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A DECADE OF INDEPENDENCE
Mike Smith
Victorian duo CARTER & CARTER have so many runs on the board during the past 10 years that there should be no argument about describing them as Australian Independent country music artists of the decade.
Their career record speaks for itself. From their debut chart single You Were There in 2000, the list of achievements, awards and accolades has been both imposing and constant.
Major awards include a 2003 Golden Guitar for Candlelight and Kisses, 2004 APRA Most Performed Country Work Award for Lead Me Home, the CMAA Industry Achiever Award for Independent Entertainer of the Year for three consecutive years, 10 Australian Independent Country Music Awards, multiple TSA Songwriting, ACMLA People’s Choice and Victorian Country Music Awards.
To date they have eight national #1 country music hits, on both the Country Tracks Top 30 chart and Music Network charts as well as nine other Top 10 hits, certainly an impressive chart history.
It’s been an amazing journey for David and Merelyn, and one that has mingled smooth highways with singularly rough and unsealed side tracks.
More particularly - one event that impacted most significantly in the past twelve months was the tragic Black Saturday bushfires. Their farm at Kinglake was in the middle of some of the worst devastation and loss of life experienced at that dark time – and an event that even now, despite their fairly minimal material loss, is an important element in Carter & Carter moving forward.
One specific driving factor about the duo’s ten year dominance has been the incredible focus and determination in an industry that for the most part has been dominated by a relative handful of major label artists.
Their achievements while remaining as Independent artists – totally self-funded and self-sufficient – is quite extraordinary when pitted against the weight of the label artists who enjoyed the financial and promotional advantages.
Not that the prospect of signing to a label hasn’t entered the equation during the time.
“I think sometimes we are too independent,” said Merelyn. “We’ve had deals offered – in fact we signed a deal at one stage that fell through – but generally we’ve wanted to keep control, and that simply spells independent.”
The first radio single in April 2000 was both a testing of the waters and a precursor to their debut album. It was their first foray into country music and the untested waters.
“It was a big change of direction,” revealed Merelyn. “Even before getting to the point where we put Carter & Carter together, David and I had to bring two separate careers together – and our relationship - and that was no easy task.
“When we released the first single as Carter & Carter and decided to do the album, it was very directed. We’d been working together for five or six years prior – so the Carter & Carter project was very focussed.
Following the subsequent release of the first single, the momentum began to build quickly, as did David and Merelyn’s focus and commitment.
“We were a little shocked by the reaction to the first single,” admitted David. “We did the follow-up as much as we could – but being new to the country music industry, it was a bit of hit and miss.
“I distinctly remembering ringing John Nutting and couldn’t remember the name of his show,” he laughingly added.
“Ultimately the song charted and it seemed fairly easy - but looking back now we realise how hard it was to get a song to chart.”
The debut album Dance Away The Night was released in September 2000, and the real beginning of an amazing journey over the next decade.
Their focus was always very closely tied to their songwriting. As the success machine kicked into gear, so did their passion for more original material.
“We were asked in a recent radio interview ‘if you had to make a choice today between performing and songwriting, which would you chose?” said Merelyn. “Both David and I said songwriting – to the surprise of the interviewer who commented that we were the only artists who had ever picked that choice.
“Not to say that we don’t enjoy the performing side,” Merelyn hastened to add. “That’s where we have had some of our most memorable moments, like playing at the Golden Guitar awards concert.
“But also playing at lots of smaller venues,” added David. “When we’ve met people at the various gigs and heard amazing stories – Australian country music is a great big family and wherever you travel you get to meet some wonderful people.”
Those “people” are a huge part of what Carter & Carter are all about – the legion of fans that have built up during the decade. And it’s a connection that also goes directly to their songwriting.
“There’s a positive aspect on life in our songs,” explained David. “We want people to go away from a show feeling good – that our songs relate to listeners. Fans come and say ‘I know what you mean in that song’.
“It is a conscious direction that we take with our songs where we want to make something that is very personal to us take on a universal understanding, and relay the emotion behind it.”
“And when someone comes up and says ‘that makes so much sense’ or ‘I see myself in that song’ – that is success,” added Merelyn. “They put themselves in the song and find meaning there - how great is that? That you wrote something that connects.”
But despite the positive outcomes, the songs don’t always start with an overly happy theme.
“As Carter & Carter we don’t sit down to write a song until we’ve been through a difficult situation,” shared Merelyn. “Our songs don’t gloss over the hard stuff – we just don’t sit down to write about it until we’re through it. If you heard songs that David or I wrote individually you wouldn’t get the same feeling.
“I wrote a song after the fires, and we also wrote Surviving Black Saturday which we released because it has a positive aspect to it. The one I wrote wasn’t positive at all – it was very questioning. As Carter & Carter our songs are very personal, but often we’re not willing to share them with the world until we’ve come out the other side.”
