Still Rockin' It - Cheryl Lee
Join Cheryl Lee That Radio Chick on Still Rockin' It for news, reviews and interviews with some of our favourite Australian musicians.
What are they up to at the moment? Let's find out .......
Still Rockin' It - Cheryl Lee
What has Tom Mac been up to lately? OR From Farm Roads to Festival Stages and how a van riff became 'Nomadic'
Join Cheryl Lee - That Radio Chick on STILL ROCKIN' IT for news, reviews, music and interviews with some of our favourite Australian musicians
A van-side riff, a dust road memory, and a choice to lean back into the sound that fits—this conversation with Tom Mac moves fast and lands deep.
We open on travel as fuel for songwriting: a winter loop across the NT and WA, a four-wheel drive replacing a faithful van, and the freedom that turns hours into hooks. From there, we trace how Nomadic grew from an Instagram riff by Byron’s Pete McCready into a coastal-outback anthem with a video shot across the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast Hinterland. It’s a song that smells like salt and red dust, and it already has the streams to prove it.
We also unpack why Australian country music is surging. Tom lays out the secret: loyalty that spans generations, family-friendly festivals, and a genre that blends pop, Americana, and even hip hop while keeping story at the center. If you’ve wondered why country suddenly feels everywhere, the answer is that it never stopped speaking to the everyday—work, roads, love, and Saturday nights that promise something real. Tom’s journey reflects that pull: a childhood steeped in music thanks to a teacher mum, early gigs that flipped a switch, and a detour into a pop rebrand that taught hard lessons about identity and momentum.
From those lessons came two things: a return to his core as Tom Mac and a booking agency built to protect and empower artists. We talk about turning scars into support and writing with purpose.
Tom performs Play It By Beer live, then turns the spotlight to Nomadic and a full-length album on the way: Dirt Road, named for the long driveway on the family farm and the path that leads back to yourself. If you love country that feels lived-in and modern, you’ll find plenty to hold on to here.
Stream Nomadic, share the episode with a friend who needs a road song.
What has Tom Mac been up to lately? Let's find out!
Get out when you can, support local music and I'll see you down the front!!
Visit: ThatRadioChick.com.au
Welcome to the Still Rockin' It podcast, where we'll have music, news reviews, and interviews with some of our favorite Australian musicians and artists. Please join me in the Zoom room with a man who has mastered the didgeri doo. He's appeared on Saturday Night Country at the Gympie Muster, Tamworth Country Music Festival, Baralaba Bash, supported iconic artists including Eskimo Joe, Kim Churchill, Matt Corby, and share the stage with Busby Marou. Spending time on country learning our native instrument is something he's very proud of, and it has brought him closer to our First Nations people. And I do love an artist who gives back beyond music. Tom dedicated himself to initiatives like Busking for Beds, raising funds for homeless charities. And he remains a vocal advocate for indigenous culture through his music and performances. We're so lucky he plays at the favourite song live. We're speaking to Tom Mac, and we're going to hear all about the new song. To catch up on podcasts and other favourite artists, simply go to that radiochick.com.au. You're with Cheryl Lee that Radio Chick and I'd like to welcome you into the Zoom room. Today we've got Tom Mac joining us. Thanks, Tom.
Tom Mac:Thanks, Cheryl. Thanks for having me.
Cheryl Lee:We've got an exciting new single to talk about. It's called Nomadic. Reading about your recent travels, I think that's quite apt.
Tom Mac:It's very apt, Cheryl. Yes. I've actually done a trip well, almost to Adelaide, but went through the Northern Territory and WA during, I guess, our winter. It can be any sorts of winter when you travel that far. But I took my partner this time and I've done a lot of travelling myself. I actually ditched my van of seven years to upgrade to a four-wheel drive so we could go off-roading. And that's what I did, as well as incorporating my music into the trip as well, which is very rewarding when a holiday essentially involves your work as well, which is why we choose this job in a way.
Cheryl Lee:Kill two birds with one stone.
Tom Mac:Exactly.
Cheryl Lee:We'll talk about the single and how it came about in a little while, but I was just going to ask your opinion. I get music sent to me all day, every day. I have just noticed over the last 12, 18 months, the country is just going gangbusters. What is going on?
