I was born with the innate desire to create art.

My three year old daughter was born with it too, everything she sets her eyes upon, is a canvas as far as she’s concerned. I personally think we all inherit this trait from our ultimate creator but some of us sever the connection, out of fear or shame or myriads of multifaceted survival instincts evolving over millennia. Pick your poison, mental, emotional, financial, it’s always safer to follow the status quo. Suffice to say we put away our creative fantasies, along with the rest of our childish things. For me though, what was foundational became fundamental. What many consider unimportant playtime became compulsion. Instinctively and intentionally I have attempted to hone my entire ‘life’ down to a fine art. 

I was introduced to music in the womb.

My old man was a roadie/security, so I was on a national tour circuit from conception. My earliest memory is of sitting with dad on his birthday, I must have been three or four years old. Mum gave him a guitar, he was wide eyed when he opened the case. He noodled around with a manic grin and announced to us “this is my new girlfriend, Susie.” I nodded and climbed into his lap, one by one I began plucking each string with all five fingers. To this day, he says it’s the first time he’d ever seen natural talent. 

Taking care of a mischievous toddler, mum was tired of the lifestyle and dad acquiesced in her decision, signing a rental tenancy agreement. I like to think we had some peaceful times together in that house, but what eventually followed was a series of unfortunate events that ended the story of our happy family. We had moved in next door to ‘underbelly’ types who were planning a bank robbery, having their first crack at making explosives. They weren’t particularly astute individuals and in all likelihood, high on crack and crack boom! They blew up their house with us sleeping soundly just a few metres away. I suffered minor cuts and bruises but also hearing damage. This event turned out to be my radioactive spider bite.

Since that day, I have endured a faint but incessant chime ringing in F sharp minor, a mental counterpoint by which I can find my way around the fretboard. My mother carried me outside and together we watched my father beat them all to a bloody pulp, after they’d already blown themselves to a bloody pulp. The next day she packed her bags and booked plane tickets for us to go and live with my grandparents. 

She did her best to be a provider and nurturer but I barely saw her from breakfast to dinner. I didn’t see my dad for a long time either. I became withdrawn and confused, and then one fine day, I was given a toy guitar and microphone, plastic imitations but it wasn’t long before I made them howl. I learned to channel all my confusion into musical exploration from that moment. I made up songs about blisters and warts and farts. It was hilarious and I’d stop at nothing to make my mum laugh when she was feeling down.

Later in life (high-school) I was introduced to an endless supply of none the wiser love interest to be the collateral damage in my pursuit of the perfect tune. My dad came back into my life, I’d spend most weekends with him. Travelling around and listening to music, camping, fishing, and all the other fun stuff that kids are supposed to do with their dad, I began to feel some semblance of normality again. On my birthday, he gave me my first acoustic guitar, I learned a few chords but never really picked it up with intent until I was forced to for a school performance. He noticed the same thing he did when I was a baby, I learned fast. He said to me “son, you know how many girls’ll wanna ‘kiss’ you if you get good at this thing?” From that moment I had a one track mind, pure determination and discipline with little to no shame, I started carrying that guitar everywhere, writing hundreds of songs, trying to woo young women.

In my final year of school, I had a brush with death twice in as many weeks, I’d lost a friend in a car accident and then on the way home from his funeral, I got jumped for 5 dollars. I got a fractured eye socket, broken jaw, broken maxilla, lost my two front teeth and a broken hand. I met death that night and she has a very alluring presence, somehow I managed to gather my senses and told her to f*** off, I had better things to do. I was told I couldn’t play guitar for the rest of eternity (12 weeks) and I developed some kind of PTSD; I started looking around every corner.

Though I was never diagnosed, I was addicted to adrenaline, I kept thinking up all kinds of monsters to get a hit. I remember my lowest point being curled up in a ball begging it to stop. I guess that was my welcome to the real world moment. It took me years to get my head around. Homeostasis is a hard fought battle of will-power vs the world. I thought I was evil and I must have deserved what happened to me. Now I understand that it was just brain trauma, but back then, I just didn’t know how to get off that imaginary rollercoaster of back to back, death defying loop-de-loops.

What saved me from myself, after my hand and jaw healed, was writing songs again. But now it was introspective rather than being about impressing girls (though I still dabble for my wife and daughter). One day I was sitting on the veranda, strumming along with my old man, having a cup of tea and a smoke and then a pigeon landed on the fence. Suddenly a flock of miner birds swarmed. Like clockwork, we watched this scene repeat itself over and over again. Attacking crows and lorikeets and even the mighty swooping menace to Australian society, the magpie. The miners were indiscriminate, they hated everyone the same. Suddenly, coming out of nowhere and going nowhere in particular, here waltzes in Willy Wagtail. Whimsical and without a care, I was expecting a tiny black and white bloodbath. But nothing. From pillar to fence post, his blissful dance seemed like a blatant taunt to the miners but they all clambered atop their tree in deafening silence.

Then I heard my dad speak. “He knows ‘the way’ son, he is a true warrior, peaceful and playful. He fearlessly and honestly expresses his joy for life as an open challenge to anyone who dares to inflict misery upon him. His presence is considered a warning in our tribe, a message of death but also life. To find your bliss and follow it to whatever end.” I had met my spirit animal.

Soon after that, we started jamming with my cousin Al Morris on drums. It was seamless and in no time at all, we lined up a few steady gigs. Mentally, I was still on shaky ground and it was a challenge to be out in the open, in front of everyone, even though everyone was often just two or three people. I felt so insecure, I barely sang above a murmur, I couldn’t bare to look anyone square in the eye and I couldn’t utter a single word between songs or sets but slowly and surely as I noticed feet tapping, hands clapping and people smiling and dancing the nights away, I became reacquainted with myself, my true self. My confidence grew with each new gig and eventually I blew it all to the wind. Soon I was the same old asshole everyone knew and loved. The rest is history.

So therefore my logic is, if I can heal and nourish myself with songwriting, then I can help teach others to do the same. For me it starts with a question in your heart and mentally reaching out to the ends of the universe for the answer, sometimes you get a nice warm hug and sometimes you get a middle finger. Either way, after repeating this practice for decades now, experience tells me there must be some kind benevolent force of creativity that wants nothing more than truth and harmony, within us or without us. Call it the universe or god or whatever you want but it's the ultimate creation and I’m compelled to be a collaborator, to write my own songs and my own destiny.