Raechel Whitchurch on outback life and connecting with people as a songwriter
This week on Streets of Your Town, we catch up with Australian country music sensation Raechel Whitchurch on her tour around the country.
And with the wonders of modern technology, I’m filing this substack to you from rural Ireland—Longford in fact!
Country singer-songwriter Raechel Whitchurch spent most of her childhood travelling to some of Australia’s most remote pockets in her family’s country music band, before establishing herself as one of Aussie music’s most recognisable country artists.
She sometimes finds it difficult to explain to people how isolated a little town like Broken Hill is.
“I grew up in a little town in far western New South Wales called Broken Hill,” Raechel says.
“Actually when I used to live in Sydney, I would say to people on stage, ‘I grew up in far western New South Wales’ and there’d always be one person who would be like 'Oh Penrith!’
“No, not Penrith! There’s life beyond the Blue Mountains!”
Her path to songwriting was far from guaranteed. In fact, it wasn't until her family saw Kasey Chambers’ family group The Dead Ringer Band perform in Broken Hill that country music became a family career.
Raechel’s dad thought it would be a great way to make a living, so they all became self-taught musicians.
“Yes, it is a funny story because often people think I grew up in a musical family and then maybe they played together, but ours was sort of a little bit back to front,” she says.
“And so everyone’s like, ‘oh, so that must have been great for you guys. You're musical.’ And I was like, no, we weren't musical. I played a little bit of piano and my dad played a little bit of guitar, but everyone—we had to learn an instrument to do the family band plan.
“Mum and Dad bought us all instruments and we started learning. And so I picked up the mandolin when I was eight years old, my brother started learning the drums. My mum started learning the bass at 30, which is wild, I think for someone as an adult to go and learn an instrument, it’s, it’s not the most common thing.”
After several local talent quests, the Lee family packed their lives into a caravan and hit the road on two laps of Australia and a six-month stint in Arnhem Land performing in their travelling country family band, The Lees.
Raechel, the eldest, was aged only 12, but it’s a lifestyle she has taken on as her own into adulthood, with her husband Ben and three children now often joining her on the road as well.
And as Raechel tells us on Streets of Your Town podcast, her songs don’t flinch from telling the hardships as well as the fun times of life in rural and remote Australia.
“The thing I love about the way that our parents raised us was that they didn’t put people into categories,” she says.
“We just got to experience all sorts of people and they were just all people and everyone’s different.
“And so I think it gave us a way of viewing the world that I think makes us quite—open-minded is not the right word—but just I guess aware that there’s people that are different than us and that’s okay.
“I do think that for songwriting, it really does help if you’ve got a wide view of the world. And I really love people as well. I find people so interesting, and I love the psychology of people and I love the way that we can all be so different.”
One of Raechel’s most powerful songs is about her miscarriage, giving voice to other women who still struggle to talk about their loss.
“It’s a very raw song and it’s very clear and direct and straight to the point,” she says.
“I think that there are songs out there about miscarriage, and they’re beautiful and wonderful, and I don’t take issue with them, but for me, I found them hard to relate to because they felt very romantic about a topic that I felt was just kind of not good.
“For me, this song was kind of in a way—I wrote it for myself and I wrote it just kind of documenting all the things that I really wanted to say about my experience, but I felt like it wasn’t socially acceptable for me to say those things.
“But one woman emailed me and in her email she said, ‘I don't think I ever really grieved properly until I heard this song’. And I was like, man, that’s just so heavy. That’s so heavy. And this was an experience she was talking about from 30 years ago.
“I feel like that’s enough. I feel like that’s all it needed to do. Everything after that is a bonus. If one woman out there heard it and the message she’d kind of said, thank you for putting into words what I wasn’t able to properly express. And so I was like, I think I’ve done it.”
If you’re after a glimpse of the outback in song, do a deep dive into her back catalogue starting with the link below to her music video “Back Where I Belong”, or download her new album when it drops. Or keep an eye out for Raechel on her tour, which comes off the back of the release of her new album “What A Time To Be Alive”, set to be released on May 24 in Newtown, Sydney.
You can find also out more about Raechel’s work at her official website: https://www.raechelwhitchurch.com/
Next time I’ll chat with you from Ireland again!
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