Tom Mac is a country music artist from south-east Queensland who has extensive experience as both a performing and recording artist, whose story – as I found out during this interview – has many strands to it, all of them weaving together to form the artist who is now releasing the songs he’s always wanted to bring to people, including his latest single, ‘Nomadic’.

Mac was in his car when we spoke, with his guitar, Maton ECW80 cutaway, in the back seat, so I decided to start the conversation there, and he certainly had some stories to tell about it! However, Mac’s first instrument was piano, which he started playing at eight, encouraged by his mother, who was a primary school music teacher who also introduced him into musicals at school, including Grease and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat. The experience in musicals stands him in very good stead as a performer today, in large part because of the singing involved and the confidence to do it. As he says, ‘A lot of people can sing, they just don’t know that they can.’

By his late teens, though, Mac wanted to play Bruce Springsteen and Bon Jovi – and also play an instrument that was of his own choosing. And ‘Stairway to Heaven’ was the first song he learned to play on guitar. 

Mac started playing gigs – lots of gigs – and developed his repertoire of covers, before moving into original music, and his experiences there were not straightforward. He released music in a genre other than country music, under a different name, but it wasn’t the direction he really wanted to be in. It’s only in the last couple of years that he’s started releasing country songs, and the latest of those is ‘Nomadic’, which started life as a riff Mac heard on social media – performed by a busker in Byron Bay – and became a song inspired by some of the many adventures he’s had, travelling around Australia and performing.

Listen to ‘Nomadic’ on Apple Music

Listen to ‘Nomadic’ on Spotify

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