one could argue there are whole albums full of songs out of Nashville that do sound a bit the same, yes [laughs].

Yeah, well. [laughs] Look, I think every genre suffers that fate, I mean whether it be pop or country or soul or rap, I mean a lot of people are under a lot of pressure to produce albums, they’ve got these contracts that they’ve got to deal with and so they’ve got to pump the material out and, God bless them. But hey, I don’t know if I want to write like that. I’d rather – I’d rather do what I’m doing at the moment, sort of saying well I need to produce another album at some point, so I’m going to sort of generally start, sort of, putting together tunes that I think are going to work on it, and follow up to the current album that I’m about to release and then when it goes to recording of that – that will be quite different, that will be another great fun experience and I can just, sort of, hit that pretty hard. But – but in terms of putting the material together I’d hate to have to sit down over a sort of a two-week period and write songs, that could – they wouldn’t be any good [laughs].

I think the – I think audiences respond to feelings as well and you – when you were talking earlier you said, oh, you don’t mean to get too esoteric, and – but I actually think that one of the things that people really respond to in country music is that it’s not – it’s not about easy stuff a lot of the time. Quite often the songs are about things in life that the audience might need to work out for themselves or might need to hear someone else saying so they feel reassured, and I think that that’s one of the great strengths of it as a genre, is that there’s permission – permission to have feelings, permission to be sad, permission to be happy; you’re not expected to just be one emotion the whole time.

I think that’s right with country music, I think the beautiful thing about country music is that it gives you the right to express, unbridled, so that you can just say what you feel and put it in a song and get out there and – and people do respond to it. I mean you just look at that last song that Johnny Cash produced, I mean what an amazing song, I’m just trying to think of the name of it, but it was—

I can’t remember either.

Oh look, it was the last one he did and it was the last video clip and it was about his death, it was – imminent and upcoming death. I mean what a difficult subject to deal with, but – and he did die, and he left this incredible legacy, I wish I could think of that song, the name of it.

I might Google it while we’re talking just so I can – I’ll see if I can come up with it.

I was absolutely perplexed by that song by the intensity of it was – it was just an expression of the end of his life.

It’s called “Hurt”.

 “Hurt”, yeah, it’s an amazing song, it’s an amazing song. It’s probably one of the – probably, well, in my opinion, oh ,it’s very sad because everybody will argue that I’m wrong, but for me it was the most important song he ever did, incredible, incredible song. But once again, here we go, so a country song expressing something that people generally probably don’t want to talk about too much or – and there it is, and it doesn’t have to be sort of all candy apple pie, it can be – it can be anything and he’s doing it totally from the heart, totally from the soul and so people listen to it and get onto it.

And Rosanne Cash, I don’t know if you’ve heard her album Black Cadillac, but she released it after – after Johnny and after June died as well, and it’s about all three of her parents, her biological mother and June and Johnny dying, and it’s – well, most of the songs are I think, and that’s – they’re country songs as well and she’s – they’re incredible songs, if you haven’t heard it, I recommend the album.

Is that that song, “I’ll pick you up in a black Cadillac”?

I don’t think so,

Okay, right, I’m sorry, I heard a song the other day that somebody threw at me how they really like it and I didn’t – I didn’t – we didn’t know who it was and it was an incredible song. It was a great song, it was about somebody’s death and it was about them, “I’ll pick you up in a black Cadillac”, it was actually about hearse.

This one, I think the lyric is, “it was a black Cadillac that took you away, was—“

This has got to be the song, who’s that by?

Rosanne Cash, Johnny’s daughter.

Oh, Rosanne Cash, okay, gee, I bet that’s the song.

That album has some fantastic songs on it, but at a guess it is, I think, yeah, country music started off as a – as a genre originally to address the hardships of life, it was what the white folks’ blues, I guess. It has evolved a lot in the United States, but I think still – I think in Australia it’s still, and in certain artists in the United States, but most of Australian country music is not overly manufactured, heartless stuff.

