The day I met my musical hero and what stuck with me

I had been listening to this songwriter's records for the better part of two decades before I ever set eyes on him in the same room. The first time came on a wet Wednesday arvo in Melbourne, half a year after I started writing songs seriously and roughly a lifetime after I bought my first copy of his album from a record shop in Adelaide. He was playing two nights at a small pub in Fitzroy, the kind of room that fits maybe ninety people if everyone breathes in, and I had convinced myself for weeks beforehand that I would somehow end up face-to-face with him.

That kind of thinking is silly, of course. Concert halls are not designed for backstage run-ins, and most artists slip out the loading dock while the crowd is still calling for one more song. But I had heard from friends in the local scene that this particular songwriter had a habit of hanging around after shows when he toured Australia, often sitting at the bar and chatting with whoever wandered over. It felt like a long shot, the sort of thing you only admit to other obsessives over a pot at the Corner Hotel or in the beer garden at the Tote.

By the encore I had given up on the idea entirely and was just listening. The room was warm, the kind of warm that settles into the bones after a few hours of standing, and most of the punters were locals who had followed this artist across multiple Australian tours. A few faces I half-recognised from open mics around Brunswick and Carlton. When the houselights finally came up, I drifted towards the bar in a daze, more interested in another pint than in meeting anyone.

Then someone tapped my shoulder and said, "You're the one who knows every word to the third record, yeah? The bloke out the back wants a chat."

The venue and the wait

The pub sat on a quiet Fitzroy street, the sort of place that had hosted punk matinees in the eighties and now leaned into quiet midweek residencies from international acts making their way around the country. I had been to that room a dozen times over the years, usually for Triple J Unearthed showcases or for the Tuesday night songwriter circles that ran out of the back bar. The stage was tiny, the PA was held together with gaffer tape, and the green room was really just a corridor behind the kitchen with a couple of camp chairs and a kettle.

Touring Australia is its own education for any visiting artist. The distances between capital cities are enormous, the regional shows are sometimes more rewarding than the big-city ones, and the audiences tend to be quieter at first and more vocal once they trust you. I had watched enough mates go through the same circuit to know the rhythm of it: soundcheck at four, dinner at the pub across the road, doors at seven-thirty, show at nine, then either a long drive to the airport or a slow walk back to a nearby Airbnb. There is a particular kind of exhaustion that settles into touring musicians in this country, and it often comes with a surprising openness once the gear is packed away.

I waited in that corridor for what felt like an age but was probably fifteen minutes. I could hear him talking to the sound engineer about a hum in one of the stage boxes, and I tried to compose something to say that did not sound like a fan who had spent the last twenty years dissecting his chord changes.

The first exchange

When he came through the door he looked smaller than I had imagined. He was carrying a battered acoustic in a soft case, the kind that has clearly seen more aeroplane cargo holds than living rooms, and he had a glass of something amber in his other hand. He set the guitar down, sat in the closer of the two chairs, and looked up at me with the sort of weary friendliness that only comes after a long run of shows.

"G'day," he said, in an accent that had clearly been softened by years of touring. "You're the one who's been shouting my songs back at me all night, I reckon."

I told him my name and confessed that I had been listening since I was a teenager, that his songs had been the reason I first picked up a guitar, and that I had recently started writing my own. He nodded along without interrupting, which is a rarer thing than people realise. Most artists, once they sense a fan in the room, default to autopilot small talk. He just listened until I ran out of things to say.

Then he laughed and said, "Fair dinkum. Right, tell me what you're working on at the moment."

That question changed everything. He did not want to talk about his own records, or about the tour, or about the strangeness of being recognised in a Melbourne pub on a Wednesday night. He wanted to talk about the work.

What he said about the craft

We ended up talking for close to two hours, mostly about songwriting, and a few things he said have stayed with me ever since. He was generous with the details in a way that very few artists of his stature are, and he treated my questions as if they were worth answering properly rather than as the standard backstage curiosities.

He was clear that he did not believe in natural talent, only in attention. He said the songs that had meant the most to people were usually the ones he had worked on the longest, sometimes for years, rewriting verses on long drives between regional shows and turning choruses over in his head while waiting for a servo coffee in outback Queensland. He said the audience rarely hears the ten earlier versions of a song, and that those failed drafts were where the actual craft lived.

Rules I try to write by

• Finish the song, even when you have lost interest in it.
• Trust the listener to do some of the work.
• A bad demo is almost always better than a good idea you never record.
• Do not write for an algorithm, write for the person who needs it most.
• Sing like nobody is listening, at least until the take is good.

He laughed at the last one, then said, "Half the songs on my third record were recorded with the curtains drawn and the dog asleep. The ones that sound the most polished are usually the ones I am least proud of."

The lesson about staying grounded

I asked him about the strange loneliness that creeps in after years on the road, and he got quiet for a moment. He said that the worst thing about a long career was not the critics or the changing tastes of the public, but the slow drift away from the people who had known you before any of it started. He said he tried to come back to Australia every couple of years because the audiences here still treated him like a working musician rather than like a personality, and that was a kind of medicine he could not get anywhere else.

He told me a story about playing a community hall somewhere outside of Ballarat years ago, where the promoter had insisted on feeding the whole band before the show and where the locals had stayed behind to help stack chairs afterwards. He said he had played bigger rooms in London and New York that had felt far less welcoming than that dusty hall with its creaking wooden floor. The point was not the size of the audience, it was the quality of attention being paid.

He also talked about his own musical heroes, several of whom had been generous to him when he was starting out, and he said he felt a kind of obligation to pass that on. He mentioned a woman in Nashville who had let him sleep on her floor for two weeks while he cut a record, and a folk singer in Dublin who had quietly slipped him a hundred quid at the end of a long tour. He said the music industry in any country tends to reward those who help others, and that a quiet act of generosity had paid him back tenfold over the years.

What I carry with me

By the time he picked up his guitar case and wished me well, the pub was almost empty and the staff were sweeping up around the beer taps. We shook hands and he said something that I have scribbled in the back of countless notebooks since. He said, "Keep writing. The world does not need another version of me, it needs the version of you that only you can write."

I think about that line every time I sit down to work on a song, and I think about the patience he described when I am tempted to throw out a half-finished verse. I think about the servo coffee and the Ballarat community hall when I am weighing up whether to play a small room or chase a bigger one. I think about the dog asleep behind the curtain when I am fiddling with a take for the dozenth time and convincing myself it is not yet good enough.

Habits borrowed from that conversation

• Write something every week, even if it is only a single line.
• Keep a list of titles, even the bad ones, because the worst ones often become the best songs later.
• Play one small room a year where nobody has heard of you.
• Say yes to the conversation when a younger musician asks for advice.
• Stay curious about genres you do not yet write in.

That wet Wednesday arvo in Melbourne gave me far more than a story to tell at dinner parties. It gave me a working philosophy, borrowed in part from a man I had admired since I was a teenager. If you ever get the chance to sit down with one of your own musical heroes, bring a notebook, ask about the work, and try not to talk too much about them. The best ones, it turns out, are far more interested in what you are doing than in what they have already done.