Mick Peaker

About the Artist

Mick Peaker is a folk/rock singer-songwriter... with a twist of country, based on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia. He bought his first guitar at nineteen, an Epiphone acoustic, and wrote his first song on it that same year. Nearly three decades on, it's still the guitar he writes with, the instrument behind every song he has ever written. One memory stands above the rest. At seven or eight years old, he wore out his parents' cassette tape of Simon & Garfunkel's Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., playing it over and over. Even without fully understanding what the songs were about, he felt the emotion of the stories. That kind of accessible, wordless connection is what he has spent the decades since trying to create for others. Simon & Garfunkel, The Eagles, Crosby, Stills & Nash, and The Beatles shaped his ear growing up, and their close vocal harmonies left a lasting impression, one he pays tribute to in his own recordings. His early years looked different from most. Raised largely on the mission field in Papua New Guinea, where his father worked as a pilot, Mick spent his childhood surrounded by choir and communal singing, an early, unstructured education in melody and voice. The family returned to Australia after his father was killed in a plane crash, a loss at a young age that shaped him long before he had the words to put it into song. Mick writes from his own life but deliberately leaves the specifics open, rarely explaining what a song is "about" so it can become whatever it needs to be for whoever is listening. That philosophy sits at the centre of his debut solo album, In the Shadows of Memories, thirty years in the making. Spanning songs written from the mid-90s to recent, the album moves through the full range of that journey, from the restless wanderlust of early songs like "A Lovely Name," with its imagery of eagles in flight and rivers running free, to the weight of grief, reflection, and hard-won resolve found in the album's later writing. It is a retrospective in the truest sense, snapshots of good times, regrets, joys, grief, lost loves, and lessons learned, gathered into a single, honest record of a life lived in song. Along the way, Mick released the EP Beginning the Dream in 1998, a co-write album After the Rain with Elizabeth Connolly in 2004, and fronted the band The Usual Suspects around Sydney's Northern Beaches through the mid to late 2000s. His third EP, One For The Road (2016), was recorded entirely analogue, no Pro-Tools, no computers, every step recorded, edited, and mixed by hand to 24-inch tape, on a guitar the engineer told him was once owned by Neil Young. Mick can't verify that, but it makes for a good story: acoustic folk/rock, recorded to tape, on Neil Young's guitar! In the Shadows of Memories is Mick Peaker's debut solo album, the culmination of songs finally finding their place.