After ten years of waltzing his Matilda all over the world, busking on street corners and playing in dingy Irish Pubs, in 2002, Luke O’Shea, the Prodigal Son, returned home to establish his own band ‘Medicine Wheel’ …. (click photo for more info) With their first single ‘No Day Like Today’ they were signed to ABC/Universal Music and were finalists in the 2003 Golden Guitars and Industry Mo Awards. From then on it’s been a wild roller coaster ride of national and international tours, rodeos, BnS’s major festivals and live television appearances. With a string of number one and top ten singles on national radio and Foxtels Country Music Channel, Luke O’Shea and Medicine Wheel have been four times finalists in the Australia wide Music Oz Awards as well as the Independent TIARAS winning ‘Best Band’ in 2007. With the release of their second album ‘Listen to the Words’, they were up for Best Australian Independent Band/Duo and Best Australian Independent Album of the year. With ten songs and four videos from the last two albums being featured on over twenty different major compilations, Luke O’Shea has well and truly cemented his name and reputation as a high quality professional within the Australian Country Music scene. After establishing his own record company ‘As U Wish’, in 2007 he was selected to perform at the Australian Music Festival in Nashville and was signed to the publishing giant Aristo Media/ Goodland Group who represent such artists as Toby Keith and Shania Twain and with the release of his third album, the aptly titled ‘Prodigal Son,’ at this years Tamworth Country Music festival, the sky literally is the limit.
After two years of waiting, like the concerned father waiting for his troubled, wild child son to return, Luke O’Shea has finally learnt his lesson and put his experiences to good, releasing his third album ‘Prodigal Son’ and thankfully, he is graciously being welcomed back home, with arms wide open.
Taking a step back from the high octane recordings of Medicine Wheel, Luke has deliberately slowed and simplified his new sound to allow the diverse characters and heart wrenching stories within his finely crafted songs, take flight.
Having carved a very respected name within the Australian country music circuit as ‘THE’ band for any occasion. Years of touring, BnS’s, Rodeos and thriving within the tough Aussie pub scene equipped Luke O’Shea & Medicine Wheel with the hard, pulsating edge to satisfy any late night crowd. However anyone familiar with the songs and lyrics of Luke O’Shea’s award winning music, will know that it is best experienced in a relaxed, cruising across the Nullarbor, listening zone, where the band unplugs… sits down… slows down… and magically delivers the song.
“Nothing is as ‘fun’ as driving a high performance rock band when a place is packed and going off! However, nothing comes close to the ‘satisfaction’ of connecting and eloping with a listening audience, regardless of its size, purely through the power of the song and in its often, raw delivery.” Says Luke, when asked of his change in style. “When you have these moments, something magic happens, something transcends, the audience feels it, the performers feel it and it somehow reminds everyone ‘why’ we all love music! Why we seek it out, why I write it, play it, labour over the craft of song writing and why it is so worthwhile!
If the full houses and standing ovations of last Tamworth Festival are any indication, he can rest assured other people are feeling the magic and it’s a good thing too, for it is from the characters he meets whist on the road and the stories of everyday people that Luke draws his passion and motivation for writing.
“Each story and song on this album can be traced back to a personal experience or from a conversation I’ve had with someone where a little bell inside me goes off and I know its a story I have to share. Says Luke, “Like the song ‘Shadow of a Cloud’ or as I call it, ‘The Ballad of Swan Hill,’ when a young man who was a fifth generation farmer from Swan Hill came up after a show in Deniliquin and talked about his father walking off the land due to the drought and the heartbreak of seeing hope fail. Or ‘Rosemaries Eyes’ the frustration, depth and beauty of the single mother, or the song ‘Maria’ where the heroine is “the girl in every town that all the boys would pass around”, not pretty or politically savvy topics, but real everyday people, real every day challenges and for me inspirational tales about how we can rise up out of the mess people often find themselves in.
“Bushranger”, Luke continues, “was inspired by a fella who was hitching down to Victoria to meet up with his family who were now forced to live with his aging mother after the Bank had foreclosed on his loan, taken away his farm and sold everything off in front of him. He was completely defeated and his options kept returning to suicide or robbing the bastard of a bank.”
Luke believes that fact is always stranger and more powerful than fiction. And you don’t have to dig too deep into anyone’s family history to find a great country song.
Annie O’Shea is one such song. “It was really hard for my Dad to hear that song about his Mum who I wanted to remember.” Luke says, “It was a remarkable time in Australia’s history and Annie O’Shea was a remarkable woman!”