No, look, it can’t be. I mean the audiences wouldn’t – wouldn’t listen to it if it was too – too produced. I mean it’s just – people are looking for that sort of honesty in country music and hence why a lot of people play country music with single instrument or a trio or a simple group. We’re performing as a trio at the moment – violin, guitar, two vocals – and it’s that – it’s that lovely sort of honesty that makes it really work.

And for you, working just with a violin and a guitar, that’s actually – I think, it’s not a common – often you’ll get like drum and guitar or – I’m trying to think of the last time I saw just a guitar and a violin but does that – did that take some adjusting?

It depends who’s playing the violin of course, and I suppose the guitar too, but Nigel MacLean, he’s just the coolest fiddle player in the entire universe, which is of course the Milky Way, he’s just – he’s incredible and I love him to bits and he’s plays so incredibly well. He’s a Tamworth winner, he’s a – I don’t want to bang his drum too hard, because he might get a big head, but the reality is he’s a brilliant – he’s a brilliant fiddle player and when you’re playing with somebody of that calibre it does – I tell you what, traditionally if you look at Irish music traditionally — which of course is the root of most evil, is that – of course I love Irish music, don’t take it for a second that I don’t, I love it and spent – I’ve spent many, many evenings in Irish pubs listening to Irish music, but you often find a guitar or string banjo and – or a mandolin and a violin, so it’s a very, in that genre, it’s quite a common – quite a common duo.

But I think it’s – it must be interesting for a singer, and you as a singer, to do it because you’re quite exposed, I guess, there’s not the backup of the band to – to sort of underlay anything you’re doing, you really have to be in your voice on the night, the audience is listening to every breath, pretty much, as well as every word. So are there ever any moments where you think, oh, maybe I’m a bit too exposed?

The reality of a band is that you’ve got to rehearse it pretty hard and you’ve got to build it pretty right, and the quality and the integrity in the industry, we say, is that nobody is really prepared to jam any more, everybody wants to play it note for note, so that leaves … where I – it’s the reality, I mean, you go and do a gig, you don’t often get bands that are just jamming out songs, they’re playing them as rehearsed and – and there’s been many an argument in the band room afterwards for somebody who played that bad note or jumped a chorus or missed a middle A or something like that. And so that sort of playing is, sort of, gone, whereas when you’re two up, you can – you can be a lot more fluid and you can be a lot more – you can improvise a bit more and you can make it a bit more expressive. So I, sort of, like that, I think I prefer it some ways, although I guess if you’ve got an audience and it’s jump [up] and down dancing, it’s pretty handy to have a drummer.

But it must be – it must be an interesting creative process and possibly sometimes a frustrating one when you’re playing songs from an album that you’ve recorded a year ago and you’ve been doing a lot of gigs in the past year, and the album’s about to come out and essentially you’ve got to play these songs like they’re new, because for a lot of the audience they will be, is there a – is there a – do you find that songs morph over the course of playing them so long, so that by the time you’re playing them to promote the album they seem new again? Or are there some nights where you just think, I don’t want to play this any more?

No, look – look, I think they – they always – they all have – they always take on energy of their own each night. I mean obviously they become more and more similar, but they certainly do take on their own entity as you – as you perform them, and you’ve got to, sort of, drop yourself into the mode of each song, and each song has a definite, sort of, mood and mode that I’ve got to get into for each performance. So once you’re in that zone you’re okay, but there’s some – there’s some new material I’m trying at the moment that gives me a lot of room to sort of play, and I’ve sort of wrote a few songs thinking – I wrote a couple of songs in particular just thinking about, sort of, the possibility of being able to talk through certain sections of song and not having to – not really hold the song up rhythmically the whole time and that’s quite a nice relief, sort of, [from continuing] a barrage of four-four at 120 beats a minute. It’s quite nice, a little bit of light and shade is good. And, yeah, look, I think the reality is that you are trying to emulate the album generally, but – but you’re always trying to get the feeling of the song in there and I often do that acoustically with Mickey guitar[k1] , I don’t – I don’t need to have the band all the time. Like I say, if people want to jump up and down, but if they’re dancing, it’s certainly nice to have a drummer. But look, who was I listening to the other day? Steve Earle, there’s a – there’s a fantastic video of him doing “Copperhead Road” on the internet somewhere, where he’s just standing there with a mandolin, and solely – a mandolin is like a – it’s a soprano instrument, so it’s got a very narrow sort of musical range, and so as an accompanying instrument it’s pretty tough to just pull off a whole song without anything else. He does it – he does it incredibly well and it’s just a pure testament to the intensity of the performance. If you can perform to the point where the song is totally believable with a sparse amount of instrumentation then the song, in itself, is much more credible I think.

