17, a Suitcase, and a One-Way Ticket: How My Songwriting Life Began

I was 17 years old the first time I left home with a suitcase, a guitar and a head full of plans that were bigger than my bank account. I didn't know it at the time, but that one decision is where my life as a songwriter really began.

Growing up with a piano in the house

I didn't grow up with a radio on. I grew up with a piano. My mother Bev was a concert pianist who taught around 40 students a week, and our house was filled — almost constantly — with Mozart, Beethoven and her favourite, Chopin. Long before I picked up a guitar, I was learning, by osmosis, that a great piece of music could change the room.

Country music came later. When I picked up the guitar, I was chasing the feeling of a great story song — Kenny Rogers, Willie Nelson, Paul Kelly. Songs where something actually happens: a character, a turn, a line that lands. But the bones of how I hear music — melody, dynamics, the spaces between the notes — were laid down by the classical music Mum filled the house with.

Leaving home at 17

At 17, I packed a suitcase and moved away to chase a career in media. Radio, TV, anything behind or in front of a microphone. My parents were supportive but (rightly) nervous. I was nervous too. I had no safety net, no trust fund, no manager. Just a belief that if I turned up early and worked harder than the person next to me, something would stick.

For the first few years I lived out of that suitcase more than I lived in any one home. Regional radio gigs. TV fill-in shifts. A lot of very early mornings and a lot of dodgy rentals. Looking back, it was the best songwriting school I could have asked for.

How media shaped me as a songwriter

People sometimes assume the radio career and the songwriting career are two separate things. For me, they've always been the same muscle.

• Radio teaches you to speak to one person. Not a crowd. Not an algorithm. One person in one car, on one particular afternoon. That's exactly how I write a lyric.

• Interviewing other artists teaches you to listen. You learn what makes a great story land — and what makes one fall flat.

• Working in live radio teaches you to commit. You can't apologise halfway through a take. You just serve the moment and move on — exactly the same instinct you need on stage with a song.

Every skill I picked up in a studio booth or a live desk ended up turning into a songwriting skill. I just didn't know it yet.

The first songs that felt like mine

The first few years of writing are always a bit of an impression contest. You write like your heroes, because they're all you know. Somewhere in my early twenties, between shifts and moves, my own voice started to show up in the songs. That's when “Unwritten Rules” arrived (1998), and later “Endangered Species” (2019). Very different songs, same writer, a lot of years in between.

If I could go back and tell 17-year-old me one thing, it would be this: the songs you're most embarrassed to play for people are usually the ones closest to the truth. Play them anyway.

From the suitcase to a studio in Darwin

These days I write and record from a private studio in Darwin, in the tropical far north of Australia. It's a long way from that first suitcase. But the same instincts are still driving the work:

• Tell the truth, even when it's inconvenient.

• Serve the song, not the trend.

• Keep turning up — on stage, at the desk, at the page.

I've been lucky enough to have songs like “I Don't Really Mind” hit #1 on the Australian Country Thunder Top 30, to work with Kenny Rogers' band in Nashville, and to be awarded the Rudy Brandsma Award for Songwriting Excellence. None of that was on the cards when I zipped up that first suitcase. All of it started because I did.

If you're the 17-year-old with a suitcase

If you're reading this and you're about to leave home with a suitcase and a dream — whether that's music, media, or anything else — here's what I'd say:

• You're allowed to want more than the town you grew up in.

• Write everything down. The journal you start this year will become songs in five years.

• Make friends with people who take their craft seriously, not just their careers.

• Your first five years won't look like success. They're building the character in the songs you haven't written yet.

I'm still writing. Still recording. Still chasing the song that feels like the best one I've ever written. Thanks for being here with me for the ride.

— Jon