RHYECE O’NEILL

Writer: Keeley Thompson

Photographer: Josephine Cubis, Rebecca Cunningham & Kim Rudner

She closes her laptop with a hot sigh. Shift Ended: 11AM. What was meant to be a full day's pay, cut short due to “organisational requirements”. Met with the opportunistic joy of a free schedule and the depression-era taste of Mi Goreng for a week, her mind struggles to decide which fate to actualise. 

All of a sudden she hears her boyfriend's Ute shiver, then roar. He tells her to put on some comfy boots and confirms he’s packed everything. Keys, phone, beer, ciggies and a bottle of icy water. Check.

After about five darts and 40 minutes of driving, rural backyards sprawl in a scale that would have Brisbane City “parklands” trembling in fear. They pull into an old, probably asbestos-ridden servo for a quick piss-and-snack-stop. You know you’re on the road when you trade the usually circular ‘dogs eye’ (aka. Meat pie) with the more trustworthy, rectangular “Traveller” pie. 

Looking at the horizon, she forgets about her 9-5 woes. Usually imposing Meriton towers now appear dwarfish, replaced by towering Myrtle trees and so…much…fucking…Lantana. Entering the forest, she turns the music down to listen to the dance of the trees and the whisper of the birds, a needed reprieve from head noise and the sound of customers complaining about wait times. 

After passing over a muddy, orange tinted incline to see the pale blue waters of a well-fed weir, the pair hop out for a destination-less wander. Roughly thirty minutes later, they decide it's probably time to head back home despite their shared, but unspoken desire to get "stuck" here overnight.

Travelling a buck 40 down the 22 back home with the music cranked and a camera roll full of cool mushrooms, she breathes a sigh of relief. Future Mi Goreng dinners aside, she’s satisfied.

This is Rhyece O’Neill.

A bluesy, port-wine soaked rock-n-roll poet, Rhyece O’Neill traverses the Australian countryside both lyrically and sonically. With his unflinching social commentary, immersive lyricism and gravelly tone, his music is best enjoyed in solitude, but played loud. 

A chefs kiss combination of grunt and geniality, Rhyece O’Neill makes music that tastes like macadamia nuts cracked with an old brick and feels like the way your favourite, busted hat fits comfortably on your noggin. 

KEELEY: Hey Rhyece! How have you been?

RHYECE: I'm going to go back to work next week, so I've just been chilling the last couple of days with the knowledge that I'm going back to the tools. I'm just like, I just chill out, play some tunes, sleep in. Though, a sleep in for me is like 6: 30. But yeah, I’ve been allowing myself to just chill the fuck out, so I've just been doing nothing. I ordered a part for my Valiant, read a book and scrolled through Instagram. Just wasting my life, you know?

KEELEY: Your Album “Journey to Bunya” came out late last year. How did that come about?

RHYECE: To be honest it wasn't my idea. It was actually Christen Driscoll of Full Flower Moon Band. I guess you could say it was all his fault [laughs]. He pulled me aside one night when we're on the piss and he suggested that I work with Jack (JB Patterson). At that point I wasn't friends with Jack and I didn't really know him other than that I was a fan of his music.

And then of course, I met Jack and I heard what was coming out of his studio, which wasn't much at that point. He hadn't really done a lot. He'd only just started to record bands. So he was just sort of getting it off the ground. But based on his own solo stuff, I was like, yeah, his records sound amazing. I'd never really worked with a producer before because I'm a bit of a control freak. 

I was interested to work with Jack by having him suggest some things and to have his input on the album. I got to know him a bit before we went into the studio, and we'd done a few gigs together and had a few boozy, bender-y sort of sessions. 

It felt pretty organic really. 

KEELEY: How was it collaborating with someone else to create the album? 

RHYECE: I was open to Jack taking the lead, and he did. It was cool being in his studio that he'd built with his methodology, and I wanted to get his sound as much as I wanted him to produce the songs. But, it became apparent fairly early on in the session that I'm a bit more ADD or whatever in the studio and I think Jack sort of had to adjust to that. It was cool, I essentially stepped into his world and he into mine. 

It was more like he joined my band for a week, and he became part of the gang as an equal member who had a say in the music. Because whenever I play with people, I play with them because I respect them. 

KEELEY: What was the inspiration or idea behind the album? 

