On tour: Ian Moss has a passion for making music that never runs dry

Even harder to believe is that the man revered as one of Australia's greatest rock guitarists watches tutorials on YouTube to improve his musicianship.

"For me, there's still more to achieve. I still want to get better as a guitar player," he says.

"I want to get better as a singer and I keep working on those things. These days we're fortunate enough - and I wish we had it back when I started learning - to be able to jump on YouTube and ... get lessons in any style of guitar and just keep adding new stuff to your repertoire and that's something I do with great keenness."

This is the same Ian Moss who Cold Chisel bandmate Don Walker once described as "the most gifted musician I've ever seen" and who others laud as the best rock guitarist in the nation. But, yes, Moss still wants to improve after more than 50 years in the industry, starting with Cold Chisel back in 1973 when he answered an ad for a guitarist in a shop window in Adelaide.

"Well, yeah," he says, like the concept is no-brainer.

"Firstly, those things [the plaudits] aren't true. What is true is that I keep trying to be [the best]. That helps me keep up the drive - keep moving, keep trying new things."

Moss is currently on his extended River Runs Dry tour. This year's dates kicked off on Thursday night at the Country Music Festival in Tamworth. He plays the Red Hot Summer Tour at Roche Estate in the Hunter Valley on April 6, and his solo acoustic tour stops off at Lizotte's on May 24 and 25.

The epic tour - which started in October last year and continues until June this year - has been a mix of big festival gigs and the solo acoustic gigs. And that suits Moss just fine.

"I love doing them both - having my cake and eating it too," he says, with a laugh.

"The show will be solo acoustic and for me it's really important to make sure the show is well-rounded. Make every song count. Of course, [I'll be playing] Bow River, Tucker's Daughter, My Baby, Telephone Booth - songs like that will be in it.

"I do have a brand new album out called Rivers Run Dry so there will be a few songs from that going into the set. As well as a couple of good old blues standards, which I love doing. Songs like Georgia On My Mind and Cry Me a River."

So how does he go performing such a big, sing-it-out-loud anthem such as Tucker's Daughter in a solo acoustic show?

"It still resonates because you're starting off with great material," Moss says.

"It's still going to work no matter how you do it - with a band, an orchestra, solo, on a piano, on a mandolin."

That was something he learnt in the days of Cold Chisel, the Aussie band that started as an Adelaide pub rock act and ended up in the ARIA Hall of Fame, their songs part of the Australian consciousness and experience.

But there was a lot of hard work and grind to create a classic song such as Flame Trees or Khe Sanh and Cold Chisel's pianist and chief songwriter, Don Walker, was the master of that.

"Way back in the old days when Cold Chisel was just starting, it was Don Walker who was ever so pedantic about making sure not only every last word, but every last syllable counted," Moss says.

"Everything had to earn its place in that song if you wanted a song to work and be popular, for not just today and not just tomorrow, but for the next 50 years."

Those are lessons that can't be taught on YouTube.

River Runs Dry is Moss's eighth studio album. His first, Matchbook, released in 1989, was a massive hit, winning five ARIAs including Best Australian Album, Australian Song of the Year for Tucker's Daughter and Best Australian Album. Moss was also named Best Australian Male Artist.

Thirty-four years later, Moss is still producing music and says the word everyone keeps using to describe River Runs Dry is "eclectic".

"People are talking about how different it all is, how every song is different to the next, but they all fit on the one record," he says.

"It doesn't bother me [what people say]. I just want to make sure I'm happy with all the songs. For me, the stories, the lyrics, are the most important.

"So, with this album, as with the last album, Ian Moss, which I released in March 2018, there is a very strong input from the writing point of view. But I have got some great co-writers, people like Troy Cassar-Daley and Lucy DeSoto, for example. There's some terrific stories.

"The title track, Rivers Run Dry, Lucy and I started writing that for a very special close childhood mate of mine from my hometown of Alice Springs who back in the beginning of COVID managed to overdo it on the cigarettes and wasn't looking after his health and had a massive stroke and at the commencement of the song, we weren't sure if he was going to pull through at all. It was pretty dark. So that's written for him."

Earlier this month, The Rivers Run Dry - Deluxe Edition was released containing six previously unreleased live tracks recorded at Sydney's Enmore Theatre on the tour last August.

Among the musicians playing on some of those tracks was Moss's 20-year-old son Julian, who has a stirring, deep voice. He and his dad do a duet on Rivers Run Dry of the Stevie Wonder song Blame it on the Sun.

Music is something Julian is pursing as a career in Sydney, where Moss has lived since 1976.

"Listen, I'm going to have to do something about soundproofing. He's in the next room and he gets stuck into writing and recording new material every day," Moss says.

So, as he looks to turn 69 in March and 70 next year, Moss says he is happy to still be performing.

"With this whole industry, even when we started, we had no idea whether we were going to make it or not," he says.

"So you just play it day by day and pray that it works because most of us never got a degree or a trade that we could always fall back on. It was either this was going to work or ... sink or swim, boys.

"But that's what drove you and made us work hard and keep coming up with songs."