REBECCA MOORE
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with Melody Pool
Sunday, May 12, 2 - 5pm
Bombie Bar, Coalcliff Surf Life Saving Club
Tickets: $10
Singer songwriter Rebecca Moore says her musical influences can be traced to singalongs during holidays at her grandparents' house at Guerilla Bay, near Batemans Bay on the Far South Coast.
"A lot of my aunts and uncles were musicians and we used to hang out around the campfire and sing Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Rolling Stones and all those classic rock songs," she says.
Moore describes her music as a blend of folk, rock and blues.
"My biggest musical influences are Led Zeppelin and Joni Mitchell and Stevie Nicks," she says.
"I love the songwriting sensibilities of folk but also I love rock music - Pearl Jam and bands like that - so I try to incorporate the two.
"And I really love the blues as well. I do a lot of trad blues - Leadbelly and Eddie Boyd and Bill Monroe - he wrote Rocky Road Blues, which is on my album, it started out as bluegrass."
Moore has been based in the Illawarra for the past year and is enjoying laying roots after enjoying the gypsy life for a number of years, travelling the country performing music while living out of a caravan.
"From 19 onwards I started touring and playing anywhere - pubs, clubs, festivals and I pretty much haven't done anything else since then," she says.
"It's pretty much all I want to do with my life. I am totally happy playing music full time."
The travelling life has also suited Moore's songwriting and many of her songs were inspired by the landscape of places she has visited.
"I have a really strong connection with the land and nature and a lot of my songs come from a sense of place, so I write about where I have been," she says.
"The desert really affects my writing quite strongly and places like the Pink Lake in Esperance.
"I really get a spiritual musical connection to beautiful, natural places.
"I did a season up at Guthega and wrote some beautiful songs up there. There's something about it that really inspires me creatively."
In recent years Moore has combined her love of music with another great passion in her life, raising funds for orphaned Burmese children. She has organised several benefit concerts and collects money at all of her own shows. So far she has raised almost $20,000.
"The children that our money goes to all lost their families in a big cyclone in 2008. It struck me so deeply that one day they could be living with their families and the next completely orphaned - they had no-one and had gone through such a traumatic experience."