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 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 Croatia Croatia is warm. Very very warm. We’re in Dubrovnik, the most touristed place in all of Europe. Estimates are 36 tourists per each local resident and we feel it when we first arrive in the Old Town. There’s a literal swarm of people walking every direction, icecreams held high above the crowd. There’s icecreams everywhere – every second shop is an icecream shop, which makes sense in a week where the temperature is 35 when we arrive and bottoms out at 30 degrees overnight. The city is glorious – giant stone walls, ramparts, skinny laneways with tiny tables laid out. Our host suggests we dine at the Stara Loza restaurant, but that we’ll need to book in advance. We stumble in by accident and manage to get a table for two on the street, finding out in the process that this is a Michelin-starred restaurant and the food is on the expensive side. Splash out, its not a honeymoon is the call of the night and I order the beef ribs which melt away as I eat them. We spend 150 Euro on one meal and promise that we’ll have breakfast in for the rest of the week to compensate. Continue reading “On Croatia”
On Serbia Sitting in Belgrade Airport waiting for our flight to Dubrovnik, which has (surprise surprise) been delayed for an hour. Air Serbia flights have so far been cheap, spacious and late. Serbia hasn’t been quite what I expected. It was meant to be a stepping stone between Hungary and Croatia, but we figured if we were going to fly through we might as well spend a couple of days exploring. We left Budapest in a flap – a world-wide IT shutdown causing transit chaos. When we arrived at the airport there were thousands of people milling around, half of the computers weren’t working, and most flights were delayed. The gate staff were hand-stamping each boarding pass as we went through. Walking out on to the tarmac we found out our plane was a little smaller than the Airbuses we’ve caught everywhere so far. This was a propeller plane, cue flashback to teenage years and catching a propeller plane between Yemen and Ethiopia, across the Red Sea. Confusingly my phone reception stayed on the whole flight – making me wonder if we were flying particularly low, or if phone towers are just getting better at sending beams into space. It was a short flight, just over an hour, and the seats were laid out in AB, DF format, two seats together in long rows down either side of the plane and the letters C and E strangely missing. Grace got a window seat, I got an aisle seat, and the air stewardess got a large glass of water for the woman who was coughing her lungs out in the row in front of us. She coughed and coughed the whole flight. Various other passengers brought her lozenges and cough syrup. I contributed dirty looks. We landed with a very loud thump, the small planes’ small wheels battling the cracked concrete of the runaway, then walked out to the terminal where a very disinterested lady at the information kiosk explained the bus process to us. ‘The bus doesn’t take card, but if you tell him you don’t have cash he will give you a number to SMS your payment to.’ I neglected to tell her we don’t have a Serbian SIM card and we wandered out the front. Continue reading “On Serbia”
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 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”