With his new album set for release tomorrow, I figured it was about time I put Bully Hay on your radar. He recently released the song “Bushfire Moon,” inspired by the bushfires that tore through Paredarerme Country/Dunalley in Tasmania a few years ago. It tells the fictional love story of a firefighter searching for his love amongst the devastation around him. You know how the greats like Paul Kelly and Bruce Springsteen can sing you a song about fictional characters but there’s so much truth in their voices that you believe it all? Bully’s exactly like that.
“The fire wiped out most of the Tasman Peninsula and caused a lot of damage and disruption,” Bully recalled. “It ended up cutting off a lot of people from the rest of the island to the point where people could only get on and off the peninsula by boat. So, the community had to band together to get help to those that needed it. It felt like just about anyone that had a boat was ferrying supplies and people back and forth for days because the roads were all blocked with debris from the fires. I had this fictional story in my head inspired by those events of a volunteer firefighter right in the thick of it, fighting the fires and totally exhausted. At some point he knows it’s a lost cause. The situation is hopeless and too far gone and he needs to get out of there. All he can think of is finding his love and he sets out, determined to find her amongst all the chaos.”
“Bushfire Moon” comes from Bully’s album Black Dogs & Songbirds, which drops tomorrow. Inspired by artists as diverse as Soundgarden, Rage Against the Machine, Jeff Buckley, Crowded House, and the Tea Party (Jeff Martin even recorded and mixed all the songs on this LP), it’s sure to be an interesting listen.
Photo credit: Eden Meure