            Yeah, it’s true, I mean that process of playing – playing them over and over again really sorts out whether they’re working or not. Which I guess is why all the musicians like to – a lot of songwriters like to test their songs live before they go into a studio, because then they can work out what songs are going to hold up.

Oh, absolutely – absolutely and you know when they bomb, you see people sort of starting, they’re looking at you because you’re singing on stage for [the] first few minutes, or first couple of minutes, or 30 seconds and then they start talking amongst themselves. You think to yourself, oops, you’ve got to – and that’s often though – that’s often in the presentation of the song and this is sometimes where bands fall down, they – the story of four-piece or five-piece band and they hammer away like I say four-four at 120 beats a minute and there’s only so much an audience can take of that, and if it hasn’t got the light and shade and it hasn’t the variety and it hasn’t got the structure, then you’ll really struggle. Of course, some people pull it off incredibly well and they have you mesmerised all night, but bands – the five-piece band in itself is a challenge.

Yeah, it’s – I haven’t seen many bands keep people mesmerised all night like that unless they’re so loud that people can’t talk.

That’s why we love country music, because they don’t do that.

I’m trying to think the only band I ever saw where like absolutely everyone was completely captivated the whole night was Soundgarden, but—

Yeah, well look, that’s right, I mean they had the audience probably in the palm of their hands and they were just feeding off it and it was rolling in ballads. I mean, think about the gigs you’ve gone to where there [wasn’t a] second where you haven’t thought about something else but what was coming at you, so it’s pretty rare, pretty rare.

           

 www.jakejackson.com.au

Interview: Jake Jackson

Jake Jackson has newly emerged onto the Australian country music scene with the single 'Hired Hand' and an album due for release in January 2013. But while he may be new to country audiences, he's a richly accomplished musician with a great story, as I found out when I spoke to him recently.

I'm going to start off by asking you what is the story behind the song ‘Hired Hand’?

The story behind ‘Hired Hand’ was a really simple little story. It was basically I got to the age of about 15 and the family had a pretty tough time. We'd come back from England without any money and been living in a boarding house; my brother and I and my mum. I figured it was time to leave and take some pressure off her and do something else and try and make a way for myself. So I left home very early, at 15, and headed out on the road and worked on farms and made a life for myself for that part of my life. I never went back, of course, but I did basically just create my own life and had a fantastic time in the process. That time is about exactly that moment, heading out and going up to -- I think the first place I worked at was this place up in Lake Bolac, which is in the western district of Victoria. Worked out on a farm there for a good, I don't know, eight, nine months and had a ball. I guess I found out who I was and worked out how it was going to go forward from there.

It's a really extraordinary thing to make a decision at such a young age to do that. Did you feel that you were older than your years? That you'd kind of experienced enough by then that it was a fairly natural decision in that you felt old enough to make it?

