More than three decades after Heaven Knows helped make him one of Australia’s most recognisable voices, Rick Price is still finding new reasons to make music while embracing the songs that have become the soundtrack to generations.
Heaven Knows and Not A Day Goes By are songs attached to first loves, long drives, family homes and chapters of life that can come rushing back with the opening few notes.
More than three decades after Price became one of the defining Australian voices of the early 1990s, those songs continue to travel.
Price is back on the road with his Call On Me Tour, bringing with him the hits, deeper cuts, stories and an enthusiasm for music that has survived an industry transformed almost beyond recognition.
Long before the records, radio hits and international career, there was country Queensland growing up in Beaudesert, Price learned his craft playing in a family band at community halls scattered throughout the small farming districts surrounding the town.
“That was my apprenticeship into music,” Price said.
His brother, sister, uncles and aunties all played, with music becoming an almost constant presence throughout his childhood.
“We lived and breathed music,” he said.
“We’d rehearse all week in the living room and then we’d play at the dance halls on the weekend.”
Dreaming of the radio
Price dreamed big as a boy with Michael Jackson and the great Motown acts among his heroes, but his own ambition could ultimately be reduced to something wonderfully simple.
He wanted to hear one of his songs on the radio.
“I achieved the thing I was trying to do,” he said.
“That’s all I ever wanted to do when I was a kid. I just wanted to get on the radio.”
Today, Price can look into an audience and see multiple generations singing along.
“I’ve had two, three generations of people at my shows and they know my songs and that is wild,” he said.
That staying power was something Price always hoped to achieve admitting he wanted to write hit songs, not simply in the commercial sense, but songs good enough to be played repeatedly and eventually become part of somebody’s personal soundtrack.
“You can’t sit down and say, right, now I’m going to write that hit song,” he said.
“You just pour your enthusiasm into every songwriting session and some songs turn out to be gems and they live on for a long time and others don’t.
“No one really knows where songs come from.”
“Everyone stopped talking and listened to her because it was so powerful.”
Strip away the technology, trends and production and, for Price, music still comes back to storytelling.
“I realise first and foremost I’m a storyteller,” he said.
“That’s what I’m doing on that stage.”
Growing older with the audience
Longevity is a rare commodity in the music industry and Price is modest about his own career, describing his success as “fairly moderate” compared with some artists but what he treasures is that it lasted.
“I’ve been able to stay around for a long time,” he said.
“I feel like I’ve been afforded that luxury of being able to grow old in front of my audience and to go out and to grow with them.”
The Call On Me Tour brings all those strands together.
