The southern states of America held my hand for the first few months of self-discovery. Taking me to church for the first time, with the sermon being casually led by The Reverend Al Green, I asked myself why I hadn’t tried this whole religious thing years ago. But after coming to my senses whilst eating pulled pork BBQ shortly after service, I quickly realized church would probably never live up to that kind of high ever again, so I put the lyrics about the devil back in my jeans pocket and naturally turned to the all forgiving hard liquor-pouring juke joints of Clarksdale, MS. After learning a thing or two about the “real” blues, and finding out from a chap named Eddie who had a penchant for moonshine, that I clearly ain’t got them blues if I could afford a plane ticket from New Zealand to Clarksdale, I decided I better keep on chewing through this whistle stop tour of mine to find the true blood and bones of this record. So, I got down to business and started writing furiously. I wore my fingers down to a callous state writing with every Tom, Dick & Harry around the world, including a chap named Charlie who plays for a man named Bob, to wrestle my emotions and bring out the raw grit hiding in my tightly guarded sub-conscious. Lucky for me, it all paid off in the way of 11 tip-top songs that have the love of a cowboy, bathe in a little lonesome blues, dance to a touch of rock ‘n’ roll and have the swagger of a woman past midnight.
After much persistence in the form of incessant nagging to my label to get Mr. Butch Walker to produce and Mr. Jake Sinclair to engineer, I found myself in the beachside haven of Santa Monica in the U.S. summer of 2011 with those two fine gentlemen by my side ready to record my second album. After a month of live and loose recording with the Black Widows and Stu Thompson, we managed to uncover my newest album Gravel & Wine…
