Darwin diva Tracey Bunn bit the bullet to join the huge expatriate Aussie posse in Nashville. The former Toe Sucking Cowgirl enlisted another ex-pat Anne McCue to produce her latest ten-song disc in Music City. McCue, youngest of eight children of a Campbelltown milkman, uses her contacts to flesh out the sound. Yes, that’s former Midnight Oil bassist Bones Hillman and Saltbush pedal steel guitarist and latter-day hot shot producer Mark Moffatt guesting on guitar on Wishes.

Bunn kicks off with nostalgia-fuelled Adelaide – imagery is her strongpoint, but a sidewalk replaces a footpath in the first verse. The singer’s memories of past loves then graduate from coffee and lattes to a morning beer in the Glenelg sand.

There’s no need for intoxication – just former Greencards fiddler Eamon McLoughlin and McCue’s mandolin – to resurrect another journey of the heart to Galway in Ballyreen as the "Burren meets the wild green sea."

Bunn’s gypsy wanderlust, pain of found and lost again love, is echoed in biographical Wishes while a ferry captain’s horn blows the mood swings of Melancholy Mood. The string-laden cry for independence with McLoughlin on viola, violin and cello in Shut Up And Let Me Breathe earned the singer a video clip to illustrate her plight.

That may be videogenic, but the peak of this disc is the riveting However Long, where the singer urges her beau to drive the relationship by reading her desires.

OK she’s a demanding divorcee but says she will wait for her lover to dip into her psyche. That may be too late. Running – the salient signpost to the damsel’s demise – drips with rural roughage as her beau flees. "We had a love that set the night on fire/ tight as a drum, as strong as fencing wire."

Not even fencing wire can withstand nature or human desire to flee as our floods and fires remind us. Bunn’s imagery reigns as her character primes her pathos with lovelorn lava as she reaches her finale – the title track.

The only blip on the radar here is Richard Thompson’s oft-covered Keep Your Distance.

Out Now On Laughing Outlaw

BY DAVID DAWSON