Sunburnt Country Music

Two Tone Pony are a five-piece country rock band from the Central Coast of New South Wales. They released the album Born on the Road in 2024 and their brand new single is 'You Haven't Heard of Me Yet'.When I interviewed Two Tone Pony founding member David Kirkpatrick, he said that the song had its origins in, of all places, a ski lodge in the New South Wales Snowy Mountains when someone, noticing the conversation had turned to music, looked him up and down and asked, ‘Tell me, what do you do again?’ When it come to music, it’s more like what hasn’t Kirkpatrick done. The son of country music legends Slim Dusty and Joy McKean, he grew up travelling Australia, surrounded by music, and it’s never left him. Rather than bristle at that ski-lodge question, though, he filed it away. ‘As a songwriter you're always looking for a hook,’ he says in this chat. ‘Something you can hang a song on.’'You Haven't Heard of Me Yet' is Two Tone Pony’s first single since their first album, Born on the Road, which was released in 2024. Kirkpatrick says that it was a first album still finding its sound. As it happens, there’s been a significant change in the band since, with founding member Ian Rhodes stepping down and new member Brandon Smith joining them. Smith brings fiddle, mandolin, lap steel and banjo to the line-up, providing what Kirkpatrick calls ‘the missing link’ for the country-rock sound he had always been after.The video for ‘You Haven’t Heard of Me Yet’ was filmed at the Hardy's Bay Club on the Central Coast of New South Wales – the band's home venue – and directed by Jeremy Minette of Eyes and Ears Creative, who has made all of their clips. It follows Kirkpatrick walking into the bar looking, as he puts it, like ‘a Beverly Hillbilly’ with a battered 1962 guitar case that belonged to Joy McKean and has travelled around Australia.The single was produced by Rod McCormack, who helmed Born on the Road, and two more singles are already recorded, with live shows and at least one festival appearance planned for the second half of 2026.‘You Haven't Heard of Me Yet’ is out now.Listen to ‘You Haven't Heard of Me Yet’ on Apple MusicListen to ‘You Haven't Heard of Me Yet’ on SpotifyListen to ‘You Haven't Heard of Me Yet’ on YouTube

**NB on the audio quality: I record this news on video then strip out the audio track. It's not always optimal quality but I'd rather bring you this than nothing at all**Mentioned in this instalment:William Alexander - ‘Heart of a Drover’Beccy Cole - new album Through the HazeMelanie Dyer - ‘Golden Girl’Tori Forsyth - ‘I’m Not God’Matt Joe Gow - two dates at Kew Courthouse on 21 March (evening show sold out)Felicity Urquhart & Josh Cunningham — new album Everything Around YouAmy Sheppard & The Wolfe Brothers - ‘Fool Outta Me’Briana Dinsdale - ‘Never Love Again’

Clancy Pye is an artist from the Central West of New South Wales who has released several memorable singles, including 'Hey Mama' and 'Days Like This'. Her latest is 'My Hometown'.Pye grew up in Oberon, a town of around 3000 people, half an hour from Bathurst in New South Wales. Oberon has no traffic lights, one main street and, as she notes in the song, a part-time cop, a detail that says so much and which we discuss in this new interview. ‘Most things got sorted out in the community themselves,’ Pye explains about the part-time cop. ‘People looked after one another.’ That capacity to compress a whole social world into a single precise image is central to what makes 'My Hometown' work and to what makes Pye a songwriter capable of evoking place, people and emotions so well, as she has done consistently over the course of her releases.‘My Hometown’ emerged during the pandemic years, when Pye wrote around 150 songs. Its catalyst was personal: her parents had just sold the family farm, the only home she'd ever known, and she found herself making more trips back to Oberon, feeling a particular pull of gratitude and loss. The chorus came quickly. The verses took twelve months and somewhere between fifteen and twenty drafts. ‘I really wanted to go a little bit underneath the surface of what makes little towns like Oberon tick,’ she says. She wanted to write something specific enough to feel true, but open enough that listeners from any small town could find themselves in it, and she has succeeded beautifully at that.The production was handled by Sean Rudd in Sydney, with Pye's brother Mickey – a guitarist and the founder of a music academy in Bathurst with over 300 current students – contributing a signature guitar riff that runs throughout the track. Drummer Pete Drummond of Dragon also plays on the track. 'My Hometown' is the fifth single from Pye's forthcoming debut album, which is due for release later this year, including a CD edition.Alongside her own music, Pye has spent the past two years performing with Tania Kernaghan and Jason Owen as part of their Let Your Love Flow tour, travelling through New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia. She also works as a physiotherapist – a background that, she admits, gives her a particular perspective on the physical demands of life as a touring musician, and we talk about that too. It’s always a great pleasure to interview Clancy Pye, and this time was no exception.‘My Hometown’ is out now.Listen to ‘My Hometown’ on Apple MusicListen to ‘My Hometown’ on SpotifyListen to ‘My Hometown’ on YouTube

