I’ve been able to experiment with some new ideas and new sounds…” “I had a chance to reset and change a few things around, to reassess where I was at, musically and practically. “I’d planned to take a year off anyway, the first time in 20 years I hadn’t done an overseas circuit,” he says. The wide-open space he’d found himself in - the great COVID silence - was both beyond his control and curiously in-sync.

It felt like a wind of change, literally, in so many ways.”

“We were on a trip north 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 literally a strong southeaster blowing, all the time. “It hit me last year when I started to write Stoney Creek,” the Australian roots journeyman says of the album’s first, exhilarating single: a rolling acoustic balm of a song that finds refuge in the simple blessings of rest, companionship and belonging in a world gone crazy. It’s a recurring image that speaks of wide-open space and the awesome natural elements that shape it: a force far greater than us, but ours to harness if we take the time to learn, reflect and respect its ways. The wind blows strong though Xavier Rudd’s tenth album.

Xavier rudd storm boy youtube