By Larry Schwartz
Australian singer-songwriter Sherrie Austin wants to know what you make of her accent. Tell her she sounds American and she says, “Oh Gosh, to them, I’m Crocodile Dundette.”
It should come as no surprise that the 26-year-old’s strine has taken on a distinctive twang since she left to pursue a career in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles 10 years ago. There have reportedly been some raised eyebrows at her inclusion in nominations for this week’s Tamworth Country Music Festival. She hasn’t heard the rumblings.
“I’ve been away for a long time,” says Austin, who was packing her bags in Nashville, Tennessee, for a first Australian visit since her teens. “So maybe, for some people, it’s a little strange. But I’m an Aussie girl at heart.”
Austin recently became the first Australian female artist to enter the US country charts since Jewel Blanch in 1979. A first single from her debut album, Words, peaked at No. 41 in the US country charts, nudging ahead of the only other Australian act, The Ranch, which made it to 50.
A second single is due out this week and Austin has a busy tour schedule planned. “Now I’m more in the spotlight,” says the singer, who was raised in Newtown, Sydney. “So there’s a lot of people watching what I do. Before it was just me writing songs in my own little world. But now I’ve put them out there and said, ‘Hey guys take a listen’. It changes things drastically.”
Her success comes at a time when antipodean acts such as Keith Urban, Troy Cassar-Daley and the Dead Ringer Band are making some headway in the lucrative, but insular, US country scene. Melbourne’s Sherry Rich has recorded an acclaimed album in Nashville with members of the US band Wilco.
Austin has been co-opted in a push to have country performers follow the example of successful rock exports including AC/DC, Men At Work, Midnight Oil, Little River Band and INXS. Until fairly recently, the multi-billion dollar, American country market has remained fairly resistant to outsiders.
“America has always been very isolated in a lot of different areas, not just music,” she says. “Australia has been a lot more open towards Europe and America … they don’t know as much about Australian country artists as Australians do about American artists. But I’m probably going to change that a little bit…”
Austin plays a country pop that betrays her childhood affection for 1970s music she grew up listening to – Simon and Garfunkel, Bread – as much as her mother’s LP collection, featuring Skeeter Davis and Dolly Parton (“my most favorite artist in the world”). The central preoccupation? Lurv, of course.
“This song is about strength and recovery,” she has said of the first single, One Solitary Tear, “that step-by-step process to get over somebody … my first real love.
“When you listen to my album,” she says, “you’ve definitely got
both kinds of influences. It’s not traditional but you’ve got elements of it and it is contemporary at the same time. In the last few years, country has kind of opened out.
“This all happened at a time when I was just ready to do my music. It was just good timing; my music was ready for Nashville and Nashville was ready for me.”
Austin has shown an aptitude for showbiz since the age of nine or 10, when she’d make up “songs and dances and little skits”. She performed at Tamworth in her teens and was just 14 when she toured Australia in 1985 with Johnny Cash. “It was an incredible opportunity for me. It was the first time I’d sung in front of thousands of people. I got really hooked.”
With her building contractor father and mum, a chef, she settled in Los Angeles after securing a role in a sitcom, The Facts Of Life. She last visited Australia in the late 1980s to take a role in the mini-series, Shadows Of the Heart.
After six years in LA, her interest in music won out over acting. She headed on to Nashville, where she met collaborator Will Rambeaux, a key figure in her musical career. “I moved to Nashville to write, and I didn’t even think about getting a record deal,” Austin, who penned a first tune for a friend’s wedding at 17, has said. “I came to town with all these ideas, these scraps of paper with lyrics and bits of melodies and was determined to put them together.”
Signed by Arista Nashville in 1996, she says songwriting has remained her primary concern. “I usually keep a notebook of titles or things that I want to write about. Or I’ll even hear music and want to write about something with that feel or that groove. That’s how you go about it. It’s not easy to do that. And for every great song I write, I probably write nine bad ones. But that’s part of the process.”
Austin has been nominated at Tamworth for awards as best female vocalist and new talent of the year. New talent? As she says: “The music business, the entertainment industry as a whole, is very difficult. There aren’t too many people who’ve had overnight success. They’ve usually been doing it for a long time. It’s quite a climb. But every day you just take it one more step.”
The Sunday Age, 25-Jan-1998
Larry Schwartz Writer 