Biography

In his native Australia, Adam Brand is a veritable superstar. Over the course of his 12-year career, he has earned three platinum and two gold albums, been nominated four times for Best Country Album by ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association), and won a dozen CMAAs (Country Music Awards of Australia) including multiple wins in the Song of the Year and Male Vocalist of the Year categories. But Adam Brand is now taking on Nashville, and here, he’s just getting started. “I’m under no illusions,” Brand says. “I’m a brand new artist. I’ve got to earn my spot and pay my dues, and I really thought about that long and hard before I came here, and made sure I was prepared for that challenge. It’s actually very motivating—it’s a new lease on life.”
Brand’s story begins in the remote city of Perth in Western Australia, where music connected Adam and his family to the world at large. His father was a singer and huge Elvis Presley fan, while his mother exposed Adam to Kris Kristofferson, Roy Orbison, and the Everly Brothers. “I was very much soaked in that as a baby,” Brand says. At age 10, he picked up the drum sticks and went on to play percussion in the church band, where he was introduced to gospel and developed his lifelong love of rhythm. As a teen, Brand discovered AC/DC, Bruce Springsteen, John Mellencamp, and Fleetwood Mac. Around that time, he started his first band with some friends, and when they were unable to find a bass player or lead singer, Brand stepped into both roles and found that he liked being up front. “You almost don’t choose to be a singer, it chooses you, and it’s something you have to do,” Brand says.
But it wasn’t until the mid-‘90s that Brand’s true calling in music revealed itself. “I was watching TV and this ad comes on, and this guy in a black hat says, ‘So you think country music’s boring?’ And there’s a big explosion of lights and he’s jumping through the air. ‘So you think it’s quiet and reserved?’ And it cuts to a shot of him smashing guitars. I had no idea who it was, but I was going to that concert. Then I saw that concert and thought, ‘Yeah, that’s what I want to do.’” Of course, the man in the black hat was Garth Brooks, who turned Brand on to the wave of contemporary country that had, unbeknownst to Brand, been sweeping the United States.
Up to that point, Brand had worked a smattering of jobs, “Always swapping and changing, ‘cause nothing was ever really satisfying.” He’d worked as a dental technician, in the family car business, and at the time was operating a sign-writing business, while continuing to play music for fun. “I remember it clearly,” Adam says, “I was standing in the kitchen stirring some soup, when I was struck with the thought, ‘If I don’t do something I really love, then this is going to be my life forever.’” He wasted no time, then, in pursuing what he really loved—country music. Three weeks later, he had sold his business, and within a month had recorded a demo with a local producer. That was September. By April he’d been offered a publishing deal, and within the year had scored his record deal.
In 1999, Brand began making songwriting trips to Nashville, visiting two or three times a year. “I found that every time I came here, I’d get really motivated and inspired and then I’d grow and I’d learn. I soaked up like a sponge the energy of the music and the industry.” In the back of his mind, Adam always dreamed of pursuing opportunities in Nashville, but felt that would have meant sacrificing his career in Australia. “I couldn’t put a foot in both camps and expect it to work,” he explains. So when he was offered the record deal that would align him with Arista Nashville, Brand was forced to make a difficult choice.
“Do I move away, leave behind a very safe, secure career and life, and move completely to the other side of the world away from family and friends to go back to the beginning of my career and start again?” Brand asked himself. “It was a big, life-changing decision—and a big gamble. But it’s a gamble I had to take.” Brand nicely sums up this emotional struggle in the song “Wonderin’,” which he wrote for his U.S. debut album, with the lines, “Don’t wanna wake up one day countin’ chances that I missed, wishing I’d have done the things that I never did/So watch me try, cause I ain’t gonna die wonderin’.”
“What I want to write and what I want to sing on stage are the same things I want to hear when I’m sitting in the audience listening,” Brand says. “That’s the song that makes me want to squeeze the hand of my wife sitting next to me, or the song that makes me want to stand on my seat and pump my fist in the air. Every song I write has got to stir an emotional reaction; otherwise I feel like we’re writing jingles or ditties. I’m always looking for ways to go deeper, getting closer to the bone with every song I write.”
On his forthcoming album, Adam Brand is not only making a statement to America—“This is me, these are my songs, this is my shot,” he says—but he’s beginning to make a life here as well. In some ways, it’s been an adjustment. “The first thing that smacked me in the head was that there’s country on the radio everywhere you go. You tune that dial and there’s country coming out of it somewhere,” he says. “The second thing was the sheer size of the country music industry,” which he first got a sense of at his first CMA Music Festival, taking in the 40,000 to 50,000 fans gathered for the event. “But country fans all come from the same gene pool,” Brand says. “They’re loyal, they’re wonderful, they’re excitable, they’re real. And thank God for it. It’s actually a really nice constant to be able to come over here and see these guys are just like the guys at home.”
So while he may feel like a big fish leaving a small pond for a much, much larger one, Adam Brand is ready to step up to the challenge. “For the first few years coming over here I was overwhelmed, and I didn’t feel like I was ready,” Brand says. “So I just kept on coming over here and learning, and kept on releasing music and touring back home. I’ve probably done over a thousand gigs in my career. But all that has felt like an apprenticeship that’s got me to the point that I can be here now.”