Tom Mac:Well, what was it that made it not go off for the previous whatever, however, amount of years? Since maybe you know John Williamson and Slim Dusty made it cool. I don't know. But yeah, it's it's come back in vogue. I've got to admit, I've lent a little more back into my country music, not because that's happened, it was just serendipitous because my partner is crazy into country, and I was I guess I was doing a folk country thing, but I've just sort of lent right into it. And I that's what I was always meant to do, you know. So it's a good thing. It's a good thing that people can feel comfortable to be themselves, especially in the country realm, because there might have been a time in Australia where people felt like, you know, there was a very small market for it, but now, you know, it's huge and there are so many festivals. I've heard a couple of people say that I'm not a massive advocate for the whole reality TV thing, although, you know, good luck to anyone that does it. But that the country artists that come out of that tend to do quite well as compared to other genres. And festivals are, you know, getting great attendances, whereas other festivals are sort of struggling. So I I think it's a really good sort of study almost into the loyalty behind country people, no matter what age, it's it's family friendly, you know, you can go through that revolution of maybe you know the splendour in the grasses and things like that when you're younger, but families can do country music festivals when they're younger, when they're teenagers, early uh adulthood, and then when their parents can take their kids. So yeah, I think it there is a reason why this happens. I mean, I'm not complaining.
Cheryl Lee:No, it's fantastic. 50% of the new music coming through to me would be have a country slant on it. And I love it.
Tom Mac:Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I think people, yeah, artists are starting to, you know, bridge across to other genres but keep their country. So country pop, you know, I'm obviously there's, you know, influences like Morgan Wallen and Luke Combs and Zach Bryan these days, but you know, not just that, there are people going into the Americana thing as well. Yeah, I think people are starting to blend genres really nicely, even hip hop and country crazily, you know? Anything works.
Cheryl Lee:Let's go right back to the very beginning for a second. Because I was going to ask, is music in your DNA? And I see that mum was a music teacher. So was that where you got your main influence from? And you were actually brought up in the country.
Tom Mac:Yes, yeah. So well, not too far from Adelaide. I often think that it's closer to Melbourne. It is closer to Melbourne, just I grew up between Melbourne and Adelaide, essentially. But we played footy against Mount Gambier, you know, in Hamilton. So and the Western Border Footy League was, but yeah. No way. Yeah.
Cheryl Lee:My husband is from Goroke.
Tom Mac:Oh, really? Little or little satellite towns around the area. Yeah. Yeah. I grew up south of Hamilton on the Port Fairy Road and on a farm for the first 17 years of my life, and Mum was a primary school music teacher. She did lean us into music at an early age in a different way. Like, I think in the end I just I found guitar myself. It wasn't something mum put me on, although she had one stashed away somewhere. And a didgeridoo, mind you, and neither well, she couldn't play it, right? It was funny that I didn't actually play either of these instruments until after I left home and I was, you know, virtually an adult. I think I started guitar when I was 18. I already had a musical ear, and I'd already played a little bit of piano and I'd played clarinets, and mum did have that influence on us, and she did encourage us to go into musicals at school, and we did. Like, I guess that got rid of the stage fright. And that's a huge thing. Because I think a lot of people can sing, but But not in front of people. But not in front of well, they don't know they can sing. They don't they haven't tried. You know, they've got it in them, but it's just the fear. And so I think more than anything, going in musicals, especially where you have to sort of, you know, be a little bit silly and you know, yeah, jazz handsy or whatever it might be. You know, I was in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Code and Grease and um productions. Yeah.
Cheryl Lee:So say we have you got some musical siblings as well.
Tom Mac:My brother went in them as well, maybe begrudgingly, but he was good too. Like he he played piano as well, and it's a real pity that he didn't pursue it because when I first started gigging, he came in and he would he would duo with me. We had great harmonies and he didn't play an instrument at that point, but he had played piano and um he just didn't pursue it. I say we because he was either in it, I don't think he was in it, because of choice, but he was forced in it by mum.
Cheryl Lee:bless mum. Good on her.
Tom Mac:Yeah, well he was the youngest of the brothers in Joseph, I think, from memory. That was a guy that was so long ago. No, but that's why I say we, and yeah. Uh mum was always in choirs. She went to Verona with Pavarotti. I say this and there were 10,000 other people in the choir, but that's her claim to fame. I sang with Pavarotti.
