I’m chuffed to say my song EVERY WAKING HOUR from Nambucca Fables has been selected as a semi-finalist in the International Songwriting Competition for 2023.

As many of you know, the songs of Nambucca Fables are stories of love n loss dedicated to my Mum, Dulcie Moldre. I reckon she’d be chuffed too.

Have a listen to Every Waking Hour from Nambucca Fables on Bandcamp – there’s a only a few copies left on deluxe gatefold vinyl.

“Mark Moldre might just be the best Australian songwriter you’ve never heard of. Nambucca Fables shows that he should be on your radar.” JEFF JENKINS/RHYTHMS MAGAZINE

Ahead of his full-band show at Moshpit in Sydney on November 11th, Mark Moldre releases the video for ‘Homecoming’, the latest single from his new fourth solo album Nambucca Fables. One of the highlights of the new album, ‘Homecoming’ features the nostalgic pull of Michael Bridges‘ violin alongside the resonant twang of Moldre’s guitar, the sprightly country shuffle and strum of the verses giving way to the compelling chorus melody as Moldre sings impressionistic lines such as, ‘branches lay like broken bones, ain’t no saviours rushing in, just radiation suffering, crescent moon recording everything.’

“The various themes of the album morph into a train trip through towns I remember as a child like Macksville and Kempsey,” says Moldre of the song. “Lyrics blur like a dream as settings, thoughts and faces join, meld, seperate and slip away. Clarity only lasts a second and then goes out of focus. Some memories are hard to catch.” In the accompanying video for ‘Homecoming’, Moldre invites you into his own home – populated by books, artefacts and family memories.

“Singing at home is where all of these songs begin and end to be honest – so it seemed like the logical location for this clip,” explains Moldre. “I also recently took a trip to Nambucca Heads, the town of my mother’s birth, the title inspiration for my recent album and the place of many a family holiday, I took a little footage on the way which is included in the clip…revisiting all those memories is a Homecoming of sorts.”

Backseat Mafia premiered the single and had this to say: “This is classic Moldre territory: an ability to sonically capture feelings and memories like an aural photograph, framed in a beautiful setting and delivered with a raw naked emotion that lingers in your mind for an eternity.” Read the post in full HERE

MARK MOLDRE RELEASES NEW SINGLE / VIDEO “DREAM DECAY“

PLUS SPECIAL NON-ALBUM B-SIDE ‘ABSOLUTION’

“[Mark] has crafted a record that’s a perfect middle-of-the-night companion. A record that will make you forget your insomnia, and revel in its dark beauty and clever instrumentation.”
Jeff Jenkins – Rhythms

LISTEN TO DREAM DECAY/ABSOLUTION HERE

Ahead of his Sydney full-band album launch at the Golden Barley Hotel on June 24th, Mark Moldre releases ‘Dream Decay’, the third single from his new album Nambucca Fables.

Fragments of whispered hospital conversations, morphine induced hallucinations and waking dreams swirl and collide to make up the lyricism of ‘Dream Decay‘.

“Reality and the 2am subconscious smash into each other to create a disjointed, nonsensical vision from deep in the night.” – “This is a Dream Decay. Wake up, I don’t wanna stay,” says Mark, expanding on the surreal nature of the song.

“One of the tracks on the album is ‘Dream Decay’, which is a surreal trip through the night. Now Moldre has a music video to accompany the song and give us a surreal trip for daytime, in which Moldre meets his younger self and – maybe – brings some of that parallel dimension of time into his present existence. It is whimsical and slightly unsettling with an undercurrent of something close to joy, which means it’s the perfect accompaniment to the song.” Sunburnt Country Music

Also released is a special non-album track called ‘Absolution‘ which was recorded early during the Nambucca Fables sessions, but as Mark explains, “in the final track listing it felt a little out of place. I think it also felt a little too close to the bone for me personally, lyrically raw and the first song I wrote after losing my Mother. It’s satisfying to see it get a home here as the perfect foil to ‘Dream Decay’.”

From an atmospheric and intimate banjo-led beginning, the song gently sways through fractured folk as backing vocals add to the hymn-like quality of the psychedelic, sparse and textured music.  

