On Moving Parts I dream of emails.I dream of emails with signed contracts, with confirmed itineraries, with tentative set-times, with the tag line ‘yep, lock it in’.For the last eight months I’ve been working on one of the biggest juggling acts of my career – lining up a fifteen show, seven person Gusto tour of the UK. I’ll do a bigger post in the near future, once the full tour dates have been announced, once the real big thing I’ve been working on can be put out in to the world, but for now I talk about moving parts.Organising a tour of this scale is a series of ever-increasing hurdles. First there’s the band availability – figuring out exactly when seven people are available to tour, how to juggle everyone’s calendars to minimise time off work, how much imposition I can put on the band’s day to day life.Then, into that ever-shrinking window where everyone says they’re free, I sketch out a rough itinerary – where do we want to go? where can we afford to go? what actually makes sense for a seven piece band from Melbourne to do on their debut Europe tour?Continue reading “On Moving Parts”
On Local Scenes I saw my friend Greta play a show a couple of weeks ago. It was an intimate jazz gig, a group of friends playing music together at Open Studio on a Saturday afternoon, and Greta had pulled together an eclectic mix of original songs and arrangements of other people’s tunes to fill in two sets. They covered a couple of classics – including a great version of a Joni Mitchell tune. They kicked the whole set off with a version of local saxophonist Julien Wilson’s tune Rebellious Bird.A big part of the jazz tradition is re-imagining older works, often using them as a vehicle for improvisation, and covering other people’s work is nothing new – its part and parcel of being a musician. We learn to play our instruments by learning to play other people’s songs. Many people never get to writing their own music, and that’s fine – music doesn’t have to be original to be good, and there’s a lot of enjoyment gained from playing a song you love.As a side note – the ’covers scene’ supports a lot of original musicians. Playing weddings and corporate events where we presented versions of songs that people know paid my rent for many years. Playing covers music is a living for many of Australia’s finest original musicians, but it often feels like the setlists are pretty US-centric. Other than a couple of classic Paul Kelly songs, the occasional John Farnham or INXS or Cold Chisel, most setlists draw heavily from music written and recorded elsewhere – there’s a bigger conversation to be had re supporting homegrown talent.Continue reading “On Local Scenes”
On Accidents and Coincidences I had an odd experience today.I woke up on my day off, and went for a 15 km run. I was almost home, on the last stretch of the Merri Creek when I ran past a girl on a bike. A moment later I hear a light crunch sound in the background of my music. I turn around to look back and there’s no-one there, so I assume the girl has just sped around the corner, but on a whim, I stop and run back a couple of steps.When I get back to the bend where I passed her, I see she’s slipped with her bike off the edge of the path and fallen down the edge of the creek. There’s some big hefty rocks along the edge of the path and she’s standing in a crack between two of them, holding the bike up above her head with both hands.There’s a lot of screaming, coming from a baby I hadn’t noticed, strapped to the back of the bike. It’s hanging off the edge of the bike, which is hanging off the edge of the rock, all supported by the girl underneath who is holding it up and out of the water.Continue reading “On Accidents and Coincidences”
On Success An interesting conversation unfolded on social media over the last couple of days. A musician who has been around for a while and (from my perspective) has an established profile – is playing lots of gigs, doing interesting shows with awesome people, popping up on line-ups that I aspire to etc, made a post talking about feeling both busy and rejected by the local music community.It hit hard, because most of the comments were musicians who I look up to – all sharing the same sentiment. Strange that I find myself in the same category as musicians who play with Jessica Mauboy and Guy Sebastian, artists who’ve won ARIA and GRAMMY awards, bands who’ve played headline shows on overseas festivals.I’ve been thinking a lot this week on what ‘success’ looks like, as an artist who might just float along at this level for the rest of my life. This might be it – the pinnacle of my career releasing an album to 150 people in Melbourne then hitting the East Coast for a run of festival dates where we’re either on in the early afternoon before the audience starts moving, or on as a late night closing act after the headline act has played and most of the sensible people have gone home.I keep reminding myself that we’re lucky to be on festival line-ups at all.Continue reading “On Success”
On Imposter Syndrome I’m releasing another new EP next Friday! This one is with Gusto Gusto, the raucous instrumental dance band I started exactly two years ago this month.In two years we’ve gone from not existing to two national tours, sold-out shows in three states, slots at festivals around the country (Woodford Folk Festival, Peak Festival, Questival – a full medieval festival in a castle with hundreds of punters in capes and wizard hats), and releasing our debut EP last year. It’s been a pretty wild rush, taking a couple years of COVID induced stasis and launching it full-bore into a seven-piece non-stop party band.It’s been exhausting at times, mainly co-ordinating seven peoples calendars, but also a lot of fun, and now we have a second EP (recorded, mixed and mastered by myself) ready to go.If you want to support us, please come to the launch next week!With the release of new music comes the return of imposter syndrome.Continue reading “On Imposter Syndrome”
