Contact: Roxanne Brown M: 0418 728 538 E: rox@troycassardaley.com.au W: www.troycassardaley.com.au

IF you take the time to study Troy Cassar-Daley, a number of contradictions will surface, quicker than the flash of bass in the headwaters of his beloved Brisbane River in south-east Queensland.

He’s the kid from Grafton in northern NSW who did it tough with his mum, Irene, after his parents separated when he was an infant. Yet he writes and sings more poignantly about family life than anyone in the business.

He was shy and sensitive as a teenager. Yet today he can hold in thrall an audience of thousands.

He’s been plying his trade for a lifetime (it began, according to family lore, with young Troy entertaining the dinner table with sets on a ukulele before securing a hand-me-down guitar aged 9) and has earned the right to be jaded. Yet he maintains an undiminished enthusiasm for his craft, and each album – you can sense it, feel it coming off the music – is a new adventure.

As an example of this, Troy made the conscious decision not to play on Home, but to concentrate on that magnificent, evolving voice of his. It has, as is evidenced on this album, become an instrument unto itself.

Troy’s method of song writing also took a new direction – he stopped touring for a year prior to recording, and in between his children’s school drop-offs in the city, and fishing for bass in the waters near his family farm, and cleaning up the property after one of the worst natural disasters in Queensland’s history, he composed.

“Right from the initial planning stages, I wanted this album to be done completely differently to anything I had recorded before. I knew that I was going to be working with the best musicians in Nashville. With this in mind it really inspired me to write songs and co-write songs that I’d be proud to record for my album. Not only that, I wanted the guys I was recording the album with to really enjoy playing on the songs and deliver the goods musically.”

Those remarkable players included: Biff Watson – MD, acoustic guitar and mandolin; Brent Mason – electric guitar; Eddie Bayers – drums; Michael Rhodes – bass; Steve Nathan – keys; Bryan Sutton – banjo and acoustic guitar; Stuart Duncan – fiddle; Paul Franklin – steel guitar; and John Wesley Ryles – background vocals. Ed Seay was the engineer on Home.

In another departure, he produced the record himself. “I might be punching above my weight, however it’s great to challenge yourself and with these players you deliver them the song demo and the chart and they add the magic,” he reflects.

What is most extraordinary about Troy, and Home (recorded, ironically once again, at Starstruck Studios in Nashville, Tennessee, between October 17 – 19, 2011; starstruck he is not), is that the more successful and accomplished he becomes as an artist, the more his subject matter and perfectly attuned musical instinct turns to those small, universal things that constitute a meaningful life.

It is said that in art it takes a lifetime to make something appear extremely simple, and this is what Troy has achieved with Home. It is music honed so beautifully, and craft so seemingly effortless, that you will somehow recognise a song halfway through, or feel you’ve heard it before even though you haven’t, because the music is honest, and it is true. And it is about all of us, in one way or the other, and those emotions and remembrances and yearnings we all experience as human beings. Troy is, amongst many things, a great chronicler of the human heart.

Above all, though, he is a superlative storyteller. He can, with a few deft flicks of the brush, paint little pictures that you’d swear belonged to your own life. He can take us back into our own childhood, or the pain of a long lost relationship, or a joyous moment with our parents or siblings that we thought had been abandoned to time. He ignites vignettes of another way of life, simpler, truer, and one increasingly left behind by globalisation and the commodification of our daily existences, and in turn our futures, and those of our children and grandchildren.

His songs teem with cousins visiting from the Big Smoke, backyard football, a father whistling tunes that are sung by the son, greasy hands working on a truck, swinging gates that no longer latch fast, dreams and hopes and love.

In the title song, a childhood home is recalled: “My world was in that street/ I thought I had it all.”

Then in the next breath he sings of a teenage son, and a little daughter, and a wife he loves more than anything or anyone else. “We build our dreams with love/and memories of home.”

Combined with Troy’s hugely emotive voice, one whose tones and timbres preternaturally connect not with the head, but with the heart, you begin to sense the enormity of what he has created here.

He is singing life, the cycle of it, the passing of time and generations and all the pleasure and heartbreak that this thing called life entails.

Most significantly, I think, through his generosity of spirit as a man and an artist, as a husband and father and son, he reminds us of what is real, of what matters and what doesn’t. To be able to take the essence of that away from a collection of songs that are wonderfully uplifting and toe-tapping and radiant and thought-provoking and that cloy on the mind and, in some cases, demand to be sung along to, is no small achievement.

Home, by definition, can be many things. But one is as an abiding place of human affections. That – thankfully for us as people, and as music lovers – is precisely where Troy Cassar-Daley lives.

Career snapshot:

Troy’s career has spanned 8 studio albums over 20 years.  Throughout this time he has been awarded numerous accolades including 4 ARIA’s, 21 Golden Guitars, 2 APRA Country Song of the year awards, 8Deadlys (Australian Indigenous artist awards), 4 CMAA Entertainer of the Year awards, and the 2008 Country Music Association of America Country Music Global Artist Award.