William Crighton: rise of a new bush balladeer

Ten original songs, full of intent and power, painting colourful images of the human condition. There is a darkness within, but also signs of a soul, alive and well and kicking.

Sitting in the Grand Junction Hotel in Maitland on a hot-as-hell summer day nursing a Coopers, Crighton, who now calls Bellbird, near Cessnock, home, talks about his headspace when the album began to gel in his mind about 18 months ago.

After several years of pushing hard, particularly overseas, to make a crust as a musician, he had come back to Australia and met with mixed success. Eventually he ended up back in his childhood stomping ground – south-west NSW. He and his wife and two young daughters were living in Burrinjuck. 

After six months of not playing a single note, not picking up a guitar, he was moved.

“Sometimes you need a jolt to be yourself,” he says. “I fully realised that when we moved to Burrinjuck. I didn’t really interact with anyone except my family. We would catch our own fish for dinner, do our own gardening. It was a good time. It is an Aboriginal spiritual place and you certainly get a good sense of that when you’re out there.”

The songs came pouring out of him, the bulk written within a couple of days. “Most of it was stream of consciousness,” he says.

The album, released last month through ABC Music, features the powerful Priest, a ballad about killing a paedophile priest (“he got what was coming to him, all the boys will understand” reads one phrase of the song).

And 2000 Clicks, dreaming about finding a way out of life in the Riverina (“we were kids in the back of a white centura, cold chisel records and long straight roads”).

There’s Riverina Kid, where a young boy takes his own life. And Woman Like You, hinting at emotional urges (“you should know before we walk down this track, I’d never treat a woman like you like that.”)

William’s wife Jules and brother Luke helped with the songwriting (both play in his band).

Crighton made a rough recording of the music and sent it off to his mate and mentor, Matt Sherrod, a renown musician in his own right (drummer for Crowded House, Beck, and others), for some input. Sherrod liked it and was in for the ride.

Crighton had met Sherrod in Nashville a few years ago, when another musician friend, David Labruyere (a session musician and longtime bass player with John Mayer), had invited Crighton to join him at a sushi restaurant for a birthday party for Sherrod’s wife Kelly. Crighton and Sherrod hit it off and two weeks later Crighton found himself working on some songs in Sherrod’s studio, Bone Yard Recordings, outside Nashville.

“The environment was different to anywhere I’d ever been,” Crighton recalls. “The way he worked was different to anybody. Subtle, but so inviting and open. Non-judgemental. No real rules. The only rule was to test ourselves.”

It changed Crighton’s direction then and there, even though it didn’t really bear fruit until Crighton landed in Burrinjuck.

After years of playing the game to team up with American producers and playing with countless musicians, Crighton found Sherrod’s approach to be refreshing. 

“He really encouraged me to go for what I had in my head at the time. He would really get behind it. He would see if the vision was going to work. If it wasn’t going somewhere, if he thought there was another route, he would speed up the tempo. He was subtle, inviting, to let go of anything that might constrain the creative process.”

Fast forward to last winter in Burrinjuck. Crighton asked Sherrod to come out from the US and play the new songs with him, and yes, record.

“It didn’t start out as a record,” Crighton says. “We were jamming a few things. I invited a few more friends. It developed into something more. We set up in my little house, brought in gear.”

During the same time, Central Coast producer Adrian Brown shot a video of the song, Woman Like You, in an old licorice factory that had been converted into a house in the Burrinjuck area. The song was recorded in one take and the video, which stars Crighton and his wife Jules, was recorded in a single take. The result is a surreal video, where Crighton seamlessly appears in various parts of the house while his wife is preparing to leave him.

“We did it all in a week and a half,” Crighton says of the recording session. Crighton spent until 3 in the morning preparing his house for the recording, then drove directly to Sydney airport where he picked up Sherrod. The only thing that slowed him up – he was so tired he couldn’t find his car in the airport for several hours.

Countless songs were left out, probably never to be heard again. The mood of the songs is very much a product of where Crighton was at the time, coming back to his roots, a rebirth of his own musical career with a bag full of stories that feel like the country he grew up in.