You can download both tracks free of charge at Bandcamp

NAMBUCCA FABLES ALBUM LAUNCHES

SAT JUNE 24TH 8PM – THE GOLDEN BARLEY, ENMORE, SYDNEY
W/ RESTLESS LEG
FB EVENT

SUN JULY 9TH 2-4PM – LINK & PIN, WOY WOY, CENTRAL COAST
W/ THE FINALISTS
FB EVENT

BOTH SHOWS FREE ENTRY

Listen/read recent interviews:

VIDEO PREMIERE – Mark Moldre’s ‘Dream Decay’
SUNBURNT COUNTRY MUSIC – Mark Moldre and his Nambucca Fables
3RRR – THE AUSTRALIAN MOOD
MELODY MENU – Revisiting Myths and Memories of Nambucca Heads

Purchase Nambucca Fables on Deluxe Gatefold Vinyl, CD and Digital HERE

Finally I’d like to say a personal thank you to all those that attended Bronte’s Fight : A Fundraiser. We raised $4,869 at the show. The following week we raised another $2596 from people who wanted to come to the gig but couldn’t make it. So a whopping $7465 goes towards my daughters cancer treatment and her living expenses during this difficult battle. Special thanks to – Jamie Hutchings for coordinating the whole event, Marc Lynch for the poster art, Chris Familton for looking after publicity, Jadey O’Regan for looking after the door and merch sales, the Petersham Bowling Club and to all the bands – The Finalists, Joeys Coop, The Gin Palace and Infinity Broke. Our hearts were full by the nights end.

Pic by Jared Harrison

Howdy folks

Welcome to May. We’re getting a cold blast and huge swells here on the Central Coast of NSW.

There’s been some news behind the scenes at Moldre HQ (ie my currently very cold music room at home) and I’d like to give you all the latest. There’s a fair amount of info here, I hope you can make it to the end.

RADIO

Nambucca Fables has been receiving radio play across the continent – it was also one of the featured albums on 2serFM a couple of weeks ago. Double J, FBi, ABC, 3RRR and 4ZZZ to name but a few have all been featuring different tracks. Thanks to all the stations for their support. You can listen to a couple of interviews online at the links below. I also had the privilege to chat with POST TO WIRE for their “6 Strings Q+A”.

2serFM The Outpost
3WAYFM Guided By Wire 27-4-23
Antipodes Radio
POST TO WIRE: SIX STRINGS

REVIEWS

Very occasionally a review comes along that makes you feel completely understood. Reviews like this one in RHYTHMS MAGAZINE make this whole music-making malarkey worthwhile. Special thanks to Jeff Jenkins.

MARK MOLDRE

Nambucca Fables (Yellow Moon Records)

“The worst thing in the world,” said F. Scott Fitzgerald, “is to try to sleep and not to.”

Four years after his last album, Fever Dreams, Mark Moldre’s mind remains ruffled, his pillow restless. He writes songs about the early hours, when your brain won’t switch off and thoughts are ringing in your head.

In the first single from his fourth solo album, Moldre confides:

“Every waking hour I’m just dyin’ to go back to sleep.” In ‘This Little Town’, he sings about “the sweet relief of sleep” while in ‘Ghost Guitar’ he is “deep in the night”. Then there’s the songs ‘Wisteria Sleeps’ and ‘Dream Decay’. “Wake up, I don’t want to stay”, he declares.

Sounds bleak, but it’s not.

Moldre – who’s based in Wamberal in NSW – has crafted a record that’s a perfect middle-of-the-night companion. A record that will make you forget your insomnia, and revel in its dark beauty and clever instrumentation, which will have you discovering something new with every listen.

The setting is rustic, the songs are robust. Nambucca Fables is left-of-centre but there’s something here for everyone, with songs about love, loss, longing, memories, dreams and home. They will linger long in your mind, like ‘New Suit’, where the singer tells the moving story of his mother’s funeral. He’s awkwardly wearing his new suit, feeling numb as the fellow mourners talk to him, but then he repeats the song’s key line:

“Your love will live for evermore.”

It’s glorious.

Mark Moldre might just be the best Australian songwriter you’ve never heard of. Nambucca Fables shows that he should be on your radar.

JEFF JENKINS

You can also check out this review from across the other side of the globe courtesy of UKAmericana

YOU CAN PURCHASE NAMBUCCA FABLES HERE

SHOWS

First up, many of you may already know (if you’ve been hovering around the socials) that my eldest daughter, Bronte, was diagnosed with a rare and hard to treat form of breast cancer at the tender age of 21. You can read more details about that at her GoFundMe page. We’ve experienced a difficult few months since her diagnosis last November. It looks as though her treatment will continue well into 2024. Wonderfully, a few of my musical friends have banded together and organised a fundraiser for all ages at the Petersham Bowling Club on Friday May 26th. The Finalists, Joeys Coop, The Gin Palace and Infinity Broke have all joined the lineup. What a beautiful thing. I’ll be playing a handful of songs too.

Tickets HERE
Facebook Event

Also I’ll be playing two shows to kick off the launch of Nambucca Fables in Sydney and on the Central Coast. Both shows are free of charge.

