Meet the talented Australian musicians taking on the world

Australia is home to plenty of up-and-coming musical talent, but our best and brightest aren’t staying home. Here are two acts taking on the world.

jordie

Australia is home to plenty of up-and-coming musical talent, but our best and brightest aren’t staying home. Here are two acts taking on the world.

Big things are happening in the life of Sydney music producer Jordie Ireland.

The 21-year-old, whose first track landed him a record deal with Universal Music, recently received a Music Backer’s Grant from American Express and is about to jet off to Los Angeles for two months.

He’s never been to California before, and he’s planning to Airbnb in the beachside suburb of Santa Monica while trying to meet as many music industry executives, producers and artists as possible.

“The best songwriters in the world tend to congregate in LA, so I think it’s a good opportunity to work with new people and see if I have a connection with anyone,” he tells the Daily Telegraph.

Ireland has created two major tracks so far, Take Cover and One in a Million, both featuring the powerful vocals of local talent Ava Hayz. While the pair works well together, and their collaboration has seen his career surge forward, he says they are conscious that neither of them wants to form a band.

“She’s got such a good voice, it [will] be hard to find someone who can match that power.”

As a producer, collaboration is an important part of his process.

“At the beginning, when I first started, I would create the whole instrumental and send it off to different vocalists, but as it’s become a bit more professional I like to be in the room while the writer is writing the lyrics. That’s how One in a Million came about, and I think over time I’ve also developed my personal writing skills as a songwriter as well as a producer,” he says.

“Generally, how my sessions go, I’ll sit down with whoever I’m writing with and we’ll talk about life a bit and what’s going good and what’s not going so good, and if any sentences or phrases stick out, we tend to write about those. It’s always easier writing from a real place, it tends to be more powerful [than making something up].”

However, the process varies significantly. While he might work on one track for six months, another might be done and dusted in just two days.

America has a huge draw for young Australian singers taking on the industry.

Jessica Porfiri, a Sydney-based pop singer better known by her stage name Kota Banks, took off to the United States when she was 18 and spent three months each in Los Angeles and Nashville.

“I just went to songwriters’ conferences and learnt the craft of songwriting. I loved it, especially Nashville, because I actually started out writing country. I love country music because I’ve always been a wordsmith and I love telling stories through songs.

“I guess you just evolve. That was 18, now I’m 24, so I’ve just grown and evolved and now I’m wanting to try new things,” she says of her transition to pop.

Although her own sound has grown, she says loves writing for other people’s projects and is actually about to work on one with a country artist. “It’s really exciting and you get to expand your horizons. You get to jump into another person’s shoes and see things from their perspective. At the start I was much more introverted and it was harder to collaborate, but over the years I’ve become a bit more comfortable.”