Sunburnt Country Music

Short versionVictorian folk artist Possum talks about her concept album Paynesville Seafoods, a cycle of songs inspired by her hometown and tracing life, death, rebirth and generational change. Long version‘If you’re the sort of person who’s not into listening to lyrics, I imagine you’re going to find my music quite boring,’ says Victorian folk artist Possum as we chat about her new album, Paynesville Seafoods, which is a world within a collection of songs set in one location, which we shall talk about. Except it’s hard to imagine how anyone would find this rich, varied collection of songs boring, regardless of their interest in lyrics, because the music tells the stories just as much as the words do.Possum grew up in Paynesville, which is in East Gippsland and, she says, set on a big lake with an esplanade of shops that runs by the lake. ‘It was a great place to grow up,’ she says. ‘We had a great community. When you’re in a small town you know the shop owners and you can walk to your neighbour’s house …‘I always found it really fascinating, this thing in Paynesville of it being so beautiful there and then having this intense small-town vibe where everyone’s in each other’s business.’She worked in Paynesville Seafoods while growing up but the shop is no longer there, although there are other fish and chip places in town. Paynesville Seafoods is, however, the locus from which this concept album grows, with Possum drawing on her experiences of Paynesville although it’s not an album about her life so much as the cycle of life in one town, with generational change, death and rebirth part of the cycle of songs. It was wonderful to have the chance to ask Possum questions about this project, to delve into her artistry and make the experience of listening to the album deeper because of it. And Possum is putting on a series of shows for the album – details below.Paynesville Seafoods is available on Bandcamp: https://possumbleary.bandcamp.com/album/paynesville-seafoods-2SEE POSSUM LIVEFriday Oct 30th- The Produce Store, Mansfield (with Mel Taylor)Sunday Nov 1st- Tolmie Community Social Club, Tolmie (with Mel Taylor)Saturday Nov 7th- Quadrophonic Club, Brunswick (supports TBA)Sunday Nov 8th- Shedshaker Brewing Company, Castlemaine (with Rufous Whistler)Friday Nov 13th- Stratford Courthouse, Stratford (with Stratford Singers)Saturday Nov 14th- Paynesville Wine BarThursday Nov 26th- Medusa, Geelong (with The Misty Mornings and Seal Prince and The Roof Rats)

Short versionTori Forsyth talks about her outstanding fourth album, Self Preservation, a collection of country and rock songs full of power and whimsy that will take the top off your head in the best possible way.Long versionWhile this interview for Tori Forsyth’s fourth album, Self Preservation, was formally arranged and we spoke at the appointed hour, Tori and I have had several off-the-record conversations since the first time I interviewed her, for her third album, All We Have Is Who We Are, in 2024. When I wrote my questions for that interview I had an instinct – based on research – to take them in a certain direction and that led to us discussing creativity more broadly. Later, she interviewed me on her own podcast.So that’s the context for why this new interview may sound less formal in places, and why I ask questions of Tori that I may not of other artists. It’s partly because I know, from her music and from speaking to her, that she is always willing to dig out the marrow of things and have a good look at what it’s made of – and that she will do this to her own beliefs and experiences and dreams. If she’s taking a blowtorch to cultural tenets that serve to suppress, she’s also taking it the ways she might have limited herself.This is what she’s done on Self Preservation, which is an extraordinarily good album with a combination of power and whimsy that can only come from an artist who has put in the work to find out who she is and what’s important to her while also being completely prepared to not take herself too seriously. The songs are country and they’re rock, but they are not ‘country-rock’ as you might understand it. They are created the way Tori envisaged them when writing them, and she writes alone. And they’re exciting. In a world when we have too much noise, too much news, it may seem that the antidote is to be quiet and bland. This album proves that what actually works to shake off malaise and reinvigorate senses is a collection of songs that really feel like they could take the top of your head off and open it to the cosmos. As she says in the interview, ‘If comfort is what everyone is seeking in art, I want to be the opposite of that. I want to be uncomfortable even within myself when creating it, when I’m delivering it … it’s going to be really important for us as human beings to consume discomfort ... to challenge us. ’She’s a force, and this album is a manifesto, and I’m here for the New Tori Order. Listen to Self Preservation on Apple MusicListen to Self Preservation on SpotifyListen to Self Preservation on YouTube

