

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.
