Singer-songwriter Ash Grunwald was last in Wollongong for the 2015 Yours & Owls Festival, freshly after chopping off his signature dreadlocks.
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A lot has happened for the 40-year-old since then.
He went through an emergency appendix removal, a recovery trip to Bali which changed his life and some studio time in the US which saw him working with music legends on his upcoming album.
“All the guys in band have long Wikipedia’s, they’re sort of part of blues and rock history,” Grunwald said.
“The bass player Reggie McBride, he started out with Stevie Wonder … The keyboard player Barry Goldberg was Bob Dylan’s keyboard player on the famous Newport Jazz Festival incident when Dylan first went electric. People were fighting and booing, someone cut the cord on his keyboard.”
Grunwald said he found himself in the ironic position of wanting these musical greats to “hurry up” and stop talking so they could get on with recording.
“But the stories were phenomenal so it was a ‘catch 22’, it was cool,” he laughed.
It was fate that Grunwald met these men.
He’s long been into crowdfunding to source money to make his albums and one fan who pledged on two of his records happened to be a US producer.
“He flew me over and said he’s get all these top level guests and wanted to make an album,” he said.
“It was quite surreal. He flew me over there and then before I knew it I was recording with these heavy cats. Completely different to anything I’ve ever done.”
This year has signaled a change of pace for Grunwald.
“I’m having a semi-kind of quiet year just doing selective gigs and hanging out,” he said. “I’ve just been going so hard for so long … it’s probably better musically to be like that.”
As part of his semi-quite year the singer-songwriter has also relocated to Bali, living the dream with his family and chasing waves.
“It’s always been in the back of the mind,” he said. “We just thought ‘stuff it, lets move here for a while’.”
“It’s never mattered where I live in Australia because I’m always touring, as long as I’m near an airport.”
Grunwald won’t be without mates as he says Aussie’s living in Indonesia is widely accepted and is always bumping into people through music and surfing.
Ash Grunwald will return to the Illawarra on the Queen’s Birthday long weekend to “sing-along” the house down at Waves in Towradgi, June 12
For tickets visit: www.moshtix.com.au