The first I heard of Ellis Undercover, who lives in the Central West of New South Wales, was the song ‘October’ from Wade Forster’s latest album, The Aftermath. The song is a standout on an already brilliant album, and it was written by the pair at the CMAA Academy of Country Music earlier this year, then – as Ellis tells me in this interview – recorded within a month. Ellis grew up on the music of David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash, started writing songs at twelve and gigging at fourteen, with a lot of Taylor Swift in her set. Several years ago she supported Fanny Lumsden in Dubbo when Lumsden’s tour came through the area – and she has quite a story to tell about that!After leaving school Ellis studied Music Industry in Sydney then worked in event management, wanting a career she could take back to the country and still be close to music if she wanted to quit. She moved home after the pandemic and got straight back into gigging. ‘I loved events but I loved to be on the stage way more,’ she says.Then she embarked on a new career when she was approached about teaching music in a correctional centre. There was a fair degree of trepidation about it, but, she says: ‘It’s the best job I’ve ever had – I love it so much. I can’t even think about doing something that doesn’t help other people any more.’Forster was one of the first people she’d written with outside of a prison environment, as her job involves writing songs with inmates in correctional centres and juvenile justice. Ellis’s stage name is a consequence of her work in corrections, as her students can’t legally know her name; it’s a variant of Miss Elle, the name her students know her by: ‘Elle is Undercover’. Initially Ellis didn’t think she’d write country music songs – she was resisting the genre until the genre itself changed. ‘I write stories that are country, I write about things that happen in the country, I’m very country in my personality and my nature, and I write everything on acoustic guitar. If the song has four chords it’s done, in my opinion,’ she says with a laugh, ‘so I think I should have been there the whole time.’ But she also thought, I don’t drive a tractor – I can’t be a country artist. I don’t own a pair of boots. ‘It didn’t feel like I was in the box enough until the box expanded.’Now she has a country single, ‘Wildfire’, as well as ‘Love to Hate You Baby’ with Red Williams. ‘Wildfire’ is, she says, ‘about women in our industry and any male-dominated industry being told what to do, what to wear, how to act and just saying no, I don’t really care, and going their own way.’ Ellis is an impressive, intelligent artist with the musicality to match her lyric ability, and it will be wonderful to have new songs on the EP she’s working towards.Ellis Undercover will be appearing at Tamworth Country Music Festival in January and Howlin’ Country Rock n Rodeo in Newcastle on 13 February.Listen to Ellis Undercover on Apple MusicListen to Ellis Undercover on SpotifyListen to Ellis Undercover on YouTube

Short versionMultiple award-winning country music artist/icon Fanny Lumsden talks about her fifth album, Traditions, which is being released on 30 October 2026 on her own label, Red Dirt Road Records. She is also embarking on a tour.Long version‘We were told to have it all, so now we want to have it all, and really that just means doing it all.’Fanny Lumsden says this early on in our interview about her new album, Traditions, which will be released on 30 October 2026. For those who aren’t aware, Lumsden has already released four studio albums, for which she has won two ARIA Awards and ten Golden Guitars, some of which are for music videos made by Lumsden and her husband and longtime collaborator Dan Stanley Freeman. She has a devoted fanbase partly grown through the Country Halls Tours she embarked on, with Freeman, several years ago and which she has kept up even as her profile has grown, including in the United Kingdom, where she has toured several times. Lumsden and Freeman have their own record label, Red Dirt Road Records, and it’s on this label that Traditions will be released. It was on this label that they originally released albums, so in that respect that are returning to a tradition, of sorts.It’s the running of the record label that probably tips Lumsden over into the extreme end of ‘doing it all’, but that too is part of the enterprise that exists because she has always dreamt big then been prepared to work to make those dreams manifest. She has not ever expected anything to be handed to her, nor has she ever compromised the high standards she set from her first album, Small Town Big Shot, and maintained through all of her releases and in her shows. Traditions continues, well, that tradition of high standards. Lumsden has always been a wonderful songwriter – clear-eyed about humanity and eagle-eyed on the details that make songs (and live shows) vivid. She knows how to break a listener’s heart and offer them succour, sometimes in the same song, because she understands that art is there to help us process life by offering us doses of emotions and experiences and memories. There is so much life in this album. So much heart and soul and love too. Lumsden gives us her all – it’s partly why she is so beloved. Doing it all may be exhausting at times – no doubt especially as an album is being released – but what she has also done on Traditions is create something indelible. For the fifth time. That is not just a tradition; that’s a legend. Preorder Traditions: https://store.fannylumsden.netFanny Lumsden is going on tour in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria. Dates and tickets here: https://www.fannylumsden.net/traditionstourListen to Fanny Lumsden on Apple MusicListen to Fanny Lumsden on SpotifyWatch Fanny Lumsden’s videos on YouTube

