How did this even come together?

Yeah, well, we teamed up with our old writing buddy, a guy by the name of Phil Barton.

He's lived in the States, in Nashville.

He's had a US number one.

He's been over there for about 20, 30 years, I think.

Yeah.

But he was back in Tassie visiting his nan and he came around to my place and around Christmas time we got a bit of a meat tray.

well you guys do keep yourselves pretty busy songwriting and not even like just for yourself as well you do a lot of songwriting for other artists as well has there ever been a time where you've created a song with someone else for someone else and you've gone oh i wish that could have been a wolf brothers

Was it helped your trajectory? Did you have a good reality experience, not so good?

Yeah.

Yeah, look, I would say overall for us it was overwhelmingly positive.

I think we did five or six performances on the show and we only had to do one cover.

The rest of the stuff we did was original music, which is kind of unheard of.

Wow.

Like that's unheard of now.

Tell us about where that came from and who wrote it.

That's gotta be the coolest thing in the world.

The- legitimately the best feeling in the world.

I mean, we write songs that mean something to us.

It's come from our real-life experiences, a- a- and everything we've been influenced by.

And when it means something to someone else, and you see people sing it, that's a very special, very special feeling.

And I think, you know, for us, the live thing, I mean, we saw during COVID, live music is, was incredibly undervalued.

It brings people together.

Hear, hear.

Mm.

"Where am I?" That was one thing.

I've got three kids under five.

Um, you know, we, uh... fortunately both our parents are no longer with us, so there's not a lot of support, lots of pressure.

And then I just...

I was, like, I struggle probably with anxiety at the best of times.

Playing, like, it's just awesome.

I think the thing, uh, and maybe just 'cause we're country music fans and country boys, I really like about that show, at the end of the show they do this song called All Our Sons and Daughters, and, like, the band is rocking.

Yeah.

Come back here for three or four months, make some money, and sort of go.

And we did that for, like, a couple of years, and there was one point during the winter we were going over Th- we're going through the Midwest doing, like, a bunch of showcases.

So, like, when we got to Nashville, Nashville in the winter was way colder.

I sort of thought-

Yeah

... that's what it's about.

So I, I look at that whole experience now, and I have no regrets.

Oh, wow.

So Dad had had cancer, and we'd been sort of-- We were living in America.

We were touring in America trying to get the career going over there.

Dad got sick.

We come home.

We're caring for Dad.

Went to the hospital, said goodbye to Dad, got to the airport, and I was like, rang up Mum.

What was it looking like for you? Like, were you having blackouts?