RHYECE: I was sort of working towards some kind of mongrel Australian interpretation of the Great American Songbook, I suppose. I wanted to use those old folk songs to tell Australian colonial stories of what sort of went down here. The song Jandamarra also came from a bit of healthy (internal) competition because I’d heard a song Paul Kelly had written about him (Jandamarra) and I thought “I can do better than that”. 

I didn't really have an overarching sort of political statement that I wanted to make. I am a man of the left, I have been since I was a kid. I'm a trade unionist, and I'm a left-winger, a Marxist, anti-capitalist, of sorts. 

I've never really considered it to be a concept album, because generally I despise the idea of concept albums, because they're usually associated with bands like Genesis. But, in hindsight, it probably is a bit of a concept album. 

KEELEY: Do you think that your travels have influenced you as a person and then has that had a knock-on effect to your music?

RHYECE: Oh certainly. This album wouldn't have happened for one. I wrote most of the songs on the road when I came to Melbourne at the start of the pandemic and learnt a lot of the stories that I talk about in the album from stories that I heard along the road. 

For example, Galilee Basin Blues (Which Side Are You On?) was inspired by the Wangan and Jagalingou strike out at the Adani mine. I drove out to it not long after they began, when they blocked the road and lit a big fire in the middle of the road. 

I wanted this album in particular to sound like a bit of a road trip or a journey. The album’s called Journey to Bunya after all. That’s kind of the litmus test for a lot of my music though - “do they sound good at a high speed?”

KEELEY: There’s that whole ‘anything except for country’ trope that goes around in the music industry. How do you find it existing within the sphere of the ‘country’ genre and do you have any thoughts on the state of it? 

RHYECE: It's particularly terrible in this country. On the one hand, you've got the establishment country music, which is very much lining up with the establishment and corporate fuckery. They don’t really have anything to say, let alone anything of substance. A lot of what they do say are things that could as easily just be spoken about. 

Mainstream country music in this country sucks, and has sucked for a very long time. It's pretty thin on the ground. You've also got the urban cowboy thing in the inner cities with the Americana movement or whatever, which I suppose if the industry is going to categorise maybe I'll get lumped in with that. But for the most part, they fucking suck too. There's not a lot happening in Australia that really interests me in terms of what you'd call country music. 

There are artists doing cool stuff that's obviously influenced by American blues, country and folk - people like Jack Patterson, Karl Williams and Grace Cummings, but the mainstream Keith Urban shit is fucking trash. 

KEELEY: How did your relationship with music begin?

RHYECE: Well, it's got to be Dylan, really. My mother and father's record collection had a lot of Dylan and I just fell in love with his music, he was like my security blanket. 

I didn't really decide to pursue song writing seriously until my early 20's, and I was actually a bit terrified to begin with. If you want to get songs, you kind of have to go to places a lot of other people probably aren't prepared to go in order to get the songs. I hesitated for a while before I made the decision, but I eventually did and all hell broke loose. 

I also had a kind of foundational moment when I was about 10 or 11. Although I was heavily influenced by my parents' record collection, I wasn't able to listen to a lot of them. Mum had gotten a record player for Christmas, but I wasn’t allowed to use it without supervision. I remember Mum and Dad going to the pub one night and I picked out a record. It was The Doors Greatest Hits. I put the needle down and the thunder in the beginning of Riders of the Storm played. It was terrifying to me as a kid because I was doing something really naughty, which I could have got the strap for, and to an extent the music itself was terrifying, but I was so mesmerized by it. 

KEELEY: What is your favourite drink? 

RHYECE: A Rhyece O’Neill screwdriver. It’s basically just a watered down screwdriver. I invented it because I once had the worst hangover of my life from the sugary orange juice in a regular screwdriver (and probably the drugs I’d done too) so I needed to come up with an alternative. 

KEELEY: What’s coming up for you this year? What’s on the horizon? 

RHYECE: I’m going full renegade and gate-crashing Tamworth Music Festival. I’m going to rock up in the Valiant with the Irish and Palestinian flags and play a set with my mate Karl Williams. So if I don't have a golden guitar, by the next time we have an interview, we're gonna have to send in the music industry militia.

I've actually got a full-blown country album that's done that's got pedal steel and a Nashville kind of production, which I did a few years ago. I've just been waiting for the right time to release it and it's probably a pretty good time to just whip out a pretty full-blown country record. 

Aside from that I’ve got a punch of producing and collaborations on the horizon too so I’m looking forward to all that! 

INSTAGRAM | WEBSITE | BANDCAMP