The Golden Barley Hotel ENMORE with our friends RESTLESS LEG on Saturday 24th June. Facebook Event

Link and Pin WOY WOY with our friends THE FINALISTS on Sunday 9th July 2-4PM. All ages. Facebook Event

NAMBUCCA COVERS

Finally, I am currently giving away a free bonus CD-R entitled “Nambucca Covers!” with every physical purchase of Nambucca Fables (CD or Vinyl) – until I run out. The songs were recorded at home during lockdowns – with most tracks being started with a guitar and vocal recorded live in one take around a single microphone. Then I added any instruments that I could find in my wardrobe. It includes 11 tracks featuring The Felice Brothers, Tom Waits, Howe Gelb, Ron Sexsmith, Robert Palmer, Big Thief, Sammy Fain, Neil Young, Elliot Smith and Loose Fur. It will only be available as a giveaway and will not be found on streaming services.

GRAB A BONUS CD-R WITH NAMBUCCA FABLES HERE

I think that pretty much covers all the current news. If you made it this far you have my thanks for being so attentive!

Go gently
Love
Mark

Nambucca Fables is an album steeped in beauty and sorrow, deep heartache and sweet remembrance.  

PURCHASE NAMBUCCA FABLES ON LTD ED VINYL, CD OR DIGITAL

A lot has happened in the intervening years since Mark released his last album Fever Dreams. Floods, fires and a pandemic descended, and just prior to that, on a devastating personal note, the sad and tragic loss of Mark’s mother.

A highly personal labour of love, the dozen songs on the album find the songwriter exploring and processing grief and loss, memory and nostalgia, dreams and hallucinations.  

There are flashbacks to childhood memories of towns and homes (Homecoming), an instrumental snapshot of his mother immersed in nature (The Absent Gardener), feeling like a ghost at her funeral (New Suit), the horror of Chernobyl and its parallels to the insidious advance of cancer (This Little Town), the incredible story of the return of a lost 1940s Tex Morton guitar (Ghost Guitar) and much more.

“Nambucca Heads was where my Mum was born and raised. Up until my mid teens my family would travel there at least once a year,” says Mark.

“As time has passed, and it’s been decades since I’ve returned, the place has taken on a mythical quality in my mind. Smells from the kitchen, fresh bread on the rustic timber dining table – that had been big enough to sit a family of 10. My grandfather’s ashtray on a stand that would spin when you pushed a button and the ash would disappear. His model train set and the room full of treasures and trinkets. The sounds and smells of chooks and the fowl mouthed cockatoo screeching in the backyard.”

Pic by Jared Harrison

In keeping with Mark’s holistic approach to his creativity – from the artwork to the videos, the songwriting and the music – the sound of the album is the perfect sonic canvas for his songs. 

The first single ‘Every Waking Hour‘ saw Mark’s lifetime of exploring the possibilities of the guitar in indie rock, jazz, power pop and beyond come to the fore on the song. Heroes like Nels Cline, Neil Young and Bill Frisell are omnipresent as Mark and his band create an exquisite blend of melodic Americana and indie pop-rock that descends into a frazzled, clattering heap as the song concludes.

“After grief, there is some kind of new balance… a new you,” Mark says of the song. “Damaged but somehow improved. A deeper understanding, more empathetic. Love finds new depths. Somehow you find you way out of that mist and into a new morning.”

On second single ‘New Suit‘ the intricate interplay between the guitars of Moldre and Jamie Hutchings (Bluebottle Kiss, Infinity Broke) provides the sonic mesh that holds the song together, the nuances providing fascinating musical details that exist at the intersection between intelligent pop songs, and hallucinogenic folk and country music. The song gradually swells and transforms from doubt and weariness to a kind of emphatic mantra with the cyclical and repeating line “Your love will live for evermore”. Even the darkest clouds have silver linings, eventually.

Right across Nambucca Fables, guitars jangle and rattle, soothe and disrupt as required, the rhythm section is constantly inventive in both traditional and more experimental styles and the use of violin, female backing vocals, banjo, melodica, Wurlitzer and Hammond organ, harmonica and more add beautiful organic textures.

TRACKLISTING

1. The Absent Gardener
2. Every Waking Hour
3. New Suit
4. This Little Town
5. Homecoming
6. Ghost Guitar
7. Kidnapping On A Train (Nambucca-Chernobyl 12:50pm)
8. Dream Decay
9. I Saw You Last Night
10. It Is What It Is
11. Wisteria Sleeps
12. A Tale Of Two Pities

STREAM OR PURCHASE NAMBUCCA FABLES

NSW singer-songwriter Mark Moldre releases ‘New Suit’ the second single from his forthcoming album, Nambucca Fables, due out April 14th.

“There is a quiet fortitude in the delivery and a melody and majestic framework that echoes songwriters as astute and eloquent as Moldre: Mark Oliver Everett from The Eels, Elvis Costello or Bruce Springsteen. This is a track that is heartbreakingly beautiful in its capture of loss and its quiet celebration of memory and love.”
Backseat Mafia

On the back of a highly successful crowdfunding campaign for his fourth solo album Nambucca Fables, Mark released his first new single ‘Every Waking Hour‘ (which premiered on Double J‘s Tower of Song with Henry Wagons and on Backseat Mafia), four years after his acclaimed album Fever Dreams. 

