Photo credit: Chloe Isaac
Tell us about your tour vehicle.
I travel almost everywhere on tour now in a Chevy Silverado HD truck and we tow a 22 ft Kokoda caravan. Last year we didn’t get on one plane for the whole year, made it to 106 music destinations (not including all the places we stopped and stayed along the way) and towed the van over 76 thousand kilometres all over Australia.
How do you eat cheaply and/or healthy while on tour?
We make all our on food on the road because we have the caravan with us so we can always stock up our fridge at local organic stores or markets along the way so we always have fresh healthy food that we’ve prepared ourselves. My favourite past time is cooking so this suits me well.
How many strings do you break in a typical year? How much does it cost to replace them?
I don’t really break many strings because luckily my partner (also one of my guitar players in my band) changed them for me fairly regularly. If it were left up to me, I’d probably have the same strings on for years out of laziness.
Where do you rehearse?
We only rehearse once every two years or so which means we don’t need to worry about a rehearsal space much but my partner and I own a recording studio on our property on the central coast of NSW (a couple hours north of Sydney) The Rabbit Hole Recording Studio. So we have our rehearsals there on the odd times we make the effort. Having my partner in my band does help because we jam around the house a lot just for fun so I guess that is our kind of rehearsing.
What was the title and a sample lyric from the first song that you wrote?
I wrote a song when I was about 15 for my best friend called ‘Beccy’. The night before, Beccy and I went to see Lucinda Williams live in concert for the first time and I decided then that I wanted to be a songwriter. I woke up the next morning and wrote my first song.
Describe your first gig.
The first time I ever sang on stage was at a little club in my hometown of Southend in South Australia. My friend and I sang Dire Straits’ ‘Walk of Life’ and Cindy Lauper’s ‘Time After Time’ with my mum and dad’s country band called The Dead Ringer Band.
What was your last day job? What was your favorite day job?
I worked cleaning houses and hotel rooms when I live in Norfolk Island in the South Pacific for a while but aside from that I’ve mostly just played music for a living
How has your music-related income changed over the past 5-10 years? What do you expect it to look like 5-10 years from now?
I’ve actually chosen to go back to a lot of the more simpler and low budget ways of touring over the last couple of years. I realised that the convenience of flying everywhere for touring really wasn’t setting my soul on fire that much and I was missing out on seeing a lot of Australia and taking my kids to experience a lot of great things that I used to do in my early days of touring and my childhood. So I traded in my fast, convenient jetting setting lifestyle for a Chevy truck and a Kokoda caravan and now we travel everywhere like that. It’s a bonus that it is better for the budget of course but mostly it’s much more soul filling and I don’t ever want to put a price on that.
What one thing do you know now that you had wished you knew when you started your career in music?
I actually try now to be more like how I was when I first started in music. Back then I didn’t know much about the industry so I was just happy to do my own thing and not worry too much about what anyone else was doing or how they did it. I just paved my own way.
Years later I started to get caught up in thinking I had to buy in to what everyone was telling me I should do and how I should do it. I think I tuned out of my inner voice and listened more to the outer noise. I guess I know now that in a creative journey there is no right or wrong way to do things and it’s all about just doing the things that resonate with you and your own definition of success. When I first started, I just did my own thing so naturally, now I have to remind myself to tune back in to that inner voice. I call her my inner foghorn and she’s way smarter and better at everything than me.