Music comes and goes. The sounds in the music change, but the feeling you have when you listen never goes away. The best feeling is indescribable, as if it came from another planet and you don’t know what it is but you understand it and it makes you something more than you were before you heard it

And you won’t forget it. You’ll hear it throughout your life and it will unlock a feeling. More than a memory.

We’re called The Genes and we travel through these songs in bars and restaurants and cafes and halls and lounge rooms and streets, and those feeling come back for us.

We try all the instruments and sounds but we keep coming back to a guitar, drums, harmonica and voices. Take away the speakers and wires and leads and all you have left are the feelings and the music. A long time we’ve been playing our music, and making what music we can when the time is right. The music changes but the feeling doesn’t.

If you can sing it around the fire you’ve really got some magic. We try to write those kinds of songs. But they are a far off dream and they’re not for the authors’ ears. They are for you in the corner at the bar, looking at your drink, or you, looking at the band through the window of the city hotel whilst dragging on a cigarette, talking to your friend but you lost the conversation because you saw the drummer who was in another world then you heard a lyric that made you think of a thought you never had before and you wondered what it was but you saw the girl in the front row and she saw you.

I keep coming back to sitting in my room strumming my guitar hearing every single sound.

I want to hear Robert Johnson’s shirt buttons clicking on his guitar coming through the microphone, as he plays hard. And we had to hear it because that was the take with the magic.

I want to hear Paul Simon’s foot tapping on the wooden stage while he sings with Art Garfunkel and they only had one microphone and you had to listen hard but you heard everything.

I want to hear Dylan screaming to be heard over those awesome loud guitars that the folkies hated but came to love when they finally caught up to him. But if you listened close to him you heard him better than he could back then.

I want to hear Bon Scott singing on the edge of his voice and Malcolm Young’s Gretsch powering along Angus’ killer moments as they look at each other and they know they got something so powerful it’s always on the edge and never quite under their control and anything can happen and that’s what you hear.

I want to hear a song I wrote and get the same feeling I got when I first played it in my bedroom and disappeared in to the night. That’s when it happens in the bars and cafes, and when the time is right it’ll get you, and you’ll always have that feeling.

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