On A New Banjo EP I’m releasing an EP on Friday!It’s with the Backyard Banjo Club, a collaborative project that I started a couple of years ago with my friend Phoebe. We’ve been friends for over ten years, met at uni, and played in a bunch of bands together before she moved overseas. She came back around the start of COVID, which just happened to be when I bought a second-hand banjo from Cash Converters. I had big dreams of learning clawhammer, but I found the banjo much more intuitive played as a chunk chunk trad jazz thing. Phoebe’s a great violin player, and an awesome singer, so we connected mainly so I could practice my jazz chops. As most often happens with projects I’m involved with, it moved from being a covers thing to an original thing, and here we are three years later. Continue reading “On A New Banjo EP”
On Low Stress Holidays I spend a lot of my time entertaining silly ideas, and this last one was one of my silliest.There’s a company that does campervan relocations. You get a free campervan, if you’re willing to drive it where the company wants it driven, and if you’re flexible so you can hit the dates they require.I’d been thinking about a holiday somewhere warm over the July school holidays, so when I looked on the website my first hope was a trip from Melbourne across the Nullarbor, up the west coast and ending in Broome.Nothing available, so I briefly entertained a four day jaunt from Hobart to Melbourne, ferry transport included. I realised that sleeping in a van in Tasmanian winter would be uncomfortable at best.Option three was a five day trip from Cairns to Brisbane, 19 hours of drive time along a stretch of coast I’ve never seen. I’ve done the Melbourne to Sydney jaunt at least thirty times over the last ten years, headed up to Brisbane ten times, gone so far as the Sunshine Coast, but never driven any higher up the coast. The company was also offering $250 in petrol vouchers which sweetened the deal, so I booked it in, and booked myself a flights from Melbourne to Cairns and a return from Brisbane to Melbourne.At this point I had no itinerary in mind and I was in the middle of a Gusto tour that was sapping all my admin head space.I outsourced the trip planning to ChatGPT.Continue reading “On Low Stress Holidays”
On the 400 Bones Single Tour Gusto just finished our second big tour, an odd collection of ten sets in three states across just over a month.We were touring to launch our new single ‘400 Bones’. It always feels a little weird to release singles as an instrumental band, it doesn’t really tie into the whole internet marketing machine – we can’t release lyric versions of our songs on Youtube, and if people hear our song in a random playlist they often struggle to find it again later (googling ‘clarinet, violin, uptempo song’ doesn’t really work).For the most part instrumental song names are fairly arbitrary, check out any of the post-bop albums of the 1960s. Without lyrics, meaning is a little harder to parse, and I often find I’ll write a piece of music with a place-holder title (inst. funk 3) and attach a title to it later based on the feeling it evokes. I’ll occasionally write using a title as inspiration – ie ‘Anathema Anthem’ from Gusto’s first EP, and it’s a nice creative exercise, but at the end of the day does calling a song ‘Amelia’ give it further depth, or imbue it with a stronger back-story?Continue reading “On the 400 Bones Single Tour”
On The Snow We are at the snow.It is way too warm inside, we had to turn the heater off last night and crack open the window to let most of the warm air out, and even then most of the band was half-naked, lying on top of blankets.We arrived yesterday arvo, rolling out of bed at six am and driving eight hours through the mountains. I spent most of the drive reading my book, a biography of Leonard Cohen. We dropped the car off at Bullock’s Flat to catch the Skitube, a train that runs through a tunnel in the mountain. The train is decrepit, reminiscent of the old Connex trains of the early 2000s, plastic bucket seats with big scratch marks from generations of skier’s poles. The brochure tells us this train is a feat of Swiss engineering.At the top of the mountain we see glorious white slopes and streams of skiers drifting in rows. Some of them are standing, many of them are not. We meet the festival team who tell us the snow is actually pretty shit and the ski lifts aren’t running yet, so anyone who is skiing has to walk up the slope for each run. As we stand in the carpark the band stomp into the sloshy snow that steams on the tarmac. I’m over-dressed, wearing two jumpers and a jacket and sweating my arse off.Continue reading “On The Snow”
On Japanuary After almost three years spent at home, drinking beers solo by the BBQ in the back park and thinking wistfully of busier times, this last month made up for the years of inaction.It kicked off on Boxing Day with a two week, twelve date Gusto tour, followed by a blessed two days at home (mainly spent invoicing venues, tracking spreadsheets, attempting to scramble together lesson plans and wash off two weeks of grime). Then we flew to Japan.Japan’s been on the cards for a while. Facebook memories informs I went there exactly ten years ago with my friend Steve, but time and I have done a pretty good job of wiping most of those experiences away. There were a couple of key Japanese phrases lodged in the old memory bank, arigato - ‘thank you’, konichiwa – ‘hello’ and watashi wa baka na gaikokujin – ‘I’m a stupid foreigner’, as well as memories of Fuji-Q – an amusement park at the base of Mt Fuji that sports horrifying rollercoasters (enter my fear of heights) and a terrifying haunted house (enter my fear of everything else). There was a vague recollection that the ticket inspector on the shinkansen – bullet train would bow everytime he entered and exited a carriage (still true), and a lot of memories of sitting stark naked in an outdoor onsen – hot spring as snow powdered down around us, toasty bodies holding up frosty heads.Continue reading “On Japanuary”