Sitting down with country music duo The Sunny Cowgirls out at the Deni Ute Muster this year, Mallory finds out more about the Victorian group’s latest album, Here We Go, their experiences on the road and more.
A favourite amongst the crowd, this was The Sunny Cowgirls eighth appearance and fourth consecutive year at the Deni Ute Muster. They’re hoping too they will be asked back next year. “They’re a good crowd,” Celeste says. “We always feel very welcomed at Deni so we love coming here every year.”
Having been so many times, they would have seen the Muster grow and change over the years. Sophie says, “[It’s getting] bigger and better. More people are hearing about it and a lot of people are coming in from the cities now, which is good because it opens their eyes to the country life and the Utes.” Celeste added, “[It would be an experience] especially if you’re from the city. It’d be a real eye opener.”
Their song that best describes the Deni Ute Muster using a title of one of their songs has to be “Rev It Up” – a song written especially for the Muster itself. The duo debuted the song, and two others, for the first time during the weekend.
“We are really excited about ‘Rev It Up,’” Sophie says. “Because, obviously, it’s about the Deni Ute Muster and everyone here will be able to relate to it, it’ll be really interesting to hear the reaction and we’re really excited to give it a whirl!”
I questioned the ‘bogans in boots’ lyric. “We’re calling ourselves bogans as well. We’ve all got an inner bogan!” Sophie laughed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mtba9ET-JIs
The song comes off their latest album, Here We Go. “It’s up and happy and positive,” Celeste says. “There’s only a couple of slow songs on there, which we tend to do. We like to keep things not too doom and gloomy. So, [it’s] a bit of a party album [with the] same sort of themes as partying, working, drinking, family and friends.”
The album release also coincided with Sophie’s birthday. They went on to say they went out for dinner the night before, opening presents before making the drive over to Deni. Celeste says she bought Sophie The Chase board game – they both felt they missed the opportunity to tell Andrew O’Keefe, the host of The Chase television show, on which the board game is based, having spoken to him on Sunrise that morning. Sophie added, “I got heaps of stuff. My Mum lives in Perth, so she sent over lots of little things that mothers do for daughters. It was lovely.”
Perhaps the best birthday present of all though was the album kicking Keith Urban off the #1 spot on the charts during its first day of release. Celeste says, “We weren’t really expecting it. We weren’t expecting number one. We knew that Keith has a new album out – so it’s very cool.”
“We’re stoked, really excited,” Sophie added. “We haven’t had an original album out in about four years now. It was nice to get back onto the iTunes chart and see our original songs doing well.”
Their latest single, “Cowboy”, is a bit tongue and cheek, written by Celeste, about wanting to find a cowboy who looks like Chris Hemsworth. “It’s a bit of a fun song. We’re just taking the mickey out of ourselves! It’s a bit of a laugh!” Celeste adds, “We did a film clip for it and we don’t mind having a bit of laugh at our own expense. It’s pretty funny.” Sophie added they had tagged Chris on Twitter to get him to appear in the music video, but doesn’t think he saw it.
The duo are about to hit the road on a national tour now up through to December, something they haven’t done on their own since 2013. The last time they toured was with Adam Harvey last year. Another new thing this time around is Celeste’s solo album, Keeping Me Here, released late last year; they’ll be adding one or two songs off the album to their set list – something Sophie remarked she still has to learn.
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