Sunburnt Country Music

Georgia Scarlett and Joel Spence are two Queensland country artists who have been releasing solo music independently for several years, and who have now found a creative partnership that has produced two singles which have taken them in a musical direction that is distinct from their own music while preserving their musical identities. The first single is ‘The Wise Folks Say’, which was the reason for our recent interview. The second, released after this interview was recorded, is ‘Honey Let’s Go’.Their story begins at the Song Muster in Gympie, which has now generated several outstanding songs and songwriting partnerships that bring established and emerging songwriters together. Scarlett and Spence were placed in the same writing group and produced ‘The Wise Folks Say’ in a single session. ‘This spark just connected instantly once we started talking our experiences, our journeys through life, some of the wisdom that’s been passed down to us,’ says Scarlett. ‘Every verse is a different life lesson. It has that old-fashioned country wisdom that I really love.’The duo brought the song to producer Kelsey Berrington. The result is a song in which the duo’s voices are given the space to meld and separate as needed, revealing the way they balance and complement each other. Spence grew up in the Lockyer Valley, west of Brisbane, on a cattle and grain property. He has been writing and recording since his teens, and also has an academic interest in the power of music, conducting research into how community-led songwriting and performance can foster healing, cultural justice, and empowerment for First Nations Peoples in remote communities. Scarlett is originally from Bundaberg and grew up learning piano but found that she was better suited to clarinet, and has since added guitar and harmonica to her repertoire. She released her debut solo album, Rhythm of Life, last year. Scarlett and Spence’s collaboration on ‘The Wise Folks Say’ worked so well that they have now released a second single together, ‘Honey Let’s Go’. Listen to ‘The Wise Folks Say’ on Apple MusicListen to ‘The Wise Folks Say’ on SpotifyListen to ‘The Wise Folks Say’ on YouTube

Jessie Robins grew up in Katherine in the Northern Territory as one of a set of triplets and the daughter of a helicopter mustering pilot, and – as she tells me in this new interview – she has been singing since she was a small child. Creativity also runs in the family as her sisters are also working in creative fields. Robins now lives in Brisbane, where she performs regularly across the city and occasionally on Stradbroke Island, and she has released her debut country pop single, 'I Should Have Known Better'. The song was written with Shannon McArthur, a producer and songwriter living in Austin, Texas who is Robins’s longtime collaborator. They made a connection made through YouTube long before Zoom made remote creative partnerships commonplace.Robins has been writing songs since childhood, and tells me that she still has notebooks from those years and occasionally finds a melody or a lyric she could use now. ‘I Should’ve Known Better’ came about through Robins watching a friend navigate a relationship from beginning to end, and the song sat with her for a couple of years before the timing felt right to release it. ‘Now that those circumstances have passed,’ she says, ‘I felt like it was the right time to move forward.’The song's title implies regret, but the sound does not. Robins was deliberate about this – she wanted something people could put on in the car and feel okay about, not sad. ‘It’s okay to test things and trial things and then come out the other side with learnings,’ she says.The genre of country music isn’t Robins’s natural habitat – she didn’t grow up listening to it. But over her years of performing and studying at JMC Academy in Brisbane, people kept telling her she sounded country. Eventually, she stopped resisting, and the result is this nuanced debut track.Listen to ‘I Should’ve Known Better’ on Apple MusicListen to ‘I Should’ve Known Better’ on SpotifyListen to ‘I Should’ve Known Better’ on YouTube

Nashdale are a Central Coast country duo – Kerryn Daniel on lead vocals and Brent Murphy on guitars and vocals – who have been playing together for over a decade and releasing original music since 2024. Their third single, ‘Boots Back On’, is out now, and an EP is in the works for the Tamworth Country Music Festival next year.While it seems like the pair came up with the perfect moniker for a country duo, Nashdale is a real place: a small locality outside Orange in the Central West of New South Wales, where Daniel grew up and her grandparents had an orchard. Daniel and Murphy have been performing together for a decade, a collaboration which started when Murphy heard Daniel sing with a friend’s band and, as he tells me in this new interview, launched a plot to steal her! Obviously he had the right instincts, considering how long they’ve been working together, and in the interview it was clear how much respect they have for each other and also how their dynamic would work on stage and in creating music.After several years playing shows on the NSW Central Coast, the enforced inactivity of the pandemic gave them the opportunity to start recording originals together. Murphy has a home studio, and it was there that they started demoing songs with no particular plan. As they told me, they now have around thirty in various stages of development.Their third single, ‘Boots Back On’ came about when Daniel played Murphy that she loved the groove of, and Murphy reached into his stack of old lyric drafts for something that might fit the energy. The song is about acknowledging that something isn’t working and putting your boots back on and getting on with things. There are other releases in the works, including an EP timed to come out around the 2027 Tamworth Country Music Festival. And if you’re a ‘Coastie’, make sure to check out Nashdale live!Listen to ‘Boots Back On’ on Apple MusicListen to ‘Boots Back On’ on SpotifyListen to ‘Boots Back On’ on YouTube