Look, I must say looking at kids now at 15, I think to myself how on earth did I do that? But now, looking back, I had at the age of nine gone to the UK. My mother was English, my father had died and we ended up going back there to see her family and then lived in London for four years. Went to school in London and out of London and experienced a lot. Did a lot of travelling -- well, not travelling but holidays with her in Europe at the time and we went to Spain and France and all that sort of stuff until, of course, the money ran out. We had a stroke of bad luck there. I guess I had a certain level of experience at that point in my life that made me feel that I was capable of doing that. I think the difference, too, is going into the country at that age and probably still now; it was a reasonably safe place to go. I think if it was the other way around, if I was in the country going into the city, I think if I was my parents I'd be concerned. But when it's the other way around, if you're going into the country people in the country are so accommodating and so friendly that it didn't really matter.

Given that you were a hired hand, does that mean you were just doing whatever was available? You just turned up and said what have you got?

Jackarooing, you know? Fixing fences, I did some shearing, I did everything -- all the farm jobs. All the farm jobs that the farmers usually end up not wanting to do, so I did a lot of that sort of stuff and it was fabulous. There were a lot of great times there and a lot of physical work. I'd always been very mechanically clever, I guess is the right word, and I could fix anything and had a go at everything. So I had a lot of fun. I was a fit fella and it was just a lot of fun. It was pretty easy for me to slot in there and assimilate and adapt to that lifestyle. It was a pretty easy transition. I know this sounds odd, coming from London and then Melbourne and then out bush. I'd always been into horses; I'd always done a lot of riding. As a kid, I'd ridden horses a lot and so getting out in the country and doing all that sort of stuff is not a big transition in some ways.

And you've never been tempted to have a property of your own?

Oh, many times. I'd love to have a little place, but farming now is a pretty serious business. I don't think anybody is going into farming now with a romantic vision. I think it's a very serious business with lots and lots of money involved. So at the moment I think it might be a bit complicated for me [laughs].

[Laughs] Well, I think it's complicated for everyone by the sound of it. But I was reading something about the song -- I think you first wrote it several years ago. Possibly even around the time you were working as a hired hand, is that correct?

I think I wrote that song when I was in my teens and it existed as a song that was in my head and lived there and I sang it a lot of times and never bothered recording it. Everybody always said what a great song, you've got to get that down and do something with it. It wasn't until now that I've really done that. I guess I always felt the song was missing something and the producer I was working with last year, Robyn Payne, and I sat down and looked at the song very carefully. She came up with something that changed the character of the song a little bit. Basically gave it another lift mid-song and away it went. It seemed to make the song come to life. Previous to that, it was always a good song and hopefully now it's an even better song [laughs]. But I definitely had that in my repertoire for a very long time.

It's a great song and a very solidly constructed song. I think the amount of care you've put into it shows. But not in a forced way -- it's not an overproduced song as sometimes country music songs from other countries, in particular, can sound overproduced. I'm curious that you wrote it in your teens because you weren't a musician in your teens. You were working doing other things but clearly there was a spark in you that wanted to write songs and ultimately to play music. So had you learnt music as a child?

I've always been involved in music. There's always been music in the family and we were a family that would always sing songs. Part of my life at that early age was definitely singing and playing and mucking around. It was never very serious and it was always very low key. We never thought much of it. Then I guess when I came back from the country the first time to Melbourne, the first thing I did was buy another guitar -- my first electric guitar -- and sort of got stuck into it. I was really writing a lot through that time. So, very simple songs but the beautiful thing about that song is that it is so simple and anybody that's just started on the guitar, or has been playing guitar for a couple of months, should be able to pick it up. It's only two or three chords and the melody is not hard to sing. It's an anthemic sort of thing that you can pick up pretty easily and I think that's such an essential part of any song, really. If you're starting to get too esoteric and too complicated you're losing the whole idea of what songs are about. They really should be songs that can communicate feelings and a simple song like that -- just to hear somebody sing. I've heard other people sing the song, and I've played with people that have helped me sing it, and it's always nice to hear it because it's such a simple little tune. But it's a lovely tune.

