2020 has not gone to plan for any of us and country musician Brad Cox is no exception. The 25-year-old songwriter came into this year with the aim of launching his second album and ramping up his already-exhaustive touring schedule.
Cox had spent much of the previous two years working on the follow-up to his self-titled debut from 2018. Bolstered by the singles ‘Lake House’ and ‘Water On the Ground’, that album brought Cox to nationwide prominence, securing support tours with the likes of Brad Eldredge and Jon Pardi and nabbing two Golden Guitar nominations for Contemporary Album of the Year and New Talent of the Year.
But as the public health crisis worsened in March, Cox’s entire touring schedule was wiped. His response? A good old-fashioned self-destructive freak out.
“I drank my way through the first couple of months of lockdown because I was just so gutted,” Cox says. “I didn’t touch a guitar for about two months because I had the shits with the world.”
Cox wasn’t alone in feeling this way, but after overcoming his initial despondence, he fought hard to stop the crisis from utterly derailing his music career. He now finds himself in the unique position of having built up serious momentum in a year when most musicians have been confined to bedroom performances in front of smartphone cameras.
Cox has completed 40-plus shows over the past few months, the majority being sold-out acoustic gigs in regional locations across Queensland and NSW. He’s also just released his second album, My Mind’s Projection.
“It feels great that in a year of so much disappointment, cancelled shows and so many musos out of work, that for me I’ve been busy the last couple of months, played a bunch of shows and the record’s out. So it’s something to be happy about and be really proud of,” he says.
Cox was born in 1995 and grew up in Jindabyne in the Snowy Mountains of New South Wales. He’s the son of two swimming coaches who’ve generally been somewhat indifferent towards music. Despite this, Cox was drawn to the songs he heard on the car stereo during many weekend road-trips to swimming tournaments on the NSW south coast.
“There was always four cassette tapes in the car, being Joe Cocker, Shania Twain, The Commitments soundtrack and something else. So yeah, I just started singing along in the car,” he says.
Noticing their son’s nascent musical ear, Cox’s parents started taking him to piano lessons when he was in primary school. Everything else developed from there, says Cox. “I started playing drums in a high school band and then playing cover gigs at a pub when I was 14 years old.”
Cox was 22 when his debut album came out, but he hadn’t been eyeing off its release ever since his first covers gig as a 14-year-old. Rather, after finishing high school, he moved to the Northern Territory to work on a cattle farm. He continued to play covers shows by night, but was reasonably content sitting on a tractor and chasing cows by day.
It was clear to his co-workers, however, that Cox’s musical talent was too good to waste. “The guys I was working for sat me down and they went, ‘Dude, stop fucking around up here. You need to go and have a proper crack at this, because you’re good.’ I think that moment for me was kind of like, ‘Maybe I owe it to myself to give it a crack.’
“I pretty much instantly stopped playing cover gigs after that and I went back to Jindabyne and sat in a little farmhouse and started writing my first record with the vision of putting out an album.”
Cox had very few preconceptions about the sort of artist he wanted to be when he started writing. For instance, his tendency towards intimately personal lyrics came about through chance rather than design. But one thing he was sure about was his genre of choice – country. He’d latched onto country music in his teens and was fascinated by all of its many sub-branches.
“I started listening to Jason Aldean and his music spoke to me because it had really big, heavy rock’n’roll guitar riffs – they’re a really guitar-heavy band” Cox says.
“I love mainstream pop Nashville country, but to be completely honest it’s probably 20 percent of what I listen to. I’m listening to alternative country and psychedelic country and weird songwriter country, and that among many other genres too.”
Cox has not only gained a nationwide following since 2018, but also dipped his toes into Nashville’s world-leading country music industry. My Mind’s Projection bears the fruit of this recent development, with co-writing credits going to the Nashville-based songwriters Dan Isbell, Randy Montana and Alyssa Trahan.
“I wrote ‘Drinking Season’ with Dan Isbell. He’s a great friend of Luke Combs and he’s such a champion. He and I have become pretty good mates and I’ve written with him a bunch of times over Zoom and while I’m in Nashville.”
Cox says there’ll be even more Nashville co-writes on his next album, but the majority of My Mind’s Projection was written in Australia. Singer-songwriter Joe Mungovan co-wrote five of its 11 tracks. “He’s a Kiama local, one of my nearest and dearest mates,” says Cox.
Despite the increased collaborative emphasis, Brad Cox describes My Mind’s Projection as a snapshot the last three years of his life. He’s indulged in plenty of untamed partying during that time, as indicated by the good times paean ‘Drinking Season’, but he’s also fallen in love and had his heart broken, which comes through in tracks like ‘Short Lived Love’.
“Anyone exposing themselves on a public platform wonders whether they’re sharing too much or things like that, but I know that I signed up as a songwriter and I’m pretty comfortable with who I am and who I’m not,” says Cox.
“I went into this record not trying to write radio hits or what I think would work live, but what I needed to write. I trusted what I did last time in the hope that it’ll do the same thing – if I’m honest with myself, then my fans will back me.”