Art can emerge at any age, and that’s just as true of younger artists as those who find their creative voices later on. Sydney singer-songwriter Hayden Phillis is not yet twenty years old and has spent his teen years developing his skills as a musician, singer and songwriter, attending the CMAA Academy of Country Music three times – twice as a singer-songwriter, once in the instrumentalist strand, which he describes as one of his favourite experiences, forcing him to rapidly develop piano skills and adaptability in a band setting. His debut album, Too Young, may have been released only last year but Phillis already has a new single, ‘Stick Poke Tattoos’, which was inspired by a friend’s relationship and written using Phillis’s somewhat wry powers of observation. He’s a songwriter who is interested in human experiences, and exploring them through his songs. He writes on buses, at gigs, in the notes app on his phone – collecting fragments, testing them against what he already has, and discarding what doesn’t fit.‘I had the attitude of writing what I see and what I think,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t trying to put myself in a box that everyone will like.’Both the first album and his forthcoming second, which is to be called What Time Doesn’t Know, were recorded at Rabbit Hole Recording Studio on the Central Coast with producer Dingo (Brandon Dodd), a collaboration Phillis talks about in this new interview.He also mentions his upcoming long trip to Nashville, his plans for the 2027 Tamworth Country Music Festival – and his hobby making video games, which is another creative outlet and form of storytelling.Listen to ‘Stick Poke Tattoos’ on Apple MusicListen to ‘Stick Poke Tattoos’ on SpotifyListen to ‘Stick Poke Tattoos’ on YouTube

The first time I interviewed country-folk artist Olive Mae she was in a caravan she shared with her husband and children, and they were travelling around Australia, embracing freedom – a concept that is at the core of Olive’s latest single, ‘Country Songs’.Now settled in the south-west of Western Australia, about ten minutes’ drive from the popular Margaret River area, Olive is playing fewer shows on the road but certainly not playing less overall, as we talk about in this new interview.‘Country Songs’ is, Olive says, her first attempt at writing a country song; she previously believed she was writing folk songs – although, as she says in the interview, when one of them ended up being nominated in a country music awards category, she reassessed! The song is partly about how music might have been the path she wanted to take from a young age but instead she followed the advice of others to pursue more conventional paths. ‘Sometimes you’ve got to do the wrong thing just to realise what’s wrong,’ she says. ‘That’s just as important as finding what’s right.’Ultimately, though, art won out, which is partly how she found herself in that caravan, touring the land. ‘I wanted to be free,’ she says, ‘to choose the path that you want to take and not take on anyone else’s thoughts on how you should be living.’ Of course, being free is not as simple as the phrase makes it sound – it requires courage to focus on what you know is right for you and ignore others who are trying to steer you away for their own reasons. As ever, it was a great deal of fun chatting to Olive, who will be at this year’s Gympie Music Muster in August, attending the CMAA Academy’s Campfire songwriting programme. She’s also booked her first Tamworth headline show for the 2027 festival, at the Listening Room at the Community Centre on Thursday 21 January. Listen to ‘Country Songs’ on Apple MusicListen to ‘Country Songs’ on SpotifyListen to ‘Country Songs’ on YouTube

The last time I interviewed Michael Cook – known as Cookie – from the Darling Downs (Queensland) alt-country and bluegrass band Rusty Pickups, there was a donkey outside the studio at Possum Creek, where the band recorded. Naturally, when we spoke again recently about the band’s new album, I Don’t Think About You at All (… some days), I checked in on this unofficial extra band member and also on the band’s recent successes, which included a New Zealand tour. Rusty Pickups were originally a four-piece, then became a five-piece – and are now back to being a four-piece, as founding member Waylon Katz is heading off around Australia on a months-long odyssey which will count him out of any band activity for a very long while. ‘Rusty Pickups is a table we’re all lucky enough to have a seat at,’ says Cookie. ‘Right now his chair’s pushed in, but it’s there for him to pull out again when he wants to come back.’In this interview Cookie talks further about the ‘table’ that is Rusty Pickups and how it has kept providing for them all, which was the main aim. He has set goals and they’ve kept reaching them, not through crossing their fingers and hoping but by putting in the work and taking chances and opportunities. It was Katz who wrote the album’s title track, drawing on conversations he’s had in his work as a therapist. Some other songs are written by Cookie, and they are what he calls clear-eyed rather than self-pitying: honest assessments of hard things, including addiction, the passage of time and the unexpected depth of feeling for a very small dog he rescued, named Princess Bubblegum. The story about that dog is an example of why it’s always great to let interviews flow where they want to go – great stories often result. And it’s also why this interview is on the long side, but Cookie is always interesting to chat to, so a longer conversation is usually on the cards. Listen to I Don’t Think About You at All on Apple MusicListen to I Don’t Think About You at All on Spotify

