TRULY great songs are able to be stripped back to just a singer and guitar, without sound engineering, backing vocals and additional instruments and still capture a listening audience.

Last Friday night at the 2NVR studios singer/songwriter Georgia Cortes Rayner played her album ‘The Past is a Passenger’ from the first song to the last to a live studio and radio audience, just her and a guitar, and the result was indeed truly great.

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2NVR’s Ceri Wrobel told News Of The Area, “The monthly Studio 3 format at Nambucca Valley Radio where an artist performs two sets live to air is not new, however combining the event with an album launch was a first for us.”

A larger than usual studio audience got comfortable and sat transfixed as Georgia worked through twelve lovingly crafted songs and told the story behind each one.

Knowing the stories up front made the performance of each song all the richer to listen to and the range of emotions covered the spectrum.

There were times when you wanted to laugh with her, cry, or leave your seat and give her a hug.

Songs on the album do not follow a specific theme other than being born from Georgia’s own life and feelings, however the name of the album somehow sews the songs together based on Georgia’s belief that our ancestors, their spirit, their genes, their memories and their lived experiences travel in us.

Georgia drives this point home on ‘Make Believe’, a song about the father she never knew, where sadness gives way to a love that seems actually tangible in the lyrics.

In the almost anthem-like ballad, ‘Flame’, Georgia tells of her experience in the 2019 bushfires and the anger in that song is balanced out by an equal amount of joy and fun delivered in the song Pineapple Ridge.

Among the studio audience on Friday night were a number of well known Mid North Coast musicians such as Dee Bee Bishop, Julie Kovendy, Snez, and the producer of the album Stewart Peters, demonstrating the friendship and respect Georgia’s peers have for her and the application to her craft.

Having called Scotts Head home for fourteen years, Georgia Cortes Rayner is well and truly a local of the Mid North Coast and it was hard not to feel a bit of pride on Friday night in the knowledge that these songs are by one of us and, in a way, being there on Friday night made us also passengers on Georgia’s journey.

By Mick BIRTLES