Fully immersed in rehearsal for his forthcoming massive 18 country international tour, Australian singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Xavier Rudd releases his tenth studio album Jan Juc Moon, out now.
The wind blows strong through Jan Juc Moon. It’s a recurring image that speaks of wide-open space and the awesome natural elements that shape it; a force greater than us, but ours to harness if we take the time to learn, reflect and respect its ways.
Title track ‘Jan Juc Moon’ was written ten years ago at a difficult time in Rudd’s life. “At the start of Jan Juc Moon what you hear is my son’s heartbeat in the womb; my one year old, Jundi. I recorded his heartbeat and that runs right through the song so it’s kind of like a full circle. That’s why I called this record Jan Juc Moon. To me if feels like a bit of a follow up to “Spirit Bird” in some way”, says Xavier Rudd.
The album’s initial single “Stoney Creek” instantly re-connected Rudd’s global fan base. Followed by “We Deserve to Dream” last September and last month’s
“Ball and Chain [Feat J-MILLA] these three preceding tracks have accrued over 12M global streams and continue to gain momentum. “Ball and Chain” basically relates to our plight in society. Depending on our ball and chain, depending on what we’re dragging, what our history is, what our bloodlines are, where we’ve come up from…this is what we carry. I was weighing my options for who to get on it and there was this song by J-MILLA that really touched me,” My People”. So I invited him up”.
“It hit me last year when I started to write Stoney Creek”, the Australian roots troubadour says of the album’s first exhilarating single, a rolling acoustic balm of a song that finds refuge in the simple blessings of life in a world gone crazy. “ We were on a trip to the Cape and the wind was blowing too hard to take the tinnie out to the island…As I contemplated everything in my life and what was happening in the world there was a strong south-easter blowing, all the time. It felt like a wind of change, literally, in so many ways.”
The wide-open space Xavier found himself during this album’s creative process somehow intersected with the great COVID silence – both beyond his control and curiously in-sync. “I’d planned to take a year off anyway, the first time in 20 years I hadn’t done an overseas circuit,” he says. “I had a chance to reset and change a few things around, to reassess where I was at, musically and practically. I’ve been able to experiment with some new ideas and new sounds…”
“Dawn to Dusk” for me is probably the most special song on the album. My nephew came up to our place and he’d just lost one of his friends, by his own hand. Fifteen years old. Abe…a Yamatji kid raised on Wadawurrung country. It was so sad. Left a huge hole in that family. It really moved me, I was working on that song and it sorta took shape after that and I dedicated it to his memory, with his parents’ permission. So it touches on that tragedy of youth suicide; the feeling of falling and there’s no one to catch you.”
“I feel like with this record, I’ve been able to be really creative and I was excited about what I was making just because I had the time,” Xavier says.. “I’ve had the chance to do it all myself, which I haven’t done since Spirit Bird in terms of instrumentation and stuff, so I’ve been getting a bit trippy with an analog synthesizer…”
“When I first got successful I was surprised, because I thought what I was doing was more like art,” he says. “I was experimenting with didges and gaffa-taping them to chairs and I always had this real love for wood and the tones of wood, so it was all very earthy.”
“I’ve been doing this long enough to realise that for some people, what I’m saying in my music really resonates,” he says. “You know, all of our ancestors around the planet have come from some form of struggle and we carry that, all of us, years on. We’ve got stuff to heal. And I think music is the greatest medicine on the planet.”
JAN JUC MOON ALBUM UK TOUR DATES 2022
For more info or to book tickets go to https://xavierrudd.com/
21st Sept Academy, Bristol
24th Sept Rock City, Nottingham
25th Sept Ritz, Manchester
28th Sept O2 Shepherds Bush Empire, London
