A Late Start, A Small Town in Victoria, and Eleven Story Songs
Bright acoustic guitar, a harmonica line, and a voice that sounds like it is talking to you across a bar table. That is how Tales From The Greenhills Tavern opens, and it sets the terms for everything after it. The album is the debut from Australian songwriter TB Whiteside, who did not start playing until his late twenties. It then took him another twenty five years to finish a record of his own songs.
You can listen to our full playlist which contains the artist’s music, and know more about the artist’s work by scrolling down the page.
Who These Eleven Story Songs Are For And Why They Travel Well
The eleven tracks here are built around stories rather than hooks, and Whiteside is upfront about that being the point. “I think with most of my songs, the fans won’t have to do too much interpreting, as they are mostly story songs,” he told Illustrate Magazine. Indeed, in the same interview he described his own taste as a liking for all sorts of genres, for contrast, for light and shade, and for happy and sad sitting in the same record. “I like stories,” he said.
You can hear where that came from. As a teenager he started on Queen, drawn to their acoustic side, and then heard Steve Earle. “The mandolin playing against heavy rock drums hooked me, and then came the story in the song,” he said of Copperhead Road. From there he worked back through Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, John Prine and Johnny Cash. Consequently that lineage is audible across the record.
What The Tracklist Actually Does
The running order follows that influence closely. For instance, First World Problem Blues is the funny one, a bluesy list of modern complaints. Smithy is about a father who is always out on the road, carried on harmonica and twangy guitars. Meanwhile From Nothing Comes Something is a mellow folk-rock piece about surfaces and what sits under them. Goodbye then closes the album on lost love with the production pulled right back. The opener, Just Singing A Song, credits Eva and Elsa alongside him on vocals.
So the listener this is aimed at is the one who follows the words. If you keep Steve Earle, John Prine or Guy Clark in regular rotation, the register here will be familiar. Otherwise the songs still work anyway, because Whiteside writes them to be understood cold. “I try and write them in a way that they can be related to, no matter where you are in the world,” he said.
The Early Response Came In From Four Continents
That last ambition is worth testing against what actually happened. Obscure Sound called the album “a consistently engaging folk album” and “a striking debut”, picking out the flourishing acoustics on the opener and the humour in the writing. Similarly, Lost In The Manor placed him in a singer-songwriter round-up in the UK.
Moreover, the coverage did not stay in English. Extravafrench built a French piece around the twenty five year wait, while Brazilian outlet Music For All wrote it up in Portuguese. For a self-funded debut from a town most readers have never heard of, that spread is the real result.
GetMusic.News curator team: “The reason this record keeps finding new readers is that it does not need a scene to explain it. A song about a father who is never home lands the same in Melbourne, Manchester or Sao Paulo, and Whiteside writes like he knows that.”
The Community Around TB Whiteside, From Rainbow To Everywhere Else
The town is Rainbow, out in the Wimmera Mallee country of western Victoria, and Whiteside puts its population at about 500. He describes it as “a five-hour drive to the nearest major cities (Melbourne or Adelaide), or a one-hour drive to the outback.” Music came late for him, arriving only after he retired from football in his late twenties and, in his words, went “looking for a hobby that required less visits to the hospital.” The album itself was cut at The Barn Recording Studio in Queensland. He files the results under a genre of his own invention: Mallee Roots and Blues.
He is direct about what finishing the album cost him. “Making this album was a massive undertaking for me in every sense of the word. Financially, logistically, emotionally, creatively,” he said. Asked separately about the hardest thing he had been through and about his proudest moment, he gave the same answer both times: creating this album. Nowadays what he seems to value most is the response he can see. “People have laughed and people have shed a tear. That’s pretty much life in a nutshell,” he said.
Where To Hear TB Whiteside And The Rest Of The Catalogue
The album sits on Bandcamp for anyone who prefers to buy it directly. His artist page meanwhile runs through Spotify, Apple Music and SoundCloud. Beyond that, his recent single Talking Green Energy Blues is on Spotify too, and it is a reasonable place to start if the full album feels like a lot at once.
Whiteside posts across his YouTube channel, Instagram and Facebook. Finally, everything else he keeps current is collected on his Linktree.