“It came after visiting the old ruined family farm on the banks of the Namoi River up near Boggabri and something about the landscape and the solitude there really created such a clear image of this woman and her story had to be told.”
It is fairly well known that Luke has another full time profession ‘teaching’ at a local boys High School. Two of the subjects he teaches are Religion and History and it is fairly evident from the new albums title, the influence this has had on his music.
“One of the things I love doing with the class is getting the kids to dig a little deeper into the often well known biblical stories and having them discover a whole new interpretation that links directly to their lives.” Luke says, “Stories written thousands of years ago are still incredibly relevant to us today. The title track, Prodigal Son, comes from looking at this rebellious young kid understandably bored to death with the farm and attracted to fast chariots and faster women. We are all familiar with the story but I just wanted to take a closer look at this fella now that all is forgiven, the chores are still mundane and farm is still boring and the memories of the fun he’d once had would be screaming at him to sneak off again.”
‘Covet Thy Neighbours Wife’, is another spin on the well known tale of David and Goliath. As Luke says, “King David had it all except the wife of a good mate and the temptation for forbidden fruit is as old as man himself, but hopefully, if we can learn from the mistakes of others we can certainly save ourselves and others, a lot of grief.”
When asked about the catchy tune ‘How Well Have You Loved’ Luke says “it came from a random but provocative prayer that somehow ended up on my desk titled, ‘Questions God Wont Ask You’ which went along the lines of not wanting to know what kind of car you had but how many people you gave a lift to. Not how grand your house was but how you treated the people within it etc. Especially today we can fill our lives up with all kinds of stuff, which is fine, but the bottom line is always going to be, how did you use that stuff to help or care for people, how well have you loved? In saying that, I didn’t want it to be too heavy, or depressing, so getting in touch with my Celtic roots, I attempted to turn it into a wild hoopnaholla!
Not forgetting those who have gone before and forged a path so wide and well marked that countless others have been able to follow with relative ease, Midnight Train pays respect to the freakish roster of artists that belonged to the stable of Sam Philips at Sun Studios, Memphis Tennessee. “After reading a book titled ‘Lost Highway’ Luke says, I gained an insight into the importance and vision of Sam Phillips on modern day music. He’s passion and ability to find, sign and guide the most influential music artists has given the world an incredible gift.”
With the song ‘Good Thing Its Raining’ Luke says “Sometimes in the studio we have a saying that when a person is getting wayyyyy to pedantic or particular about something that you can disappear up your own a#@hole, Good Thing Its Raining’ is the most simple, short and sweet track on the album, mainly to give the listeners brain a rest and funny enough its the track people often request.”
‘Rig’ is a big haunting track that places the listener in the seat of a big 18 wheeler on a long, lonely haul. “I have a mate who used to drive a truck from Tamworth to Sydney then back again five times a week” explains Luke, “which exhausts me just thinking about it and the more you speak to truck drivers, especially in the country areas, you realise just how much time on the road is required, how much strain it can put on a family and just how tough and essential their gig really is.”
The final two tracks Pride of Erin and Motel Room were co written with long time mate and guitarist Phil Doublet. “Phil is an incredible musician with a gift of melody and the first time he played me the tune to Pride of Erin, alarm bells went off! As a songwriter you long for a melody that creates and paints a beautiful picture well before a word has been put to paper. Be it my Irish ancestry, the three four beat or the fact that my grandparents met at a country ball, my parents met at a dance and my wife and I danced the Pride of Erin at our school graduation, I really wanted to take a personal story and make it as big as the universe as ‘we all spin around together’.
The song ‘Motel Room’ came from, you guessed it, a motel room. “Both Phil and I were in Nashville in yet another dodgy Motel that are literally the same all over the world. Explains Luke. “It’s the feel, the same but different vibe of Motel rooms everywhere that drives people who are on the road for extended periods of time batty. Hedonism and temptation is the break from the boredom of repetition ‘but that Bible in the drawer holds the promise of so much more’. Phil captured the feel beautifully and the words wrote themselves.”
The album ‘Prodigal Son’, the distributor ‘One Stop Country’, being launched at this years Tamworth Festival, everyday at the Tamworth Services Club, 3:30 – 6:30pm. Luke and his good mates that make up Medicine Wheel are ready to deliver what promises to be an experience. Mature music from a person who knows who he is. The Prodigal son has come home.