Short version:Home Truths is the outstanding new album from Central Coast NSW country music artist Faith Williams, who talks about the songs and the recording process in this new interview. Long version:Central Coast NSW artist Faith Williams announced herself last year with her debut EP, Queen of Hearts. It arrived with no preamble and a whole lot of impact, given Williams’s expressive, powerful voice and her storytelling abilities in her lyrics.Thus the stakes were high for her first album, Home Truths. Produced by Brandon Dodd at Rabbit Hole Recording Studio – as was the EP – this album is collectively a virtuoso performance from an unassuming artist who, in conversation, seems like she could not possibly harbour the sort of darkness that she depicts in some of the songs. Although from the start she has written stories about people other than herself, so perhaps the darkness is not hers, and these songs are the result of her knowing how to work with her imagination, and no doubt also come from a wellspring of empathy that enables her to channel her humanity into not only lyrics but her vocal performances.Williams draws on traditional and outlaw country styles, and her voice is a force all on its own. That voice will break your heart and also put it back together again, for the album is a collection of different stories and moods as befits an artist with a broad palette.It also needs to be mentioned that Williams has released the album in and around becoming a mother for the second time, although it’s also clear nothing would have stopped her from making this album. She is a huge talent, and pragmatic with it. Music seems to come as naturally to her as breathing, also behind every artist who makes it look effortless, there’s a whole lot of work, and that work has come to glorious fruition on Home Truths.Listen to Home Truths on Apple MusicListen to Home Truths on SpotifyListen to Home Truths on YouTube

Short version:A candid conversation with multiple Golden Guitar winner and fan favourite Duncan Toombs about his extensive Canada tour earlier this year and three new singles released from forthcoming album Roller Coaster.Long version:While Duncan Toombs has a full professional life in Australia, as an artist, videographer and musician, he has spent part of this year touring Canada with Canadian-Australian country music artist Gord Bamford as a member of Bamford’s band as well as his opening act. Toombs then returned and played the Gympie Music Muster in August and has since released three singles on the trot: ‘I Go Home’, ‘Gypsy Sunrise’ and ‘Out of Here’.At the time we spoke he was releasing the first and the second two were about to come out, all building momentum for his second album, Roller Coaster, which has been a long time coming for reasons Toombs talks about in this interview. Toombs’s debut album, Steel on Steel, won him many fans who may well have seen him playing guitar with other artists – as I had – and not realised that his talents were even greater. That’s partly because Toombs himself was unsure about whether he wanted to step to the front of the stage.‘It wasn’t part of my plan to become a solo country music artist,’ he says, and that is part of the story of the single ‘Out of Here’, which is about ‘the whole journey of self-belief’. The song was written in Nashville, and he has quite a story to tell about how it was written, which you’ll have to watch/listen to find out. ‘I Go Home’ was written on the same trip and in the same interesting circumstances, although each song was finished with different co-writers. Roller Coaster will be released on 11 June 2027. If you preorder, you may, Duncan says, receive the album before its official release … Preorder here.Listen to Duncan Toombs on Apple MusicListen to Duncan Toombs on SpotifyListen to Duncan Toombs on YouTube

