Winning the Rudy Brandsma Award: A Moment I'll Never Forget

There are a handful of moments in a songwriter's life when you stop, take a breath, and realise the work has actually landed somewhere. Receiving the Rudy Brandsma Award for Songwriting Excellence in 2023 was one of those moments for me.

A craft award, not a chart award

The Rudy Brandsma Award is presented each year by the Australian Songwriters' Association (ASA). It doesn't care about streaming numbers, radio spins or chart positions. It cares about the songs themselves — the writing, the honesty, the craft. For a writer like me who records most things in a small studio in Darwin, that focus on craft is everything.

The ASA has been running its National Songwriting Awards for more than forty years. Past finalists and winners read like a who's who of Australian songwriting. To have my name added to that list still feels unreal.

All the songs, considered together

Here's the part people often don't realise: the Rudy Brandsma isn't given for one stand-out song. It's given for everything I entered that year, taken together — a whole year's worth of writing, judged as one body of work rather than as individual tracks.

And it's not something you enter or nominate for. The Rudy Brandsma sits separately to the song-by-song categories: a panel of peer songwriters quietly looks across a writer's full set of entries that year and decides who should be the one to be recognised that year. There's no campaign, no lobbying, no checkbox on an entry form. The first I knew of it was the announcement itself.

For me, that's what makes it mean so much. It's a craft call from other craftspeople. It's the quiet voices in the room — not the loud ones on the timeline — saying, “the songs are working.”

You write alone in a room, and for a long time nobody knows if the songs are any good except you. An award like this is the first outside voice — from other writers — telling you the work is worth something.

Why songwriting awards matter for independent artists

When you're an independent artist, it's very easy to measure yourself by the wrong things. Follower counts. Monthly listeners. Whether a song “took off.” Those numbers move up and down like the weather, and they can quietly teach you to chase trends instead of telling the truth.

Songwriting awards pull you back to the centre. They remind you that great songs are still the unit of value in this business — not viral clips, not clever captions, not hooks engineered for a three-second scroll. Just songs.

• They give independent writers outside validation that funding, publishing and radio can recognise.

• They connect you to a community of other writers who take the craft seriously.

• They push you to keep writing stronger songs, because the bar has moved.

What it changed in me

Being chosen by my peers for a year's worth of songs — not for any one “hit” — made me look at my whole catalogue differently. It stopped being a list of individual releases and started feeling like a through-line. A voice. A point of view. Something worth building on.

A few things I'll carry forward:

• Serve the song. Production is there to lift the melody and the lyric, not to rescue them.

• Write the line you're afraid to write. That's almost always the one that connects.

• Finish more songs. You can't build a body of work out of voice memos.

What's next

Since the award, I've leaned further into writing — longer sessions, more co-writes, and a slate of new songs I'm slowly recording in the studio. Some will come out as singles through 2026. Others will live on the next record.

If you're a writer reading this: keep entering, keep finishing, keep building the body of work. The Rudy Brandsma itself isn't something you can chase — but the work that earns it absolutely is. The people who matter are listening.

To the team at the ASA, and to the fellow songwriters who thought my year of songs was worth recognising — thank you. The Rudy Brandsma sits in my studio as a quiet reminder to keep turning up and keep writing.

— Jon