Jack Carty
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Jack Carty

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Going by the buzz surrounding contemporary folksy troubadour, Jack Carty’s debut album, One Thousand Origami Birds , it seems a safe bet to say Jack’s future’s so bright, he may have to invest in numerous pairs of shades. But you won’t see Jack wearing shades while playing and you won’t see him wearing shoes either. “I usually play barefoot because I like to move my toes,” Jack casually explains. “It’s weird; people say I move my toes in a funny way, but that’s okay.”

Audiences will soon get an opportunity to squiz at Carty’s unique tootsies as he takes his relatable stylings on the Hope, Smoke And Everything Tour this July with fellow folksters Jordan Millar and Leroy Lee.

Admittedly proud of his album and pleased with public reaction, Jack affirms he hasn’t quite mastered recognising playlist potential when songwriting.

“As a songwriter it’s hard to get distance from your songs occasionally. So, sometimes I’ll write a song and won’t think it’s any good then I’ll play it to someone and they’ll think it’s one the best thing I’ve ever written,” he muses. “Sometimes it takes someone else to show you the worth in something you’ve created.”

Take for example, Jack’s latest single Them There Hills, which he originally thought an unsuitable album cut. As a matter of fact, he reports, “when I was making my initial list of songs that I thought would work and the ones I thought we wouldn’t use, Them There Hills wasn’t in my list. But we recorded it and we put that stomp-clappy thing in there and all of a sudden it became one of my favourite tracks on the album.

“But I still sort of thought that it might just be a little personal favourite of mine. I didn’t know if it was gonna be one that stood out to everybody else.

“The next thing you know people are buying the album and messaging me on the MySpace band page and on Facebook saying, ‘Hey! Loved Them There Hills,’” he recounts. “People seemed to be really reacting to it. I think it’s [because of] the story.”

Grateful for the stellar ride to date, Jack’s the first to say he’s had an amazingly hectic couple of years since chucking in his day job to dedicate heart, soul and big toe to music-making. Hence, any free time is precious and spent with family and friends where Jack grew up, in the Bellinger Valley on the NSW coast. However, it’s full steam ahead to regale national audiences with his album.

“I’m just really excited to get out on the road and tour this album properly in Australia because we released it and then I played a few festivals scheduled but after I did Western Australia, we literally flew to LA and Toronto the week after it came out. We did a month long tour of the ‘States and I haven’t been around to play it live for people. This’ll be the first proper tour of the album on home soil,” enthuses Jack.

Quizzed about whether the 23-year-old Jack Carty still aspires to the same things the 16-year-old Jack Carty did engenders a candid and endearing response.

“I’m really content to just focus on music as art and to have a function, that is an expression of who I am rather than making music as a way of meeting girls, which when I was 16, let’s be honest,” he pauses and says with a chuckle, “that was a really big part of why I started playing the guitar.”