On The Up

This past year, since the release of his latest album, All The Little Lights, the young UK singer-songwriter Michael Rosenberg, who travels as Passenger, has seen his career break out dramatically, in part courtesy his friend Ed Sheeran, with whom he recently toured Australia, a country that has become a second home for the Brighton-born troubadour. “I've been touring with Ed 'round the States and Canada and Europe and the UK, and now I'm supporting here as well,” Rosenberg explains, “and that's just changed the game really, exposure-wise, just playing to thousands of people instead of busking – it's a very different thing,” he understates. “And yeah, it's bizarre, Let Her Go, which is a song on the album, has done really well in bits of Europe – in the Benelux countries and Germany and Scandinavia and stuff. It's all gone a bit bonkers; good fun though.”

That song has done better than really well, it's topped the charts in those European countries – Holland, Belgium, Sweden, Ireland – quite the coup for a guy who still sees himself as essentially a busker, though he's had to forgo the busking for much of the past “bonkers” year. Of course the friendship between Rosenberg and Sheeran significantly predates the latter's success.

“We met in a little basement in Cambridge, playing a tiny little gig together,” he recalls, “when he was about 16 or 17, and I think we both just really liked what each other were doing musically, and had a beer afterwards, and since then we've tried to play a couple of gigs together every year depending on where we're both at. And then he obviously exploded a year or so ago and he's just been amazingly generous as far as taking me on tour and tweeting my lyrics and all this kind of stuff. He's really been amazing.

“I've been gigging round the UK for ten years and, you know, building it up very slowly – every year I'd have three more fans at a gigs – so obviously, I played, like, 30 dates in the UK with Ed, and that meant the whole of my [own] headline tour sold out. It was a very different – you know, just wonderful to play, for example, in Brighton, which is where I'm from. There's a venue called The Concord, which I'd been going to see bands there since I was 14, and to be able to headline a sold-out Concord was pretty emotional actually – quite an incredible feeling.

“So much has changed in such a short space of time, things that I didn't think were possible,” Rosenberg admits. “When I started music, when I was a kid, you know, you have all these dreams of being number one and all this crazy shit, and over the course of time you just kind of let go of a lot of that stuff because you realise that, actually, I play kind of melancholic folk music that's probably not going to get to number one, you know. So for it then to happen… I don't [think] it's really sunk in yet to be honest. It happened months ago but it's still bizarre to me.”

As it happens, while he's not topped any charts here, Rosenberg/Passenger built from busking through tiny gigs and an album that included a variety of local guests – such as Lior, Josh Pyke, Katie Noonan and Kate Miller-Heidke among others – 2010's Flight Of The Crow, to headlining theatre tours. “I've been coming here for three or four years now and spending a lot of time here – sort of six months here and six months in the UK generally in a year – and just built it up really, really slowly in Australia, and I love it here. I still think of it as my second home. I'm not sure if I'll be able to spend six months a year here anymore, which is upsetting, but yeah, it's wonderful coming back and seeing familiar faces.”

Passenger will be playing the following dates:

Wednesday 20 March - Athenaeum, Melbourne VIC
Thursday 21 March - Athenaeum, Melbourne VIC
Sunday 24 March - The Playhouse, Hobart TAS
Wednesday 27 March - Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide SA
Saturday 30 March - Astor Theatre, Perth WA
Tuesday 2 April - Conservatorium Theatre, Griffith University, Brisbane QLD
Wednesday 3 April - Conservatorium Theatre, Griffith University, Brisbane QLD
Saturday 6 April - Enmore Theatre, Sydney NSW
Sunday 7 April - Enmore Theatre, Sydney NSW