Sunburnt Country Music

Some albums just make you weep – from joy, from wonder, from appreciation, from the range of emotions embedded in and expressed through the lyrics as well as the way they’re sung. The debut self-titled album from Central Victorian folk duo Valley Road – whose members are Rebecca Jane Howell and Marty McKenna – is such an album, and the signs were there from debut single ‘The Wind Blew West’, released in the middle of 2023. Said Howell of the song, ‘It’s a deeply personal song, about my brave Mama, and the dark days she went through when my dad left her while she was pregnant with me. I wrote it years ago, during a period of serious writer’s block, and it all just sort of poured out of me, as though it needed to be written.’

That’s the second track on this album; the first is ‘1982’, which was the second single and has lead vocals from McKenna. It’s a song of the impact of the land on a life, of how drought can shape a boy, then a man, and a community. McKenna grew up singing to sheep with his father on the family property, where he still works today. 

If those two songs set the origin story for Valley Road, they also showcased the duo’s ability to tell stories that hold the listener close, and to sing them in a way that draws you even closer. When their album was released in October it contained 9 other songs that expanded on the themes that were either evident or lurking in those singles – love and loss, immersion in and attachment to the natural world, self-examination, striving to be a better person – and presented a vibrantly coloured, elegantly delivered world and worldview. 

The real heartbreaker of the album is, however, not a song about love for another but of love for and understanding of the self. It is track four, ‘The Way the Sun Goes Down’. Howell has the lead vocal, and McKenna’s harmonies serve to act as a reassurance that she’s not in it alone by making us feel like we are even more in the experience with her. It is a song ostensibly about not wanting to be confined indoors when the natural world is there to be lived in, revelled in, surrounded by, as contained in the chorus lines ‘Don’t leave me hiding in a concrete tower/Getting older by the hour’. Its bigger themes, however, are about not wanting to be confined full stop and also about feeling so connected to the world that ‘I know it’s making me crazy/The way the sun goes down without saying goodbye’. It’s a plaintive line – something a child might say but only an adult would understand – and if, by the time you’ve listened to the first three tracks and you’re not already in love with this album, this line in track four will get you, and get you every single time you hear it. 

It’s so easy to say that an artist has a gift for doing things – for writing songs in a certain way, for singing with enough skill to provoke an emotional response in the listener – as if having the gift is all that’s needed. It is not. To create songs like this the artist has to understand what to do with that gift, and to have the intention to share it in a way that is meaningful, then develop the skill to do it, then actually do it. In the case of Valley Road it is two such artists who have created a master work of love for this world and its people, sprung from a pure well of openheartedness and wonder, bottled up and brought to you. 

https://valleyroadduo.com.au

Listen to Valley Road on Apple Music

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