Their passion to deliver original songs has never wavered, although at their own admission it hasn’t necessarily been the best decision from a financial point of view.
“We’d done covers for 10 years,” said Merelyn. “Initially, when we sang originals, instead of earning us a living, it was costing us money! But it was something we were determined to do.
“The reality is that we could still earn a lot more money doing covers four nights a week here in Melbourne – but I’d have to slash my wrists!”
The decision to stick to the originals path has certainly appeared to have paid off for Carter & Carter – the simple fact is that you just have to look at their successes to make that assumption – or is it that black and white?
Reading between the lines brings up some of the harsh realities that aren’t seen on stage or revealed in their songs – realities that were draining both emotionally and financially.
“I know people look from outside and think that everything is rosy,” said Merelyn. “At one stage my brother said ‘you must be rolling in it’. I explained to him that every time we achieved something we had to up the ante – albums, publicity, risks with more touring to get the music out.”
The harsh realities hit home when David and Merelyn were working towards their third album.
“Leading up to the album, we sat down to look seriously at where we were financially;” explained Merelyn.
“We’d had three #1 hits in a row, but things didn’t seem to add up on the economic front. David’s Dad was an RMIT lecturer in marketing, and he’d always say you’d got to do this or that better, so we sat down with him and wrote it all out on butchers’ paper – incoming and expenses to do the next album – and we were $30,000 behind for one year.
“After the initial shock, we said ‘we’ve got to stop this – we can’t keep going’. The first thought was ‘let’s chuck it in go and get a day job and do the music as a hobby”.
But David’s Dad said ‘You haven’t worked this hard and come this far to do that – hang on’.
“It was when we actually thought we had secured a record deal, had already committed $10,000 to the album - and the record label went under. We couldn’t pay our mortgage, and we got home from touring to find a bill from the Tax Office.
“That’s when we did the gospel album – then we held out and within nine months we were back in the black. That was a really low time – we just did all we could do.”
With things on an even keel, Carter & Carter continued to achieve on all fronts – the awards, chart hits and album sales continued to grow, and in 2008 they made a decision to move to the rural environment of Kinglake.
“The timing seemed perfect,” said Merelyn. “Then three months later David had serious health issues with his back that took eight months to get on top of. Then we had three months and the fires hit. Basically for two and a half years it’s been survival above the music.
“But still nothing felt more right – moving here was without doubt the right decision.”
After the extraordinary decade, and specifically the trials and tribulations of the last couple of years, how do David and Merelyn see this next decade.
“Everything has repositioned after living through the fires,” revealed Merelyn. “It has had such an impact on our life – and it’s made us re-evaluate everything.
“This time last year we didn’t know if we’d ever write another album – and honestly we still don’t. It’s not about the album – it’s about the writing - and we won’t put an album out unless the songs are there,” said David. “We’ll still look for the positive angle – I like to finish movies feeling good about something – and songs are stories. Even a glimmer of hope at the end is important to people.”
Amazingly there are some real positives that have come from those harrowing two years.
“In many ways I’m really grateful,” said Merelyn. “Not so much grateful for actual things that have happened, but it’s been an amazing experience and it’s changed who I am. I like who I am even more. Going through such a dramatic experience wasn’t just personal moments when we thought it might be the end for us – it was other people sharing the grief. If you can’t come away from that with a different perspective on life and see the positives, you’d just curl up and die.”
David puts the pair’s future direction in context. “Music is not all-consuming as it was in the early days,” he explained. “Now we need to balance it with our life.
“There is not the same demand for albums through retail stores as there was before – you have to tour more to be able to sell more albums and justify making another album.
“We’re getting to the stage that we, and particularly Merelyn, want to be home more – so it’s a balancing act.”
So how do you encapsulate a decade with so many highlights? Easy answer is to ask David and Merelyn their real standouts.
“Our first #1 chart single,” said Merelyn. “30 March 2001 – Dance Away The Night – the chart is printed and framed. Until recently we haven’t really appreciated how hard it is to achieve that chart success. Now we look back and think ‘it’s been pretty amazing –eight 8 #1 hits – 15 or 16 singles that have all gone top 10’.”
“Also the APRA Most Performed Country Work for Lead Me Home,” said Merelyn. “We drove to the awards in a daggy old car, I wore a second hand dress and borrowed shoes – but it was all about the songwriting – and the fact that we had been competitive with major label artists like Troy and Lee.”
“And the award wasn’t a voted one,” added David. It was based on factual statistics.”
It has been an extraordinary decade for the talented duo – and one where they have truly earned their unique place in Australian country music.
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