Tickets $39
Two of this country's finest artists come together in one unforgettable show. Book now as tickets are limited.
Great Southern Nights is a celebration of live music that takes place right across NSW . The dynamic event features hundreds of Covid-safe performances at live music venues across greater Sydney and regional NSW in March and April 2022. Great Southern Nights is a NSW Gov. initiative delivered by Destination NSW in partnership with the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) to stimulate the revival of the state's live music entertainment and hospitality sectors and in turn the NSW visitor economy in response to challenges presented by the Covid-19 pandemic. For more information, visit greatsouthernnights.com.au
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Brooke McClymont & Adam Eckersley
These are hard times. Unprecedented in the modern era, there’s no roadmap and no way to know how long the journey will last, how many more months will pass until light permeates the seeming darkness of all that’s happened over the past two years. But you’ve got to persevere. You’ve got to pull on your boots and place your old hat hard down on your head, roll a smoke and raise an eyebrow at whatever’s dragging you down and stride forward, stomp on the terra. You’ve got to be optimistic.
“Absolutely,” Brooke McClymont says, emphatically. “It’s all we’ve got. We can sit here and whinge about it, but what’s the point? You’ve got to find a way out of it, and we did.”
McClymont, along with husband and musical partner Adam Eckersley, are of the same mind. Since they released their duo debut, 2018’s Adam & Brooke, an album which was received rapturously within the country community, garnering accolades and awards all over, things have changed dramatically. For everyone. For these two though, whose musical endeavours away from their current project are well documented, it came time to stop wallowing and regretting lost opportunity, and embrace this sense of optimism – it was time to roll on.
The results are their first recorded output since their acclaimed 2018 debut, a single at this point, ‘Roll On Baby’. Where a great deal of the songs on Adam & Brooke were love songs to each other, this new one is, essentially, a love song to the music and the way of life the pair have known their entire adult lives. And it’s upbeat, it kicks, it’s optimistic too.
“Yeah, it’s a celebration of being on the road and everything that comes with it,” confirms Eckersley. “The song pretty much says, we’ve made a life out of being fulltime musicians, both of us, and we’ve realised how important that is… [the pandemic acted] as a great reminder of that, this is what we do.”
‘Roll On Baby’ began life as a ballad, but as so often happens, a trip to the local ale house aroused within the pair a need to bring the song up, to have it adequately reflect what they were feeling at the time. “Yeah, I realised it needed to be up,” acknowledges McClymont. “It just wasn’t a sad ballad song, the lyrics are quite uplifting.”
“Yeah, it kinda wrote itself then, didn’t it?’ adds Eckersley.
Stylistically, ‘Roll On Baby’ captures the middle ground between the pop-tinged country McClymont is known for and the grittier side of the country track that Eckersley has made his own over his tenure. Like a marriage, a musical partnership demands compromise – which you can certainly achieve without sacrificing quality.
“We did try to meet in the middle somewhere,” Eckersley confirms. “We didn’t want it to sound like either of our other projects too much… somewhere in the middle where we’re both satisfied and happy.”
“Yeah, I do love the pop and Adam definitely has that ‘band’ side, and I really feel like this song, we’ve definitely found the sweet spot for both of us, that we’re comfortable and happy with,” McClymont says.
‘Roll On Baby’ then, is a sign of the pair’s optimism – the content is upbeat, the music itself is a good time, there’s touring on the horizon and, as you’d expect of these two, there are more songs on the way, another record in mind. Even though the times are hard, there’s no excuse not to just roll on.
Samuel J. Fell, December 2021
Brooke McClymont is one third of top-selling, award-winning Australian country music trio The McClymonts. With over 200,000 album sales, 40 million streams, two ARIA Awards, fifteen Golden Guitar Awards, one CMA (USA) Award, one APRA Award and five #1 ARIA Country Albums, the McClymonts are a dominant female group in Australian country music with major success from hits such as ‘Kick It Up’, ‘Wrapped Up Good’ and ‘I’ve Got This’.
Adam Eckersley has won two Golden Guitar Awards: the first in 2015 for New Talent of the Year; and then in 2016 in the Group or Duo of the Year category with The Adam Eckersley Band. Their 2014 debut album, The First Album, debuted in the Top 5 on the ARIA Country Chart, with The Second Album debuting at #7 the following year. Adam has also been recognised for his songwriting, winning the APRA Award for Country Work of the Year (2015), and receiving an Honourable Mention in the International Songwriting Competition in 2014.