You said songs can communicate feelings and when I'm talking about country music or trying to persuade other people to listen to country music, I tend to say it's a storytelling genre. Much more, I think, than any other genre that we have in contemporary music in Australia. It’s the genre that tells Australian stories.  Rock and pop don't tend to. But I can hear that in your music as well. You're telling stories.

I think rock and pop tend to get stuck a little bit on very simple, simple concepts. Country music -- it generally spans on concepts and opens up, sometimes, long stories about people's lives. And that's what it is, it is storytelling and it's our folk music. If you go to Europe and listen to folk music in any country, you'll find that the songs are about stories about the place. Australian country music is our folk music. Good Australian country songs have got stories about Australian country life and about Australian life in general, not just the country, the city too.

One thing I find really interesting about your story is that you went to the Conservatorium of Music and you were classically trained and you gravitated towards country music. So I was wondering if you could talk a bit about that. I think if you love music, you love pretty much all types of music, but it does seem an interesting trajectory to go from such classical training into a genre that a lot of people would think is very distant from classical training.

I think it's like those people that go off on those boat cruises. They cruise all around the world and they see all the different colours of the planet and they see what other people are doing and they get a feel for lots of different things. They end up coming back and probably loving where they came from more. I think it's an interesting simile but it's true. I played a lot of classical music and enjoyed it and enjoyed the exercise and enjoyed the work and loved the dedication. It was a fabulous thing to be doing in my late teens, to be at the Conservatorium and enjoying the whole musical experience. It took me onto some really interesting musical journeys. When the album comes out in January next year, you'll hear some of those emphases. I went and spent some time in Spain playing flamenco music and all these sorts of things and they all add up and they all go into the pot. So when it comes to playing, it affects how you play and how you think. But like you say, after all that music and after all that education, I guess to be -- and I don't want to use the words ‘coming back’ to country music because it's not right. I've ended up where my heart is and it's a lovely genre to work in. Especially as a singer, you know? As a guitar player, if I just purely focused on the instrument; a lot of people, they seem to spend a lot of time getting very intellectual about guitar playing. But as a singer, to sing country songs and tell stories and to write stories is really, to me, the joy of it all, absolutely.

So do you find that with your singing voice, it feels like your natural singing voice? I guess when singers sing in different genres, they have to adapt sometimes. But is this where you feel your voice belongs?

It’s funny that you say that, because there was a time there when I was trying to push my voice in all sorts of directions and I think I went through a period of about -- I think it was about the same time I went to Spain, I decided I wasn't going to sing like that any more. When I came back, I was just going to start from the ground up again and just singing with my natural voice and not bother with any more than that, and never try and sing out of my range too much, and always basically be comfortable. Because the reality is you can't get the emotion into your voice if you're trying to sing things that you're voice isn't capable of doing or isn't designed to do. And everybody's voice is so different. So for me, I started -- well, I haven't started -- I've taken the voice to a degree where I'm only going to sing things that I'm going to be comfortable singing now, in my own natural singing voice. You're absolutely right that you've heard that because it is exactly what I'm doing nowadays. I'm not trying to do anything too technical with my voice. I'm just trying to sing the words and make them mean something.

For musicians working in the country music genre, I think the audience and performer interplay is really interesting and supportive, in that you're allowed to be vulnerable as a country performer. You are allowed to sing what you feel and the audience will support that. And I think part of the reason is that the audience -- no-one who goes to a country music show is trying to be cool. They're not trying to impress anyone. They're there because they genuinely love the music and Tamworth is like that on steroids really. But I guess as a musician, it must be really satisfying to know that you're appearing before an audience that is completely open and they're there to receive you.

Hundred percent. I've played all those rock venues and I've played all those sorts of venues. I've played jazz and I've played all sorts of music and I can tell you, it can be daunting at times because you know that everybody's there -- as you say, trying to be cool and trying to make an impression on everybody else -- and they're not really there for the right reasons in some ways. But country music audiences are fantastic. They love to hear it, they love to listen to it and they're very generous with their appreciation too. They go beyond - they're a listening audience as opposed to a beer-drinking audience -- of course, they can be beer audiences too -- but as opposed to an audience that there for a whole lot of other reasons apart from the music. As a musician, as a singer, as an entertainer, there's nothing nicer than to be working to a room where people are interested in what you're saying and what you're doing and what you're singing and what you're playing. As opposed to just standing around looking cool [laughs].