At the start of this interview I say I’m a Melanie Dyer fan, and that’s because she writes songs that can encompass a whole life, as in her recent single, ‘Golden Girl’, or cut right to the heart of something in a devastating way, as in ‘What You Didn’t Say’, from her 2022 album Between You & Me, or just be out-and-out entertaining because of her ear for melody.As she talks about in this new interview, she discovered the magic of what could be created by combining music with chords at a young age. She would lock herself in her room to write a song then emerge at the ad break to perform it for her parents. She was the youngest person accepted into the Talent Development Project at twelve, training in songcraft, stagecraft, performance and networking alongside musicians from across multiple genres. ‘I’ve spent my whole life doing this,’ she says. ‘I’ve never known a life without it.’Dyer’s latest single, ‘If She Only Knew’, is a love letter to that girl growing up on a farm in regional New South Wales, learning chords on her mother’s guitar and dreaming of a life in music. The song was written in Nashville. with Karen Kosowski and Emma-Lee, which whom Dyer wrote her hit ‘Memphis T-Shirt’. There were some tears during the writing session for this song which is, says Dyer, ‘equally heartbreaking and cathartic and inspiring and hopeful’.‘If you really feel like you're destined to do something, don’t give up on yourself. That’s what this song is saying.’Dyer’s early dreams have taken her all the way to Music City, where she’s lived for over a year, playing live regularly and writing a lot. Given how often Dyer is asked to co-write with other artists, it’s perfect that she’s now in a place where songwriting is woven into the fabric of daily life. And it’s still a source of wonder to her.‘I hear melodies in my head,’ she says. ‘They just come out. And that’s still this crazy, magic thing to me – inventing and crafting something from scratch and weaving your emotion into it.’Young Melanie’s dreams have indeed come true, and listening to Now Melanie talk about that, and much more about her craft and her songs, is hugely inspiring.Listen to ‘If She Only Knew’ on Apple MusicListen to ‘If She Only Knew’ on SpotifyListen to ‘If She Only Knew’ on YouTube

Brooke Seabrook is a balladeer from Queensland who recently won the Barry Thornton Young Award, which supports Australian bush and heritage artists. Her latest single is ‘Took My Town Away’, produced by Lindsay Waddington. Seabrook describes herself not as a songwriter but as a wordsmith – and the distinction matters, as she talks about in this interview. For Seabrook came to music through bush poetry, and it runs in her blood. Her grandmother Albertina, born in 1902, was a storyteller and poet, and Seabrook had early influences in the form of AB ‘Banjo’ Paterson and Henry Lawson. As she recounts, Slim Dusty was a constant in the family home, as were Patsy Cline, Dolly Parton, Charlie Pride and Tom T. Hall. John Williamson has also had a big impact, and it was a song she wrote for Williamson called ‘Who’ll Sing Australia Now?’ that led to the Thornton Young Award, which will take Seabrook to the CMAA Academy of Country Music next January.Seabrook has increased her creative output in recent times, partly because one of her two sons died a few years ago, and writing became a way of managing her grief. ‘As long as we’re still singing and talking about it,’ she says, ‘we’re not forgetting these people.’The new single, ‘Took My Town Away’, was written about changes to Seabrook’s home suburb of Goodna, which, like so many places, has changed greatly in recent times. The track features backing vocals by Golden Guitar winner William Alexander, who also records with Waddington.Seabrook has also recorded at Rabbit Hole Recording Studio on the Central Coast of New South Wales with producers Dingo and Kasey Chambers, and mentions that she actually has a whole album ready to go, but that she has no current plans to release it. It is, she says, waiting for its moment.Meanwhile, Seabrook performs live regularly and will be supporting Luke O’Shea in Ipswich on 1 August, then performing at the Gympie Music Muster. Listen to Brooke Seabrook on Apple Music                  Listen to Brooke Seabrook on SpotifyListen to Brooke Seabrook on YouTube