Now he reveals single number two, the wistful melodies and bittersweet jangle and sway of ‘New Suit‘.

Following on from the personal reflections that made up ‘Every Waking Hour‘, ‘New Suit’ poetically conveys the disorientation and psychological haze of experiencing his mother’s funeral. The song gradually swells and transforms from doubt and weariness to a kind of emphatic mantra with the cyclical and repeating line “Your love will live for evermore”. Even the darkest clouds have silver linings, eventually.

“You just want that day to end. You go through the motions. People speak to you and you don’t really hear what they’re saying. You become a ghost for a day, wandering from group to group of mourners but not really engaging. A grey hallucination in a New Suit.“

The intricate interplay between the guitars of Moldre and Jamie Hutchings provide the sonic mesh that holds the song together, the nuances providing fascinating musical details that exist at the intersection between intelligent pop songs, and hallucinogenic folk and country music.

The song’s monochromatic video clip poignantly and perfectly conveys that sense of loneliness and dislocation that hangs heavy in the air ahead of final farewells.

Listen to New Suit HERE

Pre-order Mark Moldre’s upcoming album Nambucca Fables on LTD Edition Gatefold vinyl, CD and digital HERE. 

On the back of a highly successful crowdfunding campaign for his fourth solo album Nambucca Fables, ‘Every Waking Hour‘ (which premiered on Double J‘s Tower of Song with Henry Wagons and on Backseat Mafia) heralds the return of Mark Moldre, four years after his acclaimed album Fever Dreams. Following the release of the single, Mark is excited to release its accompanying video clip (premiered online by Rhythms Magazine), filmed by Jo Moldre, directed and edited by Mark and beautifully populated with photos from his family photo albums.

NSW singer-songwriter Mark Moldre returns with the first taste of his forthcoming new album, Nambucca Fables, due out April 14th.
 

On the back of a highly successful crowdfunding campaign for his fourth solo album Nambucca Fables, ‘Every Waking Hour‘ heralds the return of Mark Moldre, four years after his acclaimed album Fever Dreams.

A lot has happened in the intervening years. Floods, fires and a pandemic descended, and just prior to that, on a devastating personal note, the sad and tragic loss of Mark’s mother. “Grief stifles you at first. You can barely sleep, eat or get dressed….let alone try to write. Your brain feels like it’s shrouded in a low, damp mist. I certainly couldn’t write at my desk, I felt like I was suffocating there,” he confesses. 

That creative paralysis would continue for a year before he could finally put pen to paper and was able to write again. “‘Every Waking Hour’ almost threw itself onto the page when I took a notepad down to the beach. It came out in a messed up jumble of words, total stream of consciousness. That hardly ever happens and it feels surreal when it does. I barely changed a word afterwards. Melody and lyrics all arrived fully formed.” says Mark. “The lyrical style felt different for me – it was more conversational and effortless. I was able to take my finger out of the dam after that day and thankfully the words/memories/love/loss began to flow.”
 

“Every waking hour I’m just dying to go back to sleep.”

The song, in spite of its subject matter and intense personal nature, fairly leaps from the speaker with a vibrant rhythm section and invigorating and vital guitars that cleverly convey remembrance as much as they contrast with the raw longing and emotional dislocation in the wake of the passing of a loved one. Mark’s lifetime of exploring the possibilities of the guitar in indie rock, jazz, power pop and beyond comes to the fore on the song. Heroes like Nels Cline, Neil Young and Bill Frisell are omnipresent as Mark and his band create an exquisite blend of melodic Americana and indie pop-rock that descends into a frazzled, clattering heap as the song concludes. 

“After grief, there is some kind of new balance… a new you,” explains Mark. “Damaged but somehow improved. A deeper understanding, more empathetic. Love finds new depths. Somehow you find you way out of that mist and into a new morning.”

Double J has already premiered the new single on Henry Wagon’s show Tower Of Song, Henry said “Sometimes music can process the most complicated and grief stricken experiences into quite a jaunty, toe-tapping tune. It’s sometimes the best way to fend off the tears. A great piece of jangle and country rock.”.

Backseat Mafia gave us the online premiere and said “A sparkling gem filled with poignancy and stature….gathering all the collective immediacy and veracity of songwriters from Bob Dylan to Sufjan Stevens.”

You can listen to the new single from today on all streaming services – choose your fave HERE.

Purchase the single on Bandcamp.

Pre-order Mark Moldre’s upcoming album Nambucca Fables on LTD Edition Gatefold vinyl, CD and digital HERE.