“To be isolated with your energy, you realise how powerful you are,” he says. “Know yourself who you are. Just getting on the track of knowing who you are. I probably won’t really know until the second before I die. But you can be on the path to being connected. It was a little thing inside me that enabled me to write these songs.”

At 30, Crighton has put on many, many musical miles. For seven years, from 2007 to 2014, he crisscrossed the US and China, playing music and coming close to getting the right music deal together. He was known as Clint Crighton, as Clint is his Christian name (William is his middle name). There are snippets of him on YouTube, playing on a rooftop in LA with Bob Dylan’s violin player Scarlet Rivera,  playing in an indie folk rock duo called Sounds from Earth on a Bondi balcony. Lots of hope, some hype, a lot of time meeting people and travelling.

“I was quite green,” he says of the American experience. “It felt good at the time, it just never hit home. I was involved in a lot of different projects. It was a good journey and I learned a lot. I left that part of me behind musically because it just didn’t feel like me anymore.”

One of the biggest lessons from living in the US: “Living there made me far more in touch with what it means to be an Australian. It really helped me discover that part of me.”

He’s always been a fan of John Williamson, chatted with him on more than one occasion. No wonder: Crighton’s own bush upbringing is as honest and good of a story as anything Williamson has ever written.

“I was born in Dubbo,” he says. “We moved to Ardlethan. The tin mine had just shut down. There were cheap fibro houses. My family had gone broke in Nyngan. They were starting again. My mother, grandmother, dad and dad’s brother all moved to Ardlethan. They got houses for $8000 each. We started hay baling. Later they got  a farm. Mum and dad got divorced. We stayed with mum, it was 1991.  And we travelled a lot. We moved up to Tumut and that area.

“Mum worked in the Oriental Hotel. Now, she’s an aged care nurse. She did a bunch of everything to make ends meet, as you did, raising two boys, who eat a lot. It was a tough gig being a single mum, just being out there.”

Singing came quite naturally to young William.

“The first memory I have of singing by myself for someone is singing to my pop when he was dying. I was six and used to sing Home Among the Gumtrees, Amazing Grace, The Old Rugged Cross and Michael Jackson’s Heal The World, as it had just come out.

“Mum and dad had just split and I was living in the caravan with dad next to nan and pop’s old fibro house out in Ardlethan.”

His nan taught him a lot about Jesus, not just the love but the dark side, too. “She’d talk about the end of the world quite a bit, the chip in the wrist and 666. I’ll always believe in the universal message of love that Jesus echoed, but for some reason the darker stuff is what I’d always be fixated on as a kid,” Crighton says. “For a while I was convinced I was going to hell for playing footy on Saturday.”

Last year Crighton and his wife and two girls, Olive, 6, and Abigail, 2, moved to the Hunter Valley to be closer to Jules’ family. While they live on a suburban block in Bellbird, they’ve worked hard to establish a garden for themselves (tomatoes, kale, pumpkin, capsicum, , beetroot, eggplant) and raise chickens. Crighton also works as a furniture removalist.

But he’s pushed on with his musical career, self funding the album and licensing it through ABC Music, which gave him full creative control. He’s toured with The Basics (Wally de Backer’s band) and recently played the Nannup folk fest in WA with his own band.

He’s been welcomed with open arms in the Hunter’s music scene, getting a key mainstage nighttime gig at the Dashville festival last year. “It’s so humbling, I feel so lucky to be accepted,” he says.

Crighton and his band will be playing at The Gum Ball in April and then hitting the road for a tour under Gum Ball sponsorship. There will be about nine musicians on the Gum Ball bus, with Matt Johnston opening the shows.

The tour will include a couple of public school shows and workshops in the Riverina. The band will play the Stag & Hunter on April 30.

With a break or two, Crighton may become commercially successful. His music certainly merits attention.

Regardless, he’s enjoying the musical space he’s in more than ever. “At this point I feel excited and ready to keep playing. The good thing I suppose: I found a place where I play and it’s fulfilling. I’m extremely  happy people enjoy it.”