[Laughs] You don't get a lot of band T-shirts in a country music audience.

No, no, no it's probably uncool. It's funny, every genre has uncool things to do and country music band T-shirts are not the go. That's right. But, hey, it's a great genre to work with and the musicians too, there's a real family-orientated feel about it. I played some jazz music for a while and I used to play standards and sing, and it was a very loaded environment where people were very much into how you stand technically and where you sit with your taste, and you've got to like this guy and you've got to like that. And if you don't like Charlie Parker, you don't know what you're talking about sort of thing.  Whereas country music audiences and country music lovers are really just interested in the songs. They're really just interested in the things in the songs and also the other great thing about them, too, is they are prepared to judge. They're prepared to say yes, I like that, and that is a really good thing, because you'll find in a lot of audiences or a lot of genres where the music is so similar and so stereotypical that nobody's prepared to like anything new because it doesn't have a big brand attached to it or something like that.

It's an audience that's super supportive of new artists, regardless of age or sex, actually. You can be an 18-year-old young woman starting out and you'll have 70 year olds sitting there saying, ‘Good on ya, love.’ And turning up for the gig.

Australia's full of that.  Pretty much.

And also it's an educated audience, in that a lot of country music people know the history of the genre. They know about Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell and they can talk you through any number of things. But they will embrace new artists. If a reference is there, they'll hear it. So do you have any references in your own music. If there's any historical country music that you really like or that you refer to in your songwriting?

I can tell you a story that'll make you smile. When I was at the Conservatorium, I was teaching in the evening, teaching guitar because I was getting pretty good at the instrument and so I was able to make a few dollars teaching. And I ended up teaching a blind guy. I went around to his place. He'd called me up. I went around to his place and there were a lot of funny stories associated with his story. And he's an amazing guy. He just lost his sight, very unfortunately, a lovely fella and he decided he was going to learn to play guitar. He was totally into Hank Williams and so we spent a lot of time learning Hank Williams songs and me teaching him those. Teaching him the words and teaching him the guitar parts and was fantastic fun. The first time I went there, there wasn't a light operating in the place and it was a stark reminder of what blind people have to deal with. Of course, he never changed the globes because they were of no use to him [laughs].  So second time I came back, I brought two or three globes with me and put some globes into his lights and then I could see what I was doing as well. He didn't need them of course, he had the other sense. But, look, my influences go back a long way and of course, people like Hank Williams are pretty important to me. Of course, it's all there. But I moved through that period when I was listening to guys like John Hiatt and Steve Earle and those sorts of midwest American players and really enjoyed what they were doing. I think John Hiatt played a big role in my lyric growing and my songsmithing. He's an amazing songsmith, amazing wordsmith. He was a big inspiration to me and still is, funnily enough. I still listen to that Stolen Moments album, it's pretty amazing … It's funny because I think when Dixie Chicks started coming out, everybody said to me what's that playing [laughs]. This is crazy. You've got to get onto this. And I still have those albums. I've had a couple of kids and of course, they ended up putting up with my eclectic country music taste. Occasionally I'd be listening to things that could be quite obscure and then I'd be straight into the mainstream because somebody came out with a song that just had everything. And of course, that's when I think about country music, you can dip it into the mainstream and nobody is going to say to you, ‘Oh that's uncool’, because they're all great songs. There's lots of great music around at the moment. A lot of good artists coming through too. People like Jasmine Rae and those sorts of people; they're really playing some lovely music.

Oh, there are a lot of good Victorians I found this year. Lachlan Bryan and Jed Rowe. I think there's something in the water down there with you guys [laughs].

