3 x time ARIA Award and 11 x Golden Guitar winner Shane Nicholson released his new album Living In Colour along with the official video for his Top 15 Country single ‘And You Will Have Your Way.’ Living In Colour is Shane Nicholson in different hues: trusting and cynical, father and friend, sometimes buoyant and in love, beginning to have faith in the world, other times struggling to make sense of the same world that can rip your heart right out. If you love country, you will love Shane Nicholson.
Shane is a man remaking himself constantly. “That’s exactly me to a T. I guess in some ways that’s good: I have more positive days than I used to, and that probably spills over into songs now and then,” he says. “It’s been a pretty sad couple of years to be frank, losing one of my best mates to suicide, grandparents, my partner lost her dad, my manager lost his brother, a few close industry friends. And then in the first Covid lockdown there was this crazy spate of musician suicides in Australia, people that we’d all known.”
You can hear the stresses and anxieties in frank and open songs like Simple Man and The High Price Of Surviving and feel the brutal truth of a damaging relationship in Ain’t Been Loved. But it’s not the full story. The “internal struggle to stay happy” was balanced by his partner, his kids, his house and studio and Shane will tell you that “I feel lucky”. After all, even though he claims in one song here that “I can’t write a love song”, there’s a lot of it about. “There’s more love creeping into the songs but maybe that’s the 40s,” he grins.
Living In Colour was written and recorded in Shane’s Central Coast studio pretty much on his own due to Covid restrictions, while also producing 4-5 other artists projects at the same time. “I just found it fun to be doing it myself. It was sort of a return to the old days, my teenage years, when I had my first Pro-Tools set up on old computer and I was making demos and putting songs together, learning about the mechanics of production in a bedroom in Brisbane in my parents’ house,” he says excitedly. “I haven’t really done that since then, being able to sit there by myself and pick up instrument after instrument. It was mostly me and a bottle of whiskey into the night, that was it.”
Help came at the beginning and the end of the process, with Josh Schuberth recording the drums in his own studio in the Blue Mountains, over which Shane laid all the other parts, and then “comrade in arms” and fellow producer Matt Fell adding his tweaks to the finished product.
Shane’s forthcoming Living In Colour album tour dates have been rescheduled, you can catch him playing on the below dates. You can catch him tonight though performing songs from the new album on Facebook Live from 7pm AEST.
Friday Oct 8 - Hardys Bay Club NSW Sunday Oct 17 - Lizotte's Newcastle, NSW Friday Dec 3 - Murray Delta Junkie Joint Goolwa, SA Saturday Dec 4 - The Barn at Wombat Flat, SA Sunday Dec 5 - Trinity Sessions, Adelaide, SA Wednesday Jan 19 - Tamworth Regional Entertainment Centre, Tamworth, NSW Wednesday Jan 19 - The Pub, Tamworth, NSW (evening) Thursday Feb 3 - Live at Bundy Hall, Bundalaguah, VIC Friday Feb 4 - Macedon Railway Hotel, Mt Macedon, VIC Saturday Feb 5 - Memo Music Hall, St Kilda, VIC Sunday Feb 6 - Caravan Club, Archies Creek, VIC Friday Feb 11 - Factory Floor, Marrickville, NSW Saturday Feb 12 - Bowral Bowling Club, NSW
Nicolson’s storied career started in the late 1990s with his first Brisbane based band Pretty Violet Stain. With a solo career launch in 2002 with the release of ‘It’s a Movie’, he’s since followed up with nine albums, including 2015 ARIA Award winning ‘Hell Breaks Loose’ and 2 x ARIA Award winning albums with Kasey Chambers - the platinum selling, ARIA No.1 album ‘Rattlin’ Bones’ and ‘Wreck and Ruin’. With 11 x CMAA Golden Guitar awards under his belt including 2021 APRA Song of the Year for ‘The High Price of Surviving’, Nicolson has also been recognised internationally with 2 nominations for USA Americana Music Association awards. As a seasoned producer, Nicholson has been busy working with Alex Lloyd, Tori Forsyth, Beccy Cole, Michael Waugh and Camille Trail.
Nicholson is a rare talent who has bridged the gap between Alt-country and the mainstream. He crafts his songs seamlessly and can wrap up difficult subject matters with music of uplifting beauty and charm. He has released 4 songs from Living In Colour – The High Price Of Surviving, Harvest on Vinyl, Life Ain’t Fine and his latest single, And You Will Have Your Way’ which captures Nicholson’s charismatic talent for writing striking songs that pay tribute to the unpredictability of human experience.