Double Single Launch
Join us for some sunshine, good wine and folk tunes at The Shiraz Republic, as both Valley Road and Broken Creek Band team up to celebrate the release of their respective latest singles – ‘1982’ and ‘The Gathering Wool’.
Valley Road’s ‘1982’ (to be released on 11th August) is an evocative montage of rural Australian life during times of drought and hardship. Songwriter Marty Mckenna grew up singing to the sheep with his dad on the family farm in Central Victoria, and still tends the flock to this day. Marty says “Growing up in the southeastern part of Australia in a farming community, the extreme events of that particular year are talked about often and have become a kind of folklore. The fires, extreme dry and giant dust storms of that particular year still inform farming practices to this day. The memories of farming through the ’82 drought are vivid.”
In contrast, Broken Creek Band’s ‘The Gathering Wool’ (available now) is about times of flood. Even though she’s the daughter of a sheep farmer, Erin Heycox thought she would never write a shearing song. That all changed during the Echuca-Moama floods of 2022. “We were on tour and I was on the phone to my Mum who was exasperated. ‘Your father can’t find any shearer’s. He’s over sixty and will have to shear a thousand sheep before the rains come’. As soon as I heard that I knew I had to write a song about Dad. There wasn’t much else I could do being so far away during the floods.”
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