http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=zncKx4273zw
Mandy Nolan
Lee Kernaghan is one of Australia’s most prolific music artists with two million records sold, 28 Golden Guitars, 33 #1 singles, and has twice been named the Country Music Hit Maker of the Decade in 2000 and 2010. Twenty years after the release of his first album, The Outback Club,Lee is back stronger than ever with his new release, Beautiful Noise.[/ITALIC]
Not much slows him down.
‘I don’t get fatigued these days because I have got tour smart,’ he says. ‘Back in the mid 90s I was on tour nonstop and I didn’t take any breaks and I toured hard and played hard and partied hard, and I always felt burnt. These days I’ll do touring in a block of dates. Of course I still play hard and party hard!’ jokes Kernaghan.
Kernaghan believes it is his songwriting that has helped set him apart from the pack.
‘It’s so easy to miss the mark,’ he says. ‘I missed it for a long time, then I came to the realisation that I needed to write songs about my own life and my own experiences and keep it real. I had resisted that before because I didn’t think it was interesting enough to write about. The first song was Boys from the Bush and nothing has changed since then; it opened up so many doors to write new songs.
‘Generally the inspiration comes when you least expect; often it’s when you are talking to people after a show. I was talking to a bunch of kids in Canberra after a show and they told me they’d come down from the hills from their farm and the show had been gold so I wrote a song called Gold – it’s that simple – it goes hand in hand with country music. As George Jones once said: ‘country music is three chords and the truth!’
‘I have always felt like the truth in the storytelling is what gives songs strength and makes them resonate, I have always tried to keep each album autobiographical. I have an inbuilt inclination to accentuate the positive; I believe in the law of attraction and I try and put the positive element into my music.’
Kernaghan is not your average country boy. He is a seeker of deeper things. ‘I follow Deepak Chopra. I got to meet Louise Haye a few years ago, and have been very inspired by Eckhart Tolle. I don’t want to beat people over the head with my beliefs but you have to wonder where the music is coming from. I give thanks to a higher power for that. It is an absolute gift. It’s definitely a spiritual process.’
Kernaghan believes that it’s his spiritual beliefs that give him such a rock solid foundation.
‘I think it’s helped give me balance in life. It’s always a constant battle between the material and the spiritual side of your life, and you want the spiritual to dominate more than the material – life throws all kind of different things to you so it’s nice to have those beliefs to fall back on. For me meditation is one of the greatest gifts – one of my missions is to mediate more, I try and do it morning and night.’
The life changing moment for Lee Kernaghan happened in a North Bondi bookshop when he picked up a copy of Autobiography of a Yogi.
‘Nothing was the same after that! It changed my life.’
And guess what, Kernaghan still writes songs about utes.
Ain’t that something!
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