No Folking Around

Somewhere buried away in the Iowa countryside, not too far from the mighty Mississippi River, lays a small farm. Once a fully functional endeavour, it now lends its services to house country/folk/blues musician William Elliot Whitmore, when he's not occupying stages around the world with his unique kick drum and banjo combo.

“It's kind of interesting, I mean, it's these two different worlds,” Whitmore begins. “It's sort of this balance between the quiet life on the farm with no one around, and then jumping off to cities like Perth and Adelaide and Sydney, and then Amsterdam, London, and Paris, and all these places.”

The house, in which he grew up, belonged to his parents, and while it's not as alive as it used to be, Whitmore still keeps it somewhat active. “My folks are passed on, they've been gone since when I was a teenager, and so when it was time for me to start playing music full-time, I really couldn't plant row crops anymore, and we used to have horses and I had to give all that up,” he says. “But now, I definitely grow a big garden, and I've got a few chickens and a few pets, but it's not what you'd call a working farm anymore because music kind of took over. I don't know, one day I could see myself maybe returning to it full-time.”

As well as taking on his parents' passion for farming, Whitmore inherited a love for music. And there's no denying his day-to-day life provides him with more than enough inspiration. “It's my favourite stuff to write about, and I've always enjoyed those themes of planting in the spring, harvesting in the fall, life and death,” he says. “When it's time to slaughter the chickens, you sort of get a real idea of what life and death is all about. There are all these metaphors to be had within the framework of the farm that I really enjoy tinkering with.”

Taking every opportunity to escape the seclusion of the farm and expand his point of view, he only got a taste of Australia when he toured last year. The weeklong tour supporting Frank Turner & The Sleeping Souls left him yearning for more. A relatively new name to most Australian's who saw him on that tour, he's got eight albums behind him, and is coming back within a year of his live debut. “The opportunity came to tour there again and I jumped at it because I feel like I need more time to soak it up,” he says. “I'm hoping this is the second of many, many trips. There's just really unfinished business down there – I need to see more, and do more and taste more. There's unexplored territory that needs lookin' to.”

Touring with the punk rock infused Frank Turner & The Sleeping Souls, Whitmore covered Bad Religion's Don't Pray On Me. Growing up in such a secluded area, listening to predominately country and blues music, one might wonder how he found punk rock? “It's pretty geographically isolated here, so in the pre-internet days it was hard to find new music, and so I would just sort of seek out these sounds, and kind of became aware of punk rock, hip hop, and hardcore, electronic noise music… Punk music definitely called out to me because it didn't seem all that different to a lot of country music. It's just sped up a little bit and you're kind of using three chords to put forth a story, and so I really grew to like it a lot, and a band like Bad Religion, for instance, I mean, that's heavy stuff – he's writing about real issues and it's pretty cerebral as far as punk music goes, and it made me think that there's not really any limits on anything.”

William Elliot Whitmore will be playing the following dates:

Saturday 23 March - Mojo's Bar, Fremantle WA
Sunday 24 March - Enigma Bar, Adelaide SA
Tuesday 26 March - Corner Hotel, Melbourne VIC
Wednesday 27 March - Annandale Hotel, Sydney NSW