On Taking a Seven Week Old Baby to an Interstate Music Festival We took our seven week old baby on a plane across the Bass Strait to attend Dark Mofo, Tasmania’s mid-winter arts festival. If I’m honest, my partner and our friend Greta took the baby on the plane, I was on a separate flight an hour later, being upgraded to Economy X which has a skerrick more leg room because I had a glut of frequent-flyer points. When I arrived, they were already checked into the hotel and baby was happily feeding. The trip down was seamless, baby sleeping happily strapped to mum the whole flight, and he happily slept some more as we went out for Udon noodles to warm us in the icy Hobart evening. We wandered into Pablos Cocktail Bar and I had a solo beer in the beer garden with the baby while the girls watched some jazz inside, then the girls took the baby home and I went to see Clown Core, an equal parts horrific/satisfying/awe-inspiring mix of hectic breakbeats, AI-generated art, and post-apocalyptic themes. It’s music for the Tiktok generation, constant chopping and changing between ideas. Every 10 seconds something new is thrown at you, an absolute barrage of information and dopamine hits. Highly enjoyable. I had a couple of beers and got back to the hotel at 11 to find baby absolutely cracking it. He proceeded to scream and feed and shit until 3 am, when he finally passed out letting me and my partner get a small amount of sleep. Tears were shed, mostly not the baby’s. Continue reading “On Taking a Seven Week Old Baby to an Interstate Music Festival”
On Patience Night-time nappy changes are like trying to bag an ebullient octopus. His limbs multiply, his torso stretches out, he releases his siren call. He dips his heels into the mustard yellow pool in his nappy and merrily kicks it across the room, and while you reach over to grab a towel he happily fountains wee straight into the air, across the change table, into his own mouth. All the while he is screaming bloody murder. My boy was born with a strong set of lungs, and he will happily tell you how he feels. One friend likens it to an on/off switch. He doesn’t have the nuance to tell you what’s wrong, but by god will tell you something IS wrong, and once you’ve run through the laundry list of possible problems – does he require inputs or outputs? He turns off the alarm and leave you wondering which of the things you tried worked. … I thought having a baby would bring me patience. Continue reading “On Patience”
On Gusto Gusto’s New Album Gusto Gusto have a new album! To The Ocean They Returned is out today. It’s our debut full-length album, which is a funny music marketing thing I’ve seen everyone else do and figured we’d co-opt for our project. Is this our ‘debut album’? No, of course not. We’ve got two EPs out already. But it’s our ‘debut full-length album’, which basically means it’s the first time we’ve done a longer album. Weirdly, music industry people LOVE stuff like this. Anything that can make something seem new and cool sells right? Blergh. I first saw **name redacted because some of my friends play in his band** try this, and suddenly all these people were raving about this ‘cool new artist’ who has just released his first album. Not his first album, and definitely not new, he’d been kicking around Melbourne for years at that point, but he just scrubbed the internet of his first two albums and started fresh. The marketing worked and his ‘debut’ album did really well and now he has a successful career, so let’s see how it goes for us. To The Ocean IS a much different album to our two EPs. Continue reading “On Gusto Gusto’s New Album”
On Gardens Charlotte Wood reminds me I have a garden. A derelict patch down the back of the house where I stacked four planters along the top of the Astroturf and enthusiastically grew silverbeet one year, supplanted it with a half-hearted attempt at zucchinis the second year and finally succumbed to beds of mint and oregano on the third. It’s not that I’m not a good gardener, a large part of it is the environment. The house shields the planters from sun for most of the year, the olive trees shields them from rain for the rest. The plants that thrive are the ones that don’t need sun or water. The other part is of course a lack of care. The busier I get the easier it is to sequester myself inside the house where there’s warmth and light and coffee, and a distinct lack of the pollen that sets off my spring hayfever. When I’m busy the garden is left to its own devices, and it does a good job of growing, not in rigid straight lines of easily accessible zucchinis, ripe for the dinner table, but more in a higgledy-piggledy explosion of weeds and oregano, woody knots that find their way through cracks in the side of the planter box and then dig down through the Astroturf to find Mother Earth. Continue reading “On Gardens”
On Glastonbury Festival Gusto Gusto are going to Glastonbury Festival. Yeeeeeep. This little band that came out of 2021’s lockdown bubble and played our first gig in May of 2022 is getting ready to jet overseas next month and play arguably the biggest festival in the world. It’s truly absurd that in 2 short years we’ve gone from our first gig at Thornbury’s Café Gummo to playing Glastonbury. I start to write our Grammy’s acceptance speech… “Gusto, from Gummo to Glasto…” Then I remind myself that we’re still going to be the smallest band at Glastonbury – we’re no Elton John or Arctic Monkeys or Rolling Stones. We’re not playing the main stages. We’ll be down the bottom end of the official poster (if they remember to put us on at all lol). BUT we’ll be there. And we’ll play a bunch of shows. And we’ll play our arses off, because we’ve been working hard. In the last 24 months we’ve played 76 shows. Released two EPs. Toured the country three times. We’ve sold out shows in a handful of places, and in the process had a lot of fun and met a lot of people. Continue reading “On Glastonbury Festival”
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 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”