THIS BUD’S FOR YOU

Songs have always come thick and fast to Brisbane-based truck-driver Bud Rokesky, but for many years they remained untouched in his head as he focussed on his growing family and the many attendant responsibilities he faced as a husband and a father.

By Steve Bell

Yet since recently being given the opportunity to put these songs which had accumulated in his head down on tape in the studio, the 35-year-old singer-songwriter has been getting great traction with his authentic country music aesthetic and songs whose heartfelt lyrics drip with hardwon life experience. In a short period of time he’s already earned comparisons to lauded country forebears like Johnny Cash and Townes Van Zandt, as well as treading the boards at festivals such as Gympie Muster, Dashville, Queenscliff and Groundwater. These songs were obviously coming to Rokesky for a reason, it just took him a while to realise it. “I don’t know if I’d call it a passion, it’s more of a compulsion,” he reflects on his songwriting. “Many, many times I’d think, ‘This is just getting in the way, I need to be focussing on family life, home life - even extended family life and all that stuff - and here I am and I can’t get this bloody music out of my head!’ “I never really got to play any shows before COVID at all, I was really just a songwriter. It’s only been pretty-much post-COVID that I’ve been playing shows. I just loved the songwriting - it gets the emotions out of you and you get to deal with stuff. “Like I said it’s a compulsion - you get this whole story just delivered into your brain in a split second out of nowhere, and it just sits in there making a ruckus until you do something about it. You’ve got to get it out. You’ve got to get it out and once you do you feel amazing from it, and then you show a couple of mates and if they love it then it’s the best feeling in the world, and then I’m done”. Fortunately one of those who’d heard and liked this growing stash of songs was Alex Henriksson, a close friend since the pair had met during Rokesky’s childhood spent on a 170-acre property just outside the small Queensland town of Imbil. Once Henriksson started a new label Rainbow Valley Records with business partner Matt Corby he quickly signed up his talented mate, ushering into existence Rokesky’s excellent debut album Outsider. “None of it was recorded - it was all just sitting in my head in a constant loop - so getting it out has been definitely a massive relief in a way, just clearing that headspace,” the singer admits. “As soon as we finished recording the album I think I wrote about six songs in a week, because there was a bit more space for these new ones to come through instead of me just hanging on to the old ones. “I guess in terms of the country sound it’s just that my lifestyle lends itself to that - it’s most relatable to where my priorities are at this time in my life. They always have been - I always wanted to have a family when I was pretty young, I always wanted to be a young dad, which is a bit weird to some - but that was my priorities and how I wanted to live my life, and that’s what I ended up doing. That’s why I never really chased music when I was younger, because it wasn’t really a priority. “And growing up in the small rural town country music was everywhere, for sure. The kids on the bus would make mixtapes and try to get the driver to play them, and while it might sometimes be Blink-182 or something random I was definitely exposed to a lot of country music that way, and the blokes in town just lived and breathed it. It wasn’t necessarily even the music but just the way they lived - it was sometimes like I was growing up around country songs without even hearing them.” And while Outsider contains some beautiful paeans to family life, there’s also an undercurrent of living on life’s peripheries that traces back to his time spent growing up out bush. “There’s a lot of things relating to the ‘outsider theme’ but they do go back to those times,“ Rokesky tells. “We lived about a sixminute drive from town - although there wasn’t always a car so it was a 45-minute walk - and the town itself only had about 300 people in it anyway, so I guess there was a close-knit thing going on in town and even though it wasn’t very big you were still really removed from that, even though we weren’t that far out geographically. “Then there was the isolation of the property itself and all of that, and my parents weren’t really rural types - they’d moved out there from the city - so I definitely felt like an outsider in a lot of ways back then”.