专辑简介

‘Rising River’ is a song steeped in the murder ballad tradition. It’s all there – the desperate man seeking vengeance, a bloody reckoning, a pursuit and the eventual suicide to avoid capture. The lilting melody, delicate harmonies and fiddle highlights serve as counterpoint to the violence of the story, as we find ourselves singing along as we register what is actually happening to the characters. It’s a delicious counterpoint that is as old as bluegrass itself delivered in a thoroughly contemporary Australian voice.

Storytelling and a sense of place is as important to Nick as the music, and the genesis of this song came to him in a hut in the Snowy Mountains of NSW. The wild high country was home to many a man on the run, and many who came seeking a future and were driven to an early death by the harsh terrain and climate and the loneliness and isolation. Their ghosts can certainly be felt out there on a chilly moonlit night, and the echoes of our wild colonial past — which in turn contain the memories of our brutal history — are palpable in ‘Rising River’. Payne himself prefers to call the song a ‘cautionary tale’ rather than a murder ballad – after all, it is 2016 and hunting down a lover has contemporary resonance which he had very much in mind as he wrote the song.