Cheryl Lee:Good on her. You went off to uni, realize that really what were you doing at uni, by the way?
Tom Mac:Well, I loved footy. Um obviously wasn't big enough to play at the top level, but I loved it so much that I thought, well, you know what, I'm not really into much else right now. And this is a 17-18, and I did a sports admin business degree, but I didn't realise that when you got out into the workforce, football clubs are basically like any big other big corporate organizations. And I started loving my music more and I just progressed out of that, you know, after the first or second year of working full-time, I just realized it wasn't for me, and I get easily bored, you know, a bit of an ADHD brain, and I just took to music. And I once I started learning guitar, it just came to me. I learned Stairway to Heaven as the first song. People don't do that, they do Wonder Wall or you know Junger Junger songs, and I'm just sitting here trying to, you know, get my fingers around sort of more classical stuff. But I just had that light bulb moment when I played my first gig on Hamilton Island, it was. Adam Thompson from Chocolate Starfish gave me my first ever gig on Hamilton Island, and I just had that light bulb moment where I thought, oh my god, I can get paid for this, make people happy. It's a massive rush. I'm like, I've been lied to my whole life. I thought union school was meant to be what life was all about.
Cheryl Lee:Parts of that uni course would have helped you with your other little sideline that you had. You went to music, you did a little bit of a U-turn with your music genre.
Tom Mac:So, I mean, I started out, I guess what you'd class coastal country. I probably influences were, you know, a mix of Jack Johnson and Xavier Rudd, and then also, you know, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, because I played harmonica, and then Keith Urban and the country guys, and probably John Williamson to a degree as well. And all that blend was basically where I started, and it was I would call it coastal country. People kept saying, Oh, you sound country. You should go to Tamworth, and you know, this was in my early twenties, and I got picked up by a guy who felt that I should be should change my name, change my brand. I was young enough to be impressionable at the time.
Cheryl Lee:And what did he change your name to?
Tom Mac:Uh Wexford. I was playing under Tom, which is my actual surname, and he said, let's change to Wexford. Unfortunately, we you know, we didn't know, we couldn't, you know, look into the future, but at the time Facebook was the main thing. We'd just come out of MySpace. Probably Facebook was the main thing, and and you couldn't change your music page name. You had to start again. So I had all this momentum behind this that album that I created under Tom. All my friends had my album, you know, I was pulling three or four hundred people to launches and things like that. And then yeah, I for some reason I went down this path and we recorded a few songs, a very poppy. Yeah, I had to change my Facebook name to Wexford, and and it was a whole it just confused everybody. Like, like, is this a band? Is this what what is this? And I pursued it for about two or three years and then I just pulled a pin.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Tom Mac:I just I I'd spent too much money and and I'd sort of lost momentum with the Tom stuff. So I started a booking agency and just started playing covers and weddings, and that was to me that seemed like a a better idea than losing money. I liked to make it, but obviously that burning desire was still there.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Tom Mac:My strength was in my writing, and I knew that. Yes, you know, my storytelling, because I used to do poetry at school, and I just blended poetry with music, with singing, with guitar, and no, what you just realize that if you get to the end of your life and you're not serving your soul's purpose, then you're gonna have regrets. I thought, you know what, I'll start new, I'll start with my middle name, McFarlane, I'll just I'll call myself Tom Mac. I just, you know, let's forget about the past.
Cheryl Lee:Yeah. It's never really too late. And if you sort of do veer off what your life track's supposed to be, you can always veer back.
Tom Mac:Exactly, yes. Yeah. Don't leave it until you're 70, but but you know, I I think you know you're right, it is never too late. Yeah, I think you grow from making all those mistakes too.
Cheryl Lee:And I'd hate really learned a lot of lessons.
Tom Mac:Oh, absolutely, and that's why that's why running a booking agency the way I do is a bit unique. It's like psychologists become psychologists, some of them do, from traumas, you know, because they want to help people not to feel the way they've felt or whatever, you know, suffer the way they've suffered. And I I think that's a driving force behind the booking agency because more it's like an undercover music union flash, you know, music support for artists as well. And I just don't want them to go through some of the things I've gone through really.
Cheryl Lee:They can learn from your lessons.
Tom Mac:Yes.
