Xavier Rudd follows the sun with 10th album Jan Juc Moon and world tour
Roots singer-songwriter Xavier Rudd’s trajectory has been remarkable. Now 10 albums into a globe-trotting career, he still can’t quite believe how far his music has carried him.
Xavier Rudd has a vivid recollection of his father behind the wheel of a busted up Ford Falcon, singing Neil Young’s classic album Harvest from start to finish. It’s the sort of memory that embedded deep in his mind as a child, even amid the chaos of being one of seven siblings growing up in the coastal Victorian town of Jan Juc, near Torquay.
The Rudds were a working class bunch, and with a family that big, they didn’t have much. His dad clearly loved music, but most of his hours were filled with earning and providing for his children by working first as a teacher, then running a T-shirt screen printing business named Propaganda. Making a living from making music? That sounded like a pipe dream.
At times, the family Falcon didn’t even have a working car radio, hence the a cappella Harvest performance, with his dad’s ringed fingers tapping on the steering wheel acting as percussion. They didn’t have much, but they had music and each other, and that was enough.
A couple of decades later, Rudd had established himself as a singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. Against all odds, he had realised that pipe dream: plenty of people all around the world knew his name and his songs, which is why he found himself in Lisbon, Portugal to play at a major festival named Optimus Alive in July 2008.
Four albums into his career at that point, Rudd played on the main stage the day after fellow Australian roots-rock act John Butler Trio. In the afternoon sun, thousands of people gathered to watch him open his set with the deep, rumbling bass notes of a didgeridoo, a sound rarely heard in Portugal, before adding drums, guitar and vocals as he built a towering wall of sound from silence.
Later that night, on the same stage, an awe-struck Rudd stood and watched as Neil Young and his band performed a stirring set that included several tracks from Harvest, including The Needle and the Damage Done, Heart of Gold and Old Man.
Held in Rudd’s arms was his second son, Finojet, and as the Australian musician stood beside Young’s guitar technician, he tried to convey the deep emotional resonance he felt in that moment. “That was me,” Rudd told the man, pointing at his son and at the old Canadian rocker standing at centre stage, and trying to join the dots between a distant memory of a Jan Juc childhood, hearing his own old man sing these songs, and the profound cosmic miracle that he could work hard enough with his own music to somehow be playing on the same stage as the guy who wrote them.
Young’s longtime guitar technician politely smiled and nodded: he had heard this sort of story all the time, such is the reach of the great man’s songs across time, space and oceans.
Such is the transporting power of music written and performed from the heart.
Perhaps Rudd’s story could have happily ended there, that night in Lisbon in 2008, as the boy had come full circle.
Now a father himself, music had become his life and his livelihood, and he had shared space with the man who wrote timeless songs that his father committed to memory and sang, note for note, for the sheer pleasure of it.
But it didn’t end there. Rudd kept climbing; he kept writing and recording and performing. In turn, his audiences kept growing in many countries across the world.
Today, few Australian solo artists can sell as many tickets in as many territories as he can, and with the distinctive didgeridoo at the centre of his sound – a stylistic choice that also points directly to his Indigenous heritage – few performers are as overtly Australian in their musical identity while exporting their art worldwide.
Although his parents were broadly supportive of his progress, the true nature of his international success was perhaps only revealed to them a few years ago, when their long-planned – and hard-earned – overseas trip happened to coincide with a concert their son was scheduled to play in Canada.
Rudd picks up the story: “I went and found them and took them back to my tour bus,” he tells Review. “And then they came that night to a sold-out show in Quebec City – probably three or four thousand people. I think that sort of spun them out, because they were in another country and they saw it first-hand,” he says.
“I remember afterwards, Dad was a little bit teary and didn’t say anything. He didn’t know what to say. But I knew; I could tell what was going on.
“But the thing Dad remembers most was the tour bus,” he says with a laugh. “They came up here recently and Dad was still talking about it. He was just blown away by it, because on American tour buses, the sides pop when you stop, so the whole living room expands. I remember him saying to his mates, ‘He’s got a shower in there! He’s having a shower, going down the highway!’
“They’re proud, I think, but they’re not the kind of people that boast,” says Rudd of his parents, smiling. “They’re pretty humble, and pretty stoked, as long as everyone’s happy and healthy. They wouldn’t harp on about it.”
The final song on Rudd’s 10th album, Jan Juc Moon, is named Johanna, after a beach off the Great Ocean Road in southern Victoria that his family visited when he was a child. Written as a simple folk song arrangement comprising just guitar, harmonica and vocals, it begins with these words:
I can see my old man singing Harvest into the night
And I can see him tapping his rings on the wheel as he drives
Plain to me, Needle and the Damage Done in my mind
Memories, the radio wasn’t working for a time …
In the background of the recording, rainbow lorikeets are heard frolicking noisily in the trees in Rudd’s back yard at his home near Eumundi on the Sunshine Coast.