Short version:After a chat about Star Wars inspired by the T-shirt Brisbane multi-instrumentalist, singer and songwriter Chloe Marks wears for our interview, we talk about the tight bond of her band, The Mayhem, and their debut album, Bright Lights Late Nights.Long version:This interview with Brisbane multi-instrumentalist, singer and songwriter Chloe Marks begins with a chat about Star Wars. That’s because Marks is wearing a particular Star Wars T-shirt (you’ll obviously need to be watching the video version of the interview to see it) and I wanted to ask her about it. She is, it turns out, a Star Wars aficionado and collector.Storytelling and epic themes are at the heart of the Star Wars universe, so it’s not a surprise that Marks – who has written many songs – has immersed herself in its stories for many years. Part of what’s in that universe is a core group of people, sticking together and doing good together. Not unlike the band that Marks fronts, The Mayhem, with most of its members – including her – having met while at university. That cohesiveness and longevity as a group says a lot about how well they must work together, and also no doubt influences the music they make in a positive way. Those currents that band members can flow in require understanding and communication – even intuition – and having seen Marks and The Mayhem perform live, it’s clear that they work like that. Their debut album, Bright Lights Late Nights, is also a result of that relationship they have, as Marks talks about in this interview, whether it’s how songs are worked on and opinions given, or how fluid the recording process was with producer Michael Muchow. The album showcases the band’s versatility when it comes to styles of play and genre. There are songs about what it means to pursue art as a vocation, to recover from heartbreak or try and fail to fend it off, plus a track featuring Jake Hill from The Wet Whistles.The last track on the album is the demo version of ‘Carolina’, the studio version of which was the first single from Marks and The Mayhem. It’s a great way to finish the record, as we can actually hear how they work – an insight into that core group and how they make their stories. Listen to Bright Lights Late Nights on Apple MusicListen to Bright Lights Late Nights on SpotifyListen to Bright Lights Late Nights on YouTube

Short version:This is an interview with Sarah Sands from Perth six-piece The Stumblers. Watch/listen especially if you want to feel inspired to live a full creative life and find opportunities for joy. The band’s latest single is ‘Rhyolite’.Long version:The Stumblers are a six-piece band from Perth, WA, with members Sarah Sands (vocals, banjo, guitar, dobro), Dan Durack (vocals, guitar, mandolin), Becky Lodge (fiddle, accordion, vocals), Kirsty Ploeg (keyboard, vocals), Fiona Kanters (bass, fiddle) and Steven Rea (drums, vocals). It was Sands who joined me for a chat about the band, which formed not in primary school but because of a primary school – the one their children went to. The school wanted some parents to form a band, and Sands discovered that amongst the other parents there were some classically trained musicians. So they grouped together and had so much fun that The Stumblers was born.Sands grew up in a musical household: her father was in a band that played regularly around Perth, and he was a country music fan. Sands says she came to listen to country more in her twenties, drawn by the storytelling, and it’s been a natural progression for her as a songwriter to write in the country genre. Sands says that after becoming a mother she thought that she might have retired from being a musician, having been in bands and played with Durack in a duo for several years. But now it’s come back into her life and, as she says, ‘You find the time’, even if it’s writing a song in the middle of the night – or as she says, she once wrote a whole song while riding her motorbike to work, singing to herself then recording it on her phone once she could. ‘If the creativity is there and the energy is there, you’ll squeeze it in somewhere,’ she says. ‘It’s like a muscle … you get back into the rhythm of doing it and open your mind up to doing it and looking for stories everywhere.’This was an inspiring chat to have – Sands also creates opportunities for The Stumblers and other acts to play in and around Perth, so she’s something of an impresario (or, rather, a dynamo). We did also talk about The Stumblers’ latest single, ‘Rhyolite’! And the band is working towards releasing an album.Listen to The Stumblers on Apple MusicListen to The Stumblers on SpotifyListen to The Stumblers on YouTube