17/08/2012 • 2 Comments •Buffalo Tales Music News

Blood and Bone was written in Nashville. It was the day that it started to rain and then there was a huge flood, the whole town went under and I just escaped to get to the airport on time, after a long delay and after watching the disaster unfold on the local news, I finally made it out of there and was on my way to London. But before the flood  “Blood and Bone”  was penned with Eric Silver a Nashville writer who I thought was cool, eccentric and he told me stories about partying with Keith Urban a few times back in Keith’s party days. I guess he felt obliged me being Aussie and all..

When you get together to write with someone it’s almost like going to confession although I have never been to confession it must be a little similar. You bare your soul with this stranger you just met and you dig for inspiration until you find a common ground with that person, this could take awhile, it’s a lottery and this is one of the reasons why I don’t necessarily like writing with other people but I found it enjoyable this time.

My confessions rambled something like this..

I spoke about me being away for long periods of time and my struggle with feeling isolated abroad, all I wanted to do was to be home and hang out with friends and go to the beach and for everything to seem a little normal again, I had just come off the back of one wild ride on a tv show that I sorta didn’t have much respect for but was grateful that I was playing music but I didn’t feel great about being a spokesperson for something I had no respect for.. I was confused and exhausted. I knew it was a very unstable ride, a ride to be very aware of and to make sure I didn’t lose my head.

So what I wanted to write was something from the heart exactly what I was feeling at the time and who I represented at that point in my life, a sort of diary entry.

Before I embarked on my world trip that took me what seemed like everywhere I took a drive back to two country towns where alot of my first memories took place situated in the very Northern part of Adelaide, South Australia a dusty working class town called Balaklava and the very quaint little ghost-town called Owen.

Dad told me stories about the good old days, and about his friends, some passed some still alive, and how many people were lost tragically back then in farm and road accidents. The country can be a brutal place for the young and overworked.

The only real connection my dad had there was the old house I vaguely remember residing in that sat across the road from the swimming pool where I knocked and blackened my front teeth on the edge of the pools ladder, the back bedroom where I remember waking up from bad night sweats and having what they called Night terrors back in the day and the cemetery where lay a lot of his dear friends he spent his mid twenties with. It was like travelling back in time the town hadn’t changed a bit and the graves of all his friends were the way he had left them all those years ago. And was the only connection with this town he once intimately knew so well.

We just stood there reflecting and spent a fair amount of time listening to the sounds of the big trucks roaring in the  far distance on the beaten highway and the wind whistled through us as loud as a man could whistle while Dad reminisced and I took it all in and had a strange sense of  a haunting familiarity even though I was too young to really remember the area.

 

The next few days I was checking in alone at the Mondrian hotel on the Sunset Boulevard in LA. Where I was to stay for 2 and a bit months before heading to Nashville.

LA LA land wore very thin very quick, I was sick of Mexican food which I thought impossible at first, I was sick of the plasticity and the state of the city, there was this strange undertone that LA had seen it’s day and the city was populated with lost souls that were competing for a dying dream , they are the people that hold on to the hope that Hollywood is indestructible. Maybe it is.

On the flipside I can see how Hollywood can be addictive and I sure had some fun while I was there for almost 6 months of that year going backwards and forwards. Waiting for my car at the valet one morning and talking about basketball with Jack Nicholson was a highlight. Although I don’t follow the basketball I still pretended..

I was drinking heavily and wondered where I belonged in the grand scheme of things, I felt like I was spinning more out of control than the earth itself, I was hurtling through space.. with no real direction,

I needed something real, something natural. But At this time I had no care for spiritual conversations I didn’t believe in the soul, all I saw was a physical mess inside and out. I was self destructing and I wanted out. I wanted to go far away from everyone but at the same time I wanted everyone to be near me at all times.

I had money for the first time in my life and I was like a kid with a loaded gun.

Nothing was real and I needed reality more than ever. I didn’t know myself and I wanted to get to know myself but I didn’t allow myself.

Blood and Bone is the reflection of where I had come from, from the dusty little quaint town in country Adelaide to the big, bold bankrupt Los Angeles and  where I saw myself going in the future, trying to play a role I had created with a big corporation breathing down my neck  and at the same time screaming internally out for help.