But awareness of his ancestry, in all its myriad threads, clearly informs not just the earthy tools but the profoundly inclusive message of his music. “There’s stuff we’ll never know,” he says. The spiritual conviction was there long before Xavier discovered the unsettled legacy of his paternal great grandmother, who would disappear from public records after being taken from her Wiradjuri homelands to Melbourne.

“I don’t need to understand who that is or what that is, I just need to be a clean, strong vessel for that to come through, and be humble about it to realise it’s something that resonates within me and I just need to hold space for it, not let my ego get in the way.” “I’ve always felt like I’ve had this old woman spirit with me that that is prevalent in my music, and I’m a vessel for that old woman to speak,” he explains, not for the first time as others try to understand his innate connection to his craft. And I guess I always celebrate those things in my music.”Īs a child, at one with the sea and sand, inventing songs for his own enjoyment, Xavier set the tone for a life where creation was its own reward, and a gift not taken lightly. I think the roots of who we are, and what our ancestral lines are and how those stories have shaped us are the most important things. I don’t care too much for the other stuff. “I value community, culture, our connection to the earth as human beings. “I value the simple things in life,” he shrugs. Countless more celebrated acts have come and gone like fireworks as his campfire steadily grows: a beacon to the kind of music fan that seeks sustenance in a fast-food world.

Today, Xavier’s relentless upward arc is among the most astounding success stories of our time. Those instinctive beginnings eventually yielded the more crafted and purposeful likes of Spirit Bird, Nanna (with his nine-piece band the United Nations), Storm Boy and seven more live albums - though nobody could ever count those early bootlegs swapped by fans from Argentina to the Czech Republic, serving to double his audience on each return. I was experimenting with didges and gaffa-taping them to chairs and I always had this real love for wood and the tones of wood, so it was all very earthy.” “When I first got successful I was surprised, because I thought what I was doing was more like art,” he says. From his birthplace on the blustery southeast coast of Australia to Europe, Japan, the US, Canada and South America, you can measure it today in audiences in their tens of thousands, and in hundreds of millions of song streams, not least his timeless, windswept keynote, Follow The Sun (2012).Īcoustic guitar in hand, engulfed by his progressively more complex and elaborate scaffold of didgeridoos and percussion, Xavier Rudd cut an utterly unique and compelling figure as the world warmed to his first indie albums of the early 2000s, Live In Canada, To Let and Solace. The break accelerated a return to the solo mode of creation that first led the barefoot multi-instrumentalist on his phenomenal journey. I’ve been able to experiment with some new ideas and new sounds…” “I had a chance to reset and change a few things around, to reassess where I was at, musically and practically. “I’d planned to take a year off anyway, the first time in 20 years I hadn’t done an overseas circuit,” he says.

The wide-open space he’d found himself in - the great COVID silence - was both beyond his control and curiously in-sync. It felt like a wind of change, literally, in so many ways.” “We were on a trip north to the Cape and the wind was blowing too hard to take the tinnie out to the island… As I contemplated everything in my life and what was happening in the world there was literally a strong southeaster blowing, all the time. “It hit me last year when I started to write Stoney Creek,” the Australian roots journeyman says of the album’s first, exhilarating single: a rolling acoustic balm of a song that finds refuge in the simple blessings of rest, companionship and belonging in a world gone crazy. It’s a recurring image that speaks of wide-open space and the awesome natural elements that shape it: a force far greater than us, but ours to harness if we take the time to learn, reflect and respect its ways. The wind blows strong though Xavier Rudd’s tenth album.

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