Cheryl Lee:Awesome. I've been playing Play It by Beer for a while now. You know, it's just one of those typical tongue-in-cheek, you know, not too serious country songs. The new one, Nomadic, is quite different. And this song I think comes together pretty much differently than anything you've ever written before.
Tom Mac:Yeah, well, this one I got a riff from a a young artist in in Byron. His name's Pete McCredie. He's doing quite well actually now. And so he and his brother are doing really well today down in Byron there, and they're from Newcastle. And I met them through whole van life, you know, that era. So I found this little riff on his Instagram and he was playing with a mate in the back of his van, and I thought, that is so catchy. And I asked him, What is this? Like, is this a a song that already exists, or is it just something you've come up with and you've put up because it sounds cool? And he said, It actually is a riff from a song that I released, one of my very first releases when I was really young. And I said, Look, I I want to reimagine it as a country song, because I just hear country in this. Uh he said, Great. I said, Look, we'll we'll do a royalty. We came up with a figure. I went away and I wrote it really quickly because it actually lent itself still to his kind of lifestyle, what I had been through, the coastal surfy kind of lifestyle, and then blending that with country. And the whole story of it, you know, the first verse and chorus is like you're on the beach, and then the second is you're in the outback. And it just came together so nicely and naturally, and I always knew it was gonna be one of the bigger tracks than a single that I wanted to uh you know get behind. And so it's got about a hundred and seventy thousand streams already here in ten days, which is crazy.
Cheryl Lee:Did I see a guitar somewhere there?
Tom Mac:Yes, you did.
Cheryl Lee:Are you gonna do a tour? Yes, I'm doing an album.
Tom Mac:That'll happen when the album comes out.
Cheryl Lee:Do a tour to promote the album.
Tom Mac:Yeah, yeah. This was gonna be an EP with this song being the last one, but I decided I wanted to do a whole album to go a bit more old school. I just prefer touring a whole album. But I've got more songs that I want to bring out, and there's another song that I've already written with a mate down in the Gold Coast called Dirt Road. So I'm gonna call it Dirt Road.
Cheryl Lee:You're gonna call the album Dirt Road.
Tom Mac:Yeah, because it reminds me of our driveway, like our one kilometer driveway back on the farm, and that was that's what it's all about going back to that dirt road.
Cheryl Lee:Do you have a rough ETA?
Tom Mac:It'll be like July, August.
Cheryl Lee:You heard it first here, everybody next year, July-ish. Brand new album, followed by two. You're gonna come to Adelaide?
Tom Mac:Oh, I'll have to. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Cheryl Lee:Yeah.
Tom Mac:Alright, so let's do play it by beer because Cheryl has requested play it by beer. Also based on the fact she's gonna play nomadic after the episode.
Cheryl Lee:Yay!
Tom Mac:Thank you.
Cheryl Lee:Very good. You know, I can't get any more Australian than a song about beer.
Speaker 2:Right.
Cheryl Lee:You know what I reckon? I could hear that little bit of Keith Urban influence in that one.
Tom Mac:I'm not shying away from that.
Cheryl Lee:Well, thank you so much, Tom. You know what? I thought Tom Mac was in reference to a Mac truck. You've explained that now. It's been great chatting to you, and I wish you all the best with the release of the new single. Get on to all the usual suspects and have a listen to Nomadic. And we are waiting excitedly for the new album next year.
Tom Mac:Definitely. Yes. No, thanks for having me. It was nice to chat. And yeah, no, no doubt we'll chat again when that all happens.
Cheryl Lee:Absolutely. We'll chat about the new album release and we'll chat about you coming to our beautiful town of Adelaide.
Tom Mac:Right, no, it sounds good. Thanks, Cheryl.
Cheryl Lee:Thanks, Tom. See you next time.
Tom Mac:Bye bye. You are listening to Still Rockin' It, the podcast with Cheryl Lee.
Cheryl Lee:As promised, let's hear the brand new single now. By the way, there's also a great music video for this single, directed by Mike Mikha, and it perfectly captures the track's adventurous disposition filmed across the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast Hinterland. The ultimate anthem for road trippers, dreamers, and anyone ready to leave the everyday behind and chase adventure. Let's do that right now. Here it is, Tom Mac, nomadic. Thank you so much for joining me on the Still Rockin' It podcast. Hope to catch you again next time. Get out when you can, support Aussie music, and I'll see you down the front.