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Unique American singer/songwriter Michelle Shocked returns to the Canberra School of Music on Tuesday, 19 March.

On her first tour of Australia last year, Shocked was accompanied onstage by her father, highlighting songs from her albums The Texas Campfire Tapes and Short Sharp Shocked. On this tour she will perform material primarily from her most recent LP Captain Swing, accompanied by Paul Kelly’s band, The Messengers.

Michelle introduces herself: “I was born in “Dollars, Taxes,” in 1962. I spent my years travelling around Army bases until 1977…”

“At 16 I ran away from home and in 1979, I went to live in Dallas with my father. I had always spent my summers with him going to bluegrass festivals and back porch picking sessions. This was my first introduction to music beyond the fundamentalist environment of my mother’s house, and in his small record collection I first heard Austin outlaw Guy Clark and rebel songwriter Randy Newman, country bluesmen Leadbelly [sic] and Big Bill Broonzy, and the living underground folk music of middle America’s Norman and Nancy Blake, Doc Watson, and Hot Rize. Two years in Austin (‘81-‘83) provided the catalyst for my songwriting.

“I did not adjust well to Reagan’s America. From my first days as a runaway, I continued to exist close to the edges of homelessness. In San Francisco I joined ranks with ‘squatters’ who settled into warehoused buildings left vacant by real estate speculators. In New York and Amsterdam my involvement grew as I saw hope for solutions to developers’ ‘redlined’ ghettoes. While I was an activist in the squatter’s movement. I learned that I had an album that was number 26 on the UK independent charts.

“In May 1986 I had worked as a volunteer at the Kerrville Folk Festival. An English chap by the name of Pete Lawrence requested a few of the tunes he’d heard me play at a campfire the night before, which I recorded then into his Sony Walkman. He released it on his Cooking Vinyl label as an album called The Texas Campfire Tapes and I was invited to London for a short tour in January 1987…it went to number one within a few weeks…

“This success created the opportunity to record for PolyGram Records and in 1988 a second album, Short Sharp Shocked, was released…

Captain Swing ups the ante. The anxieties of my first encounter with a studio made me hold very tight on the creative reins… The styles seems to flow like the Mississippi River…”