“My musical education was in the back seat of a Ford, driving down bumpy tracks on long country drives. My parents played car tapes – usually the Greatest Hits collections of American Country singers – and you had no choice but to look out the window and listen to the stories. It was a case of ‘learn to love country music, or jump out of the moving vehicle’.
Sometimes Dolly Parton would tell about growing up in the Tennessee mountains, sometimes Kenny Rogers would sing about a woman who’d done him wrong in a saloon, sometimes Jim Reeves would croon about brave men and long distance phone calls. Always, there was the road and a story.
Those American songs seemed larger than the little country life that I was living. But they were also the closest thing that we had to the soundtrack of growing up in East Gippsland.
In this collection of songs I wanted to create stories like those musicians and songwriters who are my heroes. The texture of their rhyme and meter is the shacks and bars and snowdrifts of American life. I wanted to capture the magpies and lawnmowers and footy games of rural Australian life. Because, to me, that is the beauty and the poetry of how I grew up. Maffra, Heyfield and Sale may not have the exotic twang of Nashville – but we’ve got the Macalister Hotel, Mafeking Hill, the Heyfield Timber Mills and more cows than you would ever want to have to get up at 5am to milk. And there’s music in our stories, too.
Some of that time is funny and beautiful – even if I didn’t always recognise it at the time. The teasing and Chinese burns for my brothers. The raucous underage parties with my friends. The endless bloody country drives with my family.
Some of it was awful. The smell of shit from the cow yard. The vicious torture of little boys in the change rooms, humiliated because they were weird or gay or just a little bit original. The sound of my father struggling under the weight of asthma, a massive mortgage and a workload that would never end. The old men who slaved on farms for years and then slipped into forgetting, as Alzheimer’s stole the peace that they worked their whole lives to enjoy. Little country towns with their guts ripped out of them as industry and infrastructure were stripped away.
I wanted to give voice to all of these stories, because they are about brave, beautiful, honest, undervalued and overworked men and women who taught me what to be. I’m honoured to have come from Gippsland and to be a dairy farmer’s son.
When I started making this record with Shane, he asked what I wanted it to sound like. I told him that I had this vision of an old vinyl record in my mum’s record collection – sitting next to Glenn Campbell, Patsy Cline, Dolly Parton, Jim Reeves and Kenny Rogers – but a record that tells our story, not theirs.
Shane is a beautiful musician and a sensitive songwriter and storyteller. I really felt that he cradled those stories in the way that he built musical homes for them. His studio is like a craftsman’s workshop – surrounded by guitars and harmoniums and horse brushes (that feature in the rhythm section of ‘Terrorists and Planes’), like tools hanging on a shadow board in my pa’s tool shed. I really feel that you can hear the care in how he has chiselled and sanded each of those story-songs for ‘What We Might Be’.
He has helped me to make a record where more people will get to hear the stories of my family and of the people that I grew up with. And that means the world to me. I hope that the people of East Gippsland feel that their stories have been treated with honour and respect – because that is the intention.
At the heart of this record is my mum and dad. My mum is a great storyteller. My dad is a dairy farmer. They are about as ordinary as you can get but they are the bravest and strongest people that I know. I’m at a place now where I can recognise how incredible their story is. When I was growing up, it was just life.
As I fumble my way through adulthood and fatherhood, a backwards glance gives me insight. And I’m proud that I come from there – even if I don’t always know where I’m heading to. As I said in the dedication on the record sleeve - they supported me to be what I was and my family in Melbourne give me hope for what we might be.
I had no idea in the Ford that I’d one day get to make a record with musicians as incredible as Shane Nicholson and my dear friend, Kate Crowley. I really hope that people enjoy it.”