We're working on it [laughs]. We're trying to make an impression on the country. Well, it's so cold down here; we've got sit around and write songs. There's all there is to do [laughs].

We're always hearing about how good Melbourne is for the arts. But it does seem to be the case with country music.

Oh, look, there's no doubt about it. Melbourne has got a really nice live music feel about it. But I think Sydney is the same, if you know where to go. I think you can find -- but I think it may just be a little bit more obvious here, that's all.

Smaller and more parochial, Jake, that's the way we think of it [laughs].

Absolutely [laughs].

You've obviously been doing a lot of different things but you arrived at this point of your life where you're going to put out a country music album. So how did you come to the decision of doing it now?

Oh, it’s straightforward -- did my job with the kids. Kids have left home. Personally, I love them to bits, they're fantastic kids. I lost my father early so I was determined to do a job for them. I tried to give them all the things that I missed out on and I was determined that they didn't leave home at 15 [laughs]. And of course they didn't. So in some ways -- well, I'm really proud of them and really pleased with how it all turned out. It's a bit of my time now. I struggled to keep playing music all those years, bringing up the kids. I went into all sorts of bits and pieces with my music. I was producing and playing and gigging but never really putting my heart and soul into it. I just couldn’t with the children, but now I'm free of that. I can certainly put a lot more time into it.  You know what they say about difference between a musician and a pizza: a pizza can feed a family of five and a musician can't [laughs].

[Laughs] I've never heard that.

It's a good one, isn't it? I often think about it [laughs]. But now I'm free of the kids, I'm able to focus back on the music. And I'm really enjoying it. It's great. I've rekindled a lot of friendships that I had years and years ago and some of those people have gone on and reached amazing heights in their musicality. Others have stopped playing and come back to playing. A couple of guys that I haven't played with for a few years that I jam with now and again. Every couple of weeks. They both stopped playing and now that I'm back into it, they've sort of jumped back in a bit too. So it's a nice journey to be back and doing it as ferociously as I'm doing at the moment. And I did the album and I came away from the album thinking I really like this album. I know that sounds odd, and I probably shouldn't say these things about my own things, but I really am proud of it and I'm really, really enjoying it, and what's nice about it is I play it for people and they enjoy it too. And that is a wonderful feeling; it's a wonderful thing to be doing.

There actually wouldn't be too many artists who can say that the album has happened at the right pace, at the right time of their lives. It's really unusual for someone to put their artistic ambitions on hold or artistic dreams on hold, to raise a family. I think the cultural imperative is to get out there and do it as young as possible and as quickly as possible. But, of course, then you're vulnerable to doing things when you're not ready. But you've had time to let it marinate, so to speak. And to put it in the oven when you wanted to [laughs].

 [Laughs] Yeah.

And obviously that's what you're feeling, that it's the right time.

Oh definitely. The nice thing about doing it a little bit later in life is that you don't have the same inhibitions that you do when you're younger. I remember I played hundreds and hundreds of gigs when I was younger and I never thought I was a good enough guitar player. I never thought I was a good enough singer. I was always trying to get better and I was always working on it hard. And, of course, you always do try and get better, but there comes a certain point in your life where you think to yourself well, that's what I am and that's what I've got and this is how I play and this is how I sing and I'm just going to work with that and work with what I've got rather than the continual push to try and make it happen in some sort of a way. The other nice thing too is that now I am doing it at my own pace. I'm not under any pressure. I'm not going crazy to get signed by some major record label or anything like that. I'm an independent artist and I'm basically just cruising along and doing it at my own rate. That's the only way you can really be creative. If somebody says, ‘Sit down here and write a song in the next half an hour’, it's pretty hard to do, but if you've got the time and you take your time, things just seem to happen anyway. So it's all good.

Your album's coming out early next year but will you be touring ahead of that? One would imagine you're touring around the time it's released as well.

