Cars bogged and tents flying: Songwriters get back to nature
Five South Australian musicians sat around a campfire in the Flinders Ranges to write songs, and pretty much everything that could have gone wrong did. You can catch them perform the story this month as part of Nature Festival.
When Tom West gathered a group of artists to connect with and write songs about nature, he thought all his focus would be on improvising riffs and lyrics, not navigating stormy conditions.
“I had a vaguely set vision, but I guess you could say we rolled with the punches because it was a crazy week of weather,” Tom told CityMag.
“We were around the campfire noodling on the guitar and then one thing led to another and here we go, we’re writing a song and midway through the rain and the wind knocked our little ramshackle canvas, strung over trees, shelter down.”
The weather was complete chaos; raining, freezing, and windy, so nothing went to plan as the group was “in for a penny, in for a pound,” he says.
“I had a $50 little cheapie camp guitar, so it doesn’t really matter if that gets rained on or wet, but some of the other guys had their nice things, which mostly stay snugged in their cases.
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“Our cars got bogged. Our canvases blew over. Our tents were flying around, and it was great.
“The unpredictability of our outback in our nature that we have, that’s part of what you’re buying into, and that’s part of what you’re absorbing through that experience.”
Despite the wild weather they endured, the creative flow of the group wasn’t disrupted, inspiring their songwriting.
“One song we made is a light-hearted little song about a camping trip that goes horribly wrong,” says Tom.
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The first song the group sat down and wrote came when musician Alana Jagt was taking a photo of a red-capped robin.
“We took inspiration and built a song around that vignette of Alana taking the photo of that small bird,” Tom says.
“In that regard, it was satisfying to me to see that hypothesis proven correct, that if we went out to nature and sat around, we would be inspired by what we experience and put that to song.”
This is the first time the Outback Song Camp has featured on the Nature Festival program and Tom says it was a good lesson.
He says he would do it again, but with less set-up, less packing up, and organise it to focus more on songwriting and be easier on everyone who comes along.
“On this trial run of the concept, it worked out well that we knew each other a little bit because the conditions were pretty difficult… but on another occasion, it would be cool to get completely new faces,” he says.
“Songwriting is always different collaboratively, and different people will have different inspirations, but for us, the stuff that we wrote was directly inspired by the nature all around us.
“I think the creative times that we had were the best parts for me personally. The other guys might have different ideas, but it definitely wasn’t the three-times-cooked sausages mixed in with yesterday’s stew that we had for breakfast on the last day, that wasn’t a highlight.”
The musical camping crew will perform their works at the Grace Emily Hotel on Waymouth Street at 5:40pm, October 8. Entry is free, but to secure your spot, register via Humanitix.
The Nature Festival is currently in its sixth year and features hundreds of nature-inspired events from September 26 to October 12.