Jake Davey is a multi-talented artist – a singer, songwriter, producer, videographer and photographer. He has released several infectious country-pop singles and the latest is 'Workin' On Me'.Since releasing his last single, Davey's life has changed considerably. He and his wife, Grace, are now parents to a son, Dalton, a development which is particularly significant given that a spinal cord injury in 2023 left doctors telling Davey he was unlikely to walk again, let alone have children. ‘Grace literally walked into the studio and was like, “Baby”,' Davey recalls in this new interview. ‘And I was like, what do you mean?’ That moment was the spark for 'Workin' On Me', a song about wanting to show up as the best possible version of himself – for Grace, and for Dalton.‘I wanted to write a song about growing up in the right ways,’ Davey says, ‘admitting that I've had moments where I was selfish, and that's fine. This was my surrender to being the best version of me.’The song was written in Nashville with Dakota Striplin and Charles Walker at Ronnie Dunn's publishing house, part of a trip that yielded eight to twelve songs in total (so we know there are more songs in the works). Davey produced it himself, though he's candid about the particular challenge that presents. ‘Having ultimate control over your music is a dangerous thing because you're never done,’ he says. But, as he tells me, a quote he encountered during the process helped: perfectionism is procrastination disguising itself as progress. The strong reception for the song has come in the wake of a great start to the year, with Davey’s fourth consecutive sold-out show at Moonshiners Honky Tonk Bar during the Tamworth Country Music Festival.‘Workin’ On Me’ is accompanied by a video that Davey made with longtime collaborator Jackson James. It features Davey's family, including a notably relaxed Dalton, who slept through most of the shoot! With more singles already in the works and a headline hometown show on the cards for later in 2026, Davey is already looking ahead, and that includes his packed schedule as a producer and videographer.Listen to ‘Workin’ On Me’ on Apple MusicListen to ‘Workin’ On Me’ on SpotifySee the video for ‘Workin’ On Me’ on YouTube

Mentioned in this episode:Kelly Brouhaha - 'This Is All For You' Amber Lawrence - 'That’s Cowgirl To Me'Charlotte Le Lievre - ‘I Yearn To Love Someone’Tom Busby - Rockhampton Hangover- interview coming upBrooke McClymont and Adam Eckersley - ‘Now I've Said It’ Felicity Urquhart & Josh Cunningham - New Frontier EPSara Berki - ‘Where I'll Be (For Adeline)’Interviews coming up:Jake DaveyClancy PyeDavid Kirkpatrick of Two Tone PonyLindsay WaddingtonDylan Wright

