One of the most innovative and constantly in demand artists on the thriving Australian music scene (as she has been for the past decade), Melinda Schneider began performing on stage at the tender age of three, with her mother - the Queen of Australian Yodelling, Mary Schneider - before entering a recording studio for the first time at the age of eight.
Despite this early taste of stardom, it would be another 20 years before the Sydney native released her debut LP, My Oxygen, in 2000 - the first of six critically-acclaimed albums (not including compilations) that have also resulted in a number of recognised industry awards.
In 2003, for example, Ms. Schneider took home the coveted Golden Guitar for Female Vocalist Of The Year (for her signature tune, The Story Of My Life) and two years later, her third record, Family Tree, was named Album of the Year at the same event.
Melinda Schneider: Finding Her Own Way
"Music was in my blood; I couldn't deny it, although I didn’t actually record my first album until I was 28," admits Melinda, who is probably best-known today as a hit songwriter. "I was a bit of a late-starter, I think, because I came from a show business family - my mum was most well-known for her yodelling albums.
"She’s amazing at that and I admire her for it, but I didn’t want to yodel – it wasn’t my passion. It took me a long time to kind of get my head around that because I think there was a lot of expectation from her fans - and country fans in general - when I was a kid, that I yodel like her and people still expect me to do it.
"They still ask me to do it all the time and even though I can yodel, I don’t really do it much - I don’t particularly love it. So I think it took me many years to reconcile all of that and work through it and figure out what my truth was as a writer and an artist and what I wanted to stand for."
Melinda Schneider: Music with an Edge
Suite101: Your sound reminds me of Lucinda Williams, in that it seems to have a bit of an edge...
"Yeah, there is at times... I love Lucinda Williams - that album, Essence, I absolutely adore - but yeah, I love those more Americana artists and Ricky Skaggs is my favourite bluegrass artist. He’s actually just recorded one of my songs, called I'm Awake Now, so I’m thrilled about that."
Suite101: So you would describe your music as more Americana than straight-up country?
"Yeah, probably. It’s probably got more bluegrass influences and Americana influences than country, but I have done some very country stuff as well - I’ve done a whole cross-section. I think country’s a very broad banner.
"I’ve done full-on kind of George Jones country tracks and then some real bluegrass and more blues-orientated, like old R&B kind of stuff, so I like to keep it versatile. I don’t like to have that same sound on the whole album and that comes from the songs I write - it just depends on the songs."
Melinda Schneider: Happy at Home
Despite being an increasingly popular genre Down Under (annual visits by the likes of Alan Jackson and Brooks & Dunn are becoming commonplace), the number of Australian country singers relocating to Nashville hoping to make it big stateside seems to have increased tenfold in the last few years, perhaps due in no small part to the groundbreaking achievements of Mr. Nicole Kidman, Keith Urban.
"I’ve been over to Nashville probably a couple of times a year for the last 15 years, I guess, to write and record," explains Melinda, who co-wrote Sometimes it Takes Balls to be a Woman with Elizabeth Cook. "I’ve recorded three of my albums over there, so yeah, I’ve done a lot of work in Nashville.
"I love living here, so I don’t think I would actually want to base myself over there – I made that decision quite a few years ago - but I think this new stage show that I’ve written is going to take me overseas a lot.
"We’ve got some interest out of the UK, for me to do a regional tour early next year with the Doris Day show and I think that’s really going to get me out of Australia a lot, it seems, so I’m looking forward to that."
Melinda Schneider on the Nashville Sound
Suite101: How does Australian country differ from Nashville country?
"I prefer our country music because I think Nashville has become very generic now – it wouldn’t matter who’s actually singing the songs. The artists are pretty much interchangeable a lot of the time, unless they’re artists like Alan Jackson, who I love - you know Brad Paisley and people who are a little more traditional.
"The Nashville country that’s coming out with a lot of the younger artists, it’s not even country, it’s pop – it’s '80s rock, really, that just, to me, all sounds the same. I love George Jones, I love Brad Paisley and Alan Jackson and the more traditional country, which is what we do a lot of here.
"It hasn’t all turned pop here, which I like, and we’ve got a lot of bluegrass, which is one of my favourite styles of music. We have a lot of that and there is a market for it and a lot of Americans when I tell them that, get excited - the purists. They like the fact that we’re keeping to the real roots of it."
Melinda Schneider on Keith Urban
Suite101: Do you think then that most Australians, with the exception of Keith Urban, have had a hard time breaking America because their music is just "too country?"
"Well, if you go to Nashville and you want to be a huge star, you’ve got to play by their rules. If you’re snapped up by a major label over there, they’ll pretty much govern what you have to record. You don’t have too much of a say in it and that wouldn’t fit well with me because I write my own stuff and I want to make my own statements.
"I wouldn’t want to be told what I had to record and not believe in it; I’d have to believe in it. So there haven’t really been... apart from Keith Urban and he was there for 13 years before anything happened to him – he really paid his dues. Apart from Keith, there’s no one from here who’s really made it big over there. It’s a very very hard area to break into."
Suite101: And I guess Keith Urban's not really traditional country...
"No, he’s not really. He’s more like Bryan Adams or someone like that, I think."
Melinda Schneider: Australian Country Star
Though the country music industry in Australia is an ever-expanding multi-million dollar business, with new and exciting artists emerging all the time, many people abroad still seem surprised to learn that this most American of genres has found an audience at all in the land that gave us Kylie Minogue and INXS.
"I don’t know..." muses Melinda, mulling over the reason why Australian country seems to be less well-known in other countries - though there are signs that that is changing. "Maybe because country music started in America, although it has got a lot of influences in Irish folk music and bluegrass - but it’s more of an American thing.
"I think in the late '40s/early ‘50s, there was always a country song on the radio - a little bit of yodel and everything - and it was very, very popular. It’s always been here, but they were influences from America and maybe people don’t associate us with having American influences, but of course we do – there’s a McDonald’s on every street corner!"
Adrian Peel - Adrian is an English freelance writer and journalist currently living in Mexico. Over the past eight years, he has had articles, features ...
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