The Road To Austin: We Look At Three Young Aussie acts on their first visits to SXSW

TORI FORSYTH

It’s been two years since Tori Forsyth wrote her first “proper” song, and now she’s building to the worldwide release in late May of her debut album Dawn Of The Dark, produced by Shane Nicholson and out through Lost Highway / Universal.

In between, one of her songs ‘New Walls’ topped Spotify’s Most Viral Chart and generated 2 million streams.

Last year, she toured the United States for the first time, spending three weeks playing seven nights a week.

Forsyth grew up a country girl, first on a rural property on the NSW Central Coast and then a 62-acre spread near Congewai, a tiny Hunter Valley village.

From her parents’ record collection came her two main inspirations, Stevie Nicks and American ‘70s folkie Melanie Safka who had a huge hit in Australia called ‘Lay Down’.

Her 5th grade English teacher showed her poetry could be cool, and despite “always fluking English”, from there came her first proper song ‘Johnny And June’ which ended up on her debut EP which she did multiple jobs to pay for.

“The song absolutely no structure to it, because I didn’t know what I was doing,” she admits.

“But the beauty of it is I feel like I had a very naïve start to music, which I think was really good, because I didn’t have any expectations.”

She turned her back on co-writes because “I didn’t feel that they were a reflection of me” and went for brutally honest songs as her early experiences in Nashville and Tamworth – “It was like a war zone, it was like a battlefield. I felt like I was in high school again,” – as well as revealing about her own struggles with mental health in a song such as ‘Snow White’.

What she hopes to get out of SXSW is touring and support opportunities, and making connections with industry folk and artists to keep on the journey.

THE MONEY WAR

Perth duo The Money War started out during a US road trip in late 2015 when Dylan Ollivierre (Rainy Day Women) and Carmen Pepper (Warning Birds) were wondering what to do when their respective bands had broken up.

“In a creative burst I wrote five songs in a day” recalls Ollivierre who’d been writing since he was 13, “we ended up with over 20 iPhone demos”.

A chance meeting with producers Thom Monahan (Devendra Banhart, Fruit Bats, Little Joy) and Arne Frager (Prince, Paul McCartney) in a dive bar in San Francisco, the duo were convinced of the value of the demos.

Ollivierre could have received songwriting tips from a legendary writer, one Bob Dylan.

His family is from Bequia, in the Caribbean, where his father worked as a shipwright on Dylan’s boat Water Pearl.

“I got to meet Bob Dylan a few times. I played guitar with him and talked about song writing.

“I wish I could have the conversation now because I would appreciate it so much more.”

From their debut EP came a gorgeous piece of pop called ‘Recall’ was the 4th most played track on triple j last year.

Now on their visit to SXSW, the track has started to be played by US college radio stations.

From SXSW they’re hoping for US and worldwide label distribution, booking agents in the US and UK/Europe, publishers and sync/music supervisors.

DAGGY MAN (THOMAS CALDER)

A lot happened in the past two years since Brisbane singer-songwriter Daggy Man (Thomas Calder) returned to Australia from living abroad.

He says he found himself “at a crossroads… a year of personal hardships and creative woes… the most difficult period of my life so far.”

Out of that came his debut album A Lazy Kind of Pain, out on February 16 through US indie AntiFragile.

“This album, and project, really just came out of nowhere,” he ‘fesses up.

“It became a way for me to digest, and to try and understand the pain and sadness I was experiencing, and find a way to the other-side of it.

“I needed to rediscover the beauty in things. I was completely lost and isolated, and I discovered through the process that music was really a way for me to try and save myself.

“Almost like letters, written to myself from the outside in, the songs were trying to keep me going, and affirm to me that life is worth living.”