Melinda Schneider first appeared on stage at the age of three and on a recording at the age of eight. Since then she has released fifteen albums and won six Golden Guitars. She runs her own label, Mpower Records, she's a keynote speaker and much more besides. Her latest album, Tender, is a moving collection of songs.There is a particular kind of courage required to make an album like Tender. Schneider has spent decades as one of Australian country music's most celebrated performers – six Golden Guitars, fifteen albums, a career that began before most people's memories form. But she is candid about the fact that much of that work was made while she was privately struggling. ‘I was putting on a happy face in public and then being in a lot of pain privately,’ she says. The depression she experienced in 2018 became, in her telling, a turning point: the moment she stopped what she calls ‘the impersonation of perfect’.Tender is the album that reflects what came after. Most of the songs were written in the last decade, during what Schneider describes as the happiest and most peaceful period of her life – since meeting her husband, Mark Gable, and since becoming a mother. The result is a collection that moves between vulnerability and warmth, grief and gratitude, with Schneider's voice carrying each shift with complete conviction.The title track is a duet with Diesel, a pairing Schneider chose deliberately, looking for someone ‘respectful of women’ and emotionally present enough to meet the song where it lives. A duet with Gable also appears on the album, a song she wrote only months after they got together.The album was shaped by Schneider's instincts alone. As the founder of her own label, the creative decisions – which songs made the cut, how the album opens and closes – were entirely hers. It begins with the upbeat, Americana-inflected 'Open Up' and ends with 'Story of My Life', a song she first wrote 22 years ago that now sounds, she says, like a different person singing it – freer, more at ease.Alongside the album, Schneider exhibited a series of eleven paintings, one for each song, a practice she took up during the pandemic that has since become a weekly meditation. The Tender tour is currently under way, with New South Wales and Victoria dates already announced and more to follow later in the year.Tender is out now.Listen to Tender on Apple MusicListen to Tender on SpotifyListen to Tender on YouTube

Faith Williams is an artist from the Central Coast of New South Wales who last year released an outstanding debut EP, Queen of Hearts. She is now set to release her first album later this year, and the first single from it is 'Holy Grail'.When Queen of Hearts arrived in early 2025, Williams released it independently and, as she says in this new interview, ‘I didn't have a lot of knowledge into the industry at all. I was fairly green.’ In the year since, she has quietly accumulated the kind of experience that can't be taught: festival appearances she didn't expect, a New Songwriter of the Year win at the Tamworth Country Music Festival, radio play on ABC Country, and – just recently – being added to the playlist at Triple J, nearly a year to the day after the EP's release. That growth is also evident in her approach to the new album, which was recorded in September at Rabbit Hole Studio with producer Brandon Dodd, who also helmed Queen of Hearts. Eleven tracks were laid down in three days — an efficiency Williams credits to arriving with her songs fully formed and a clear sense of what she wanted. The album features one co-write, 'Black Fire', written with Millie Mills at a songwriting retreat run by Lyn Bowtell — otherwise the writing is entirely her own.The lead single, 'Holy Grail', is a love song that deliberately resists the conventions of the genre. Williams describes it as being about ‘choosing real over ritual’ – the kind of love that doesn't need to be dressed up or explained. It's also an example of what makes her writing distinctive: she's drawn to stories and characters, to the specific detail that opens into something universal. Her song 'Dear August', about the loss of a pregnancy, has that quality; so does 'Joe', which she traces back to a mental image of a stranger at a bus stop, telling their life to someone they'll never see again.At the time of recording, Williams was in the last trimester of pregnancy, due at the end of March. She plans to take a few months off before returning to gigging, with an album launch and a return to Tamworth pencilled in for later in the year. I was hugely impressed by Queen of Hearts when it released, so needless to say I’m excited to hear the album, and to see Williams release a wider audience, as she deserves.Listen to ‘Holy Grail’ on Apple MusicListen to ‘Holy Grail’ on SpotifyListen to ‘Holy Grail’ on YouTube

Mentioned in this episode:Max Jackson – new album Dangerous in Denim Brooke McClymont and Adam Eckersley – new single ‘Now I’ve Said It’ Morgan Evans - ‘Steel Town’ Saralyn – ‘Cowgirl Blues’ - THIS TRACK PLAYS AT THE END OF THE EPISODE Jo Page – ‘When We Knew Nothing’ Jasmine Sparkes – ‘You’ve Got Time to Kiss Me’ Jake Whittaker - ‘Boots On’  Tour news:Sara Storer, Shane Nicholson and Shane Howard - For the Sake of the Song. Limited shows in New South Wales, Victoria and the ACT in May.