Cotton Pickering

Swapping one music hot bed (Brisbane) for another (Nashville) is all fine and dandy for Chris Pickering.

“I have been gradually adjusting back to Brisbane life,” begins the Warwick-born singer/songwriter. “It's pretty tough hey - it's hectic as hell.”

Dry humour aside, Pickering has been a busy boy, with his hard-to-pigeonhole style killing it over in the States, with gigs in LA's famed Viper Room and a run on San Francisco springing up like mushrooms in the night.

“It is - I am a bit different to what they are kind of used to, an Australian singer/songwriter who sounds a little country but isn't really country. Sounds indie rock but isn't really indie rock either. So it's interesting, but I think they generally dig what I am doing.”

They certainly dug what Pickering was laying down at last year’s SXSW showcase in Nashville, with his shows there snowballing into a semi-permanent move to the southern American city, which has a reputation that far outweighs its modest size.

“The vibe is that Nashville is very much like Brisbane and that's probably the reason why I found it easy to settle in there, it's got a really good indie music scene - there is a lot of great talent in Nashville, the bands and everything but the quality of songwriting and musicianship, everything is pretty off the scale. It's a real good place to kind of go and see music and be part of the scene.”

While the city hosted the world's most influential music industry showcase (with Australia donating literally a jumbo jet’s worth of attendees) Nashville has yet to outstretch its down-home bourbon bars and cowboy hats image. So has it been unfairly stigmatised?

“No there is that as well. Nashville is kind of renowned as the country music capital so there are a lot of honky tonk bars and tourist joints and things like that with cowboy hats but if you know where to go there are a lot of really good joints, the good songwriter joints.”

So it's no surprise really that Pickering found his spiritual home in such a city - with the quality on his latest offering 'Excuses Excuses' stacking up well against the best of them, particularly tracks like 'Ruby Ruby', 'Ghost City' and 'Honey' showcasing the singers undoubted musical chops, which sprung from a youth spent in regional Queensland with one ear on the ABC Radio.

“It was more being in the environment - we didn't really listen to any commercial AM radio at all when I was growing up. So my knowledge of commercial music was really restricted to what I saw on Rage and whatever the ABC played. The rest of it I got from my parent’s record collection, which was all stuff from the 60s and 70s and 80s.

“When Triple J went national I think it was in '94, I can remember when it happened because I can remember trying to find it and then found it on the dial and went to school the next day and said 'hey did you listen to Triple J' because it was Australia Day or something and they were like 'No we couldn't get it'. I was the only guy who I knew who could get it and for some reason I was getting it from Lismore; it was somehow getting over the mountains. The (frequency) from Warwick that we were supposed to be getting didn't work for anybody, they fixed it up like a year later. But for that first year I was the only one who was getting it.”

Ahead of the bell curve? Somethings haven't changed.

Chris Pickering plays X&Y Bar as part of the Big Sound showcase September 9, Bon Amici's in Toowoomba September 11, Set List @ Premiers Bar September 24, La Plaza on the Gold Coast September 25 and The Troubadour supporting Epicure September 26. ‘Excuses Excuses’ is out through Think Label/Fuse Music Group.