We'll definitely be touring around the time it's released and hopefully we can get to as many ports in as many storms as we can [laughs]. I will be taking a band on the road -- I do a three-piece set-up with a singer and a fiddle player and just myself on guitar. That's pretty nice too. So we may be doing a combination of ‘band gigs’ and three-piece gigs. So we'll see how that rolls out, but that's what I'm very much looking forward to getting the album out there on the road. It'll be good fun.

As an independent artist, I guess, it's great to have control over your own music but the flipside is you've got to organise everything yourself. So is it somewhat daunting to think, ‘I've got to organise a tour or I'll find someone to organise a tour for me’?

It’s massive, it's absolutely massive. I can't deny it. I used to think it was just going to be a simple thing. Just putting together an album and away you go -- the rest of it will all fall into place. Well, I can tell you it's a big job and I tell you what, the stuff that I've been doing lately that I find to be an amazing job is putting those videos together. The videos for the songs are just a huge job and I guess I totally underestimated the work of the videographer. I have been very, very busy for the last six weeks now -- five weeks putting together a couple of videos. One of them is up on YouTube for this song [‘Hired Hand’] now. It's a lot of fun. We had a lot of fun filming it and we had a lot of fun producing it. That's a hard process. It's nearly as hard [laughs] as writing the music, dare I say it. In some ways it's harder because it's not my field of expertise. Music almost seems simple compared to the movies.

I almost would have thought that we could do away with videos these days. But they're obviously still very useful because people are making them.

Oh look, people will have to. People have to put a name to a face and a face to a name. They need to see it on the screen and I think it helps tremendously in terms of relating the songs. The video we did, it's a nice video and it's cool. There's a little bit of humour in there and it's not too serious and we're just having fun. You get to see the players and you get to see where we filmed it out in the country in Taggerty up in the north of the Divide here. It's good stuff. It's important, I think. If it helps people to relate to the songs and the next single which comes out in about another six or seven weeks, we're working on that video at the moment. 

And when you head out on the road, are you one of these writers who tends to collect stories from various places? Like you'll keep an ear out for what's going on and jot down a few ideas as you go? So if you're on the road, will it be partly a story-collecting exercise?

My car has two books, two old books in it that I just keep writing words in. I'm writing stories down, reference points. I leave two books in there because if I take one out and lose it or I put it somewhere else, I leave it in the rehearsal room or something, then I've always got the other one to jot it down. I've always got a jotting book next to me. I learnt that from a guy called Mike Rudd years and years ago. When I was a kid, I played around with a band working. He wrote a song called ‘Someday I'll Have Money, I'll be Gone’ it's called, I think. It was a great song, a huge song, huge international success. He taught me that. He said you always grab a little pad with you and write down words as they come. So yeah, definitely, as we're on the road, we'll be looking for -- not necessarily looking for experiences. We'll be noting experiences. There you go.

 [Laughs] Well, I guess again the genre feeds into itself that way. To be a country music artist necessitates going out to remote places often or just going to regional centres and you do tend to see a lot more stories or hear a lot more stories that way.

Oh look, no question about it. You roll up in a new town; you have a lot of experiences. I was doing a radio interview the other day and it was up in Tenterfield -- actually it was a day of radio interviews and I remember almost every town I'd been in, there was a story I could tell. Tenterfield, I came off a motorbike at 2 o'clock in the morning one night and spent the whole night in a ditch. I could've written a song about that but I don't know if I did [laughs].

You could still write a song about that.

I still could, yeah. I still could. The New England Highway in the middle of the night.

I hope it wasn’t winter.

It was okay; I survived it [laughs].

 [Laughs] That's good. Will you be heading for Tamworth?

Look, that's the plan at the moment. Things are happening very quickly for this, for me and this song at the moment. We're getting an extremely positive response to everything so I guess we've got to be at Tamworth in some way, shape or form. I'm not sure quite how we're going to get that sorted but I know we will and yeah, we'll be there somewhere.  So it'll be good fun.

Visit www.jakejackson.com.au to listen to 'Hired Hand'.