![]() He also called it "one of two favorite songs on the album". It was probably the most versions of any songto get it right". “Dancing on a pier and doing the most un-Tasman Keith shit possible.Ryan Tedder stated that "'Counting Stars' came about as an idea. “If I didn’t go through what I did go through, sitting in those hotel rooms, I probably wouldn’t be comfortable within myself to step out the gate with Love Too Soon,” he laughs. The album’s lead single is a pop-tinged break-up song called Love Too Soon, in which Keith wears his heart on his sleeve singing about heartbreak over a soaring, dance-down-the-street beat.įor a rapper who made his name writing the fiercest and most incisive bars, it was a curveball – one that he only had the guts to release because of those challenging nights alone on tour. There are moments of joy and levity, including the lovestruck Jessica Maubouy collaboration Heaven With U. Because it had always been there.”īut A Colour Undone isn’t only the story of Keith’s dark night of the soul. “I think I was very ready to deal with it then. “I read something a few weeks ago about how you start to face trauma and you’re ready for it,” he reflects. “That was the first time when death has come up in my life where I was like, ‘OK, I have to sit here, because I have nothing going on, and face it,” he says. It wasn’t Keith’s first experience with grief, but with the pandemic pausing the music career that had been keeping him so busy, he was no longer able to distract himself from his feelings with work. Keith’s older cousin, known affectionately as Knoxy, passed away suddenly from a heart condition. The same year, things started to come to a head in his personal life. Keith’s incisive lyrics got the attention of Midnight Oil and, in 2020, he was tapped to collaborate with the band on the Aria award-nominated track First Nation – a meeting that would eventually see him invited on tour. By 22, he’d moved back to Sydney and released his breakthrough EP, Mission Famous, in 2018. At 17, he made his first mixtape and drove around Bowraville selling it out of the boot of his mum’s station wagon. Rap quickly became the teenage Keith’s mode of expression. “I just think Australia wasn’t necessarily ready for what he had to say.” “I listen to some of his music today and I’m like, what a bar, or that line is incredible,” Keith says, reflecting on his father’s career. While his dad is now regarded as a pioneering figure in Australian hip-hop, at the time, it felt like there was a ceiling for artists of colour, stopping them from rising higher in the overwhelming white local scene. Hip-hop was already the family business: in the early aughts, his father was a rapper called Wire MC. They’d stay there for hours, happily writing and recording rhymes in a room that had egg cartons and foul-smelling carpet stuck on the wall for makeshift soundproofing. With little else to do in the tiny town, which Keith describes as “one main street, surrounded by a river”, he and his cousins would cram into the youth centre’s tiny recording studio. It was back in Bowraville that Keith first started making music. That return home allowed him to forge stronger connections with family – something he’s grateful for – but also exposed him to the cycles of incarceration and addiction that ensnared some of his cousins. Eventually, when Keith was 14, his parents took them back to Bowraville. He and his siblings shifted between inner-city public housing flats while his mum worked multiple jobs to keep them afloat. ![]() When he was eight, Keith and his immediate family moved to Sydney, where he became aware of “just how little money we had”. Keith remembers his childhood as fun and loving, but, he says, “there was also a lot of shit that happened”.ĭuring his early years in Bowraville, Keith was raised around a tight-knit network of aunts, uncles and cousins. That small town loomed large in his early music, as Keith used his bars to celebrate the old Aboriginal mission where he grew up as a site of pride and resistance – so that when his cousins Googled their hometown, the search engine would spit out something other than the shameful murder of three Indigenous children in the 1990s. While he now lives in Sydney’s inner west, in an apartment above the cafe where we’re having coffee, Keith spent much of his early life in Bowraville on the NSW mid-north coast. And with his debut album out this week, Keith’s star is only set to rise. The 26-year-old has spent the last few years releasing serious, sharp and whip-smart raps that have earned National Indigenous Music award nominations and been championed by youth radio station Triple J (as well as catching the ear of one Peter Garrett). But if you don’t know the name Tasman Keith yet, odds are you will soon.
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