Recorded at “bird hour”, as he fondly calls it, the stripped-back track is an outlier on the album, which is an otherwise slickly produced affair that traverses roots, reggae, folk and even a didgeridoo-centric dance floor rave-up named Slide Down a Rainbow.
Johanna, though, catches the ear immediately as a result of its plaintive vulnerability and sentimentality. In the next verse, Rudd moves forward from his childhood to recall becoming a father, then reflects on more recent events:
And it was hard to imagine the scene
Where the people of the world would be locked down in the streets
And the borders that we knew to be careless and free
Had become strict state lines and illegal to breach …
It is an extraordinary song that shines through with light, life and love, and when Review visits Rudd’s home on a hot day in early March, it becomes clear that “back yard” doesn’t quite capture the place where it was recorded.
The home the 43 year old shares with his wife, Ashley Freeman-Rudd, and their one-year-old son, Jundi, backs on to two hectares of dense rainforest. No wonder the lorikeets lose their colourful minds each afternoon while feeding at “bird hour”: it is a slice of pure bush paradise, still muddy underfoot from recent rains that drenched southeast Queensland.
During a two-hour interview conducted while his blue heelers Indi and Honey alternately rest at our feet and slurp noisily from the swimming pool, we canvass his story and some of the songs on his 10th album.
Jan Juc Moon was largely written and recorded here at his home studio during the pandemic and, as before, it was rooted in his unusual way of composing: rather than writing bit-by-bit, stacking instruments and melodies and harmonies, as many songwriters do, his process is all internal, with the arrangement being constantly refined in his mind until he thinks a song is finished. Only then will he start recording.
“Sometimes it’ll be a year before I’ll even take [a song] to an instrument,” he says. “It’ll be in my head for ages, and I can sort of shape it: I’ll understand what instrument I’m going to approach it with, and what key it might be in. It’s almost constructed in my brain before I even start with an instrument. I’ve never sat down with a guitar and gone, ‘I’m going to write a song.’ I’ve never done that once in my life; they just come when I’m doing things.”
“I feel like a bit of a numpty sometimes, musically, because sometimes I’ll have to ask someone in the band, ‘What are we playing here? What are those notes?’” he says with a laugh.
“I do a lot of what I do from sound, and I feel a bit embarrassed or inadequate – but I just have my own approach, which I taught myself.”
Toward the end of the album, a song named Angel At War references his oldest son, Joaquin.
Rudd was 21 when he was born, and the song is written to him, reflecting on the personal difficulties associated with being an absent father, while the touring musician was establishing himself overseas. “He went through a lot of stuff that I’m regretful of,” he says. “I wish that I could change it for him now, but I can’t.”
To date, he has sold more than one million concert tickets and two million albums worldwide, according to estimates provided by his team. These are impressive numbers that help tell the story of his success, but it’s toward the end of our long, poolside conversation that I ask Rudd to reflect on that sweet, deeply embedded memory with his old man behind the wheel, singing Harvest from memory because the radio was busted.
For a hardworking father of seven, the notion of any of his children making a life out of playing music could scarcely have seemed possible. Yet as Rudd tells it, becoming a father himself was the kick up the arse he needed to give music a proper crack for the first time, rather than it being just a hobby that had absorbed him since he was a child. At 21, he was working full-time at a golf course, mowing lawns and making not much money. Then came Joaquin.
“I just started trying to play live wherever I could, and it turned into what it is,” he recalls. “It quite quickly got to a point where I could make some money from it, playing my own songs, which blew my f..king mind – the fact that I could go and play my own music somewhere, not covers, and get paid.
“It didn’t matter if it was $50, $500 or just some dinner – I didn’t care,” he says. “I was pumped about that. I thought that was amazing. As my confidence grew, it just sort of steamrolled. Then I started making more money, and I was like, ‘Wow, this is actually a great career. I can do this!’ It snowballed like that; it wasn’t a plan.”
Early on, his parents saw him struggle, and they worried for him in the way of all parents of children pursuing careers in fickle, unstable fields such as the performing arts. But they raised tough kids who were encouraged to fend for themselves from a young age, and the budding musician found his way.
When Joaquin was about four years old, and Rudd was not quite the established headline draw he is today, he went and worked in his dad’s screen printing factory for a few weeks before Christmas, so that he could earn a little extra money to buy some gifts for his son. That was the last time he worked for anyone other than himself.
Jan Juc Moon is released on Friday, March 25, via Salt X. Records/Virgin Music. Xavier Rudd will perform a ticketed live stream event from his home via eMusic on March 24. His national tour begins in Toowoomba (May 25) and ends in Karratha, WA (July 27).
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