A small-town street party on a Saturday night. On a stage outside the Tweed Regional Museum in Murwillumbah, a band is playing. They all seem to be related, as one cousin after another steps up to the mic.
Suddenly a voice of extraordinary beauty rings out into the spring night. People stop and turn. Skin tingles. It’s Budjerah, the Aria award-winning pop R&B singer whom the prime minister confidently predicted “will be a superstar” after he sang at last year’s Australian of the Year ceremony. The Coodjinburra artist has toured with Ed Sheeran and Vance Joy, and has amassed more than 50m streams, including 15m on Spotify, for his 2023 single Therapy.
The two guitarists, Jarulah and Banahm, are his cousins. At 22 he is the youngest person in the band.
Not long after blowing everyone away on the stage with his charisma and soaring voice, Budjerah is queuing at the gelato truck with his younger sister. Then, with his father, Joel, they melt away into all the other families out on a Saturday night.
“I don’t ever want to think of myself as a celebrity or better than anyone else,” he tells me a few days later when I meet him and his mother, Mary. “Give me some ice-cream and I’ll be right.”
We’re at his apartment at Tweed Heads, where he’s in the final hours before heading out on his Therapy Sessions tour – his biggest yet. He had been touring so much globally that, a year after buying the place, “I still had unpacked boxes. I’d just put the bed frame together and that was all that was in my bedroom. I did two shows a week for two years. I had to call my nan and ask, ‘Where’s the toaster, where do I get a cup, how do I make the washing machine work?’”
He waves at a laden shelf: “I wouldn’t have these awards up or the pictures of me as you walk in. That was my grandmother.” The Aria award is notably pointy as he hands it over. “I heard that someone dropped theirs and it went straight through their foot,” he says.
He says he couldn’t believe it when he won his first Aria for breakthrough artist, in 2021, off the back of his self-titled debut EP. “I was crying, my mum was crying – and then the Wiggles came up and gave me a hug, and that made me cry even more,” he says. “It was just something I had always dreamed of. I didn’t actually think it was going to happen.”
With 13 nominations in 2022 for his sophomore EP, Conversations, he won again for best soul/R&B release.
Not far away from his Tweeds apartment is the tiny village of Fingal Head, on the scenic peninsula where he grew up. This is the place that shaped him. His parents are nondenominational pastors. One of them – usually Mary – travels with him, while the other homeschools his two younger siblings.
“We lived at the very top end of Fingal, past the school, even past the cemetery,” he says. “It was a lot of Aboriginal people. My cousins all lived next door, we all went to church together. My parents, my cousins and their parents all played in the band at church. We would go to church and sing and learn how to play music and then go surfing or fishing.” His mother, he says, “has my favourite voice of all time”.
His name Budjerah means first light. “I was born just before the sun rose in the morning.” And his middle name, Julum, means fish. “All of my uncles were at the beach that morning and they caught a heap of fish. Our names tell our stories.”
He speaks language. “Me and my cousins are the first generation that have traditional names again. We are very lucky that we weren’t moved off our land. We are one of the few families that have still got continual contact to our home.”
His parents founded and run Juraki, a not-for-profit supporting Indigenous surfers. His sister Jalaan, a surfer and board shaper, is partnered with Roxy; a cousin, Julung, travels the world surfing for Quiksilver. Budjerah quips that he became a singer “because I couldn’t swim very well”. Steeped in gospel music from church, and blues and soul at home, he wrote his early songs with his father.
He captured the attention of a Warner exec, Marcus Thaine, when another cousin, the writer and actor Nakkiah Lui, shared a clip of him performing via social media. He was 17 and still at school when he was signed. “It was pretty crazy,” he says.
His lyrics, he says, just pop out. “An idea can come from nowhere. Might be in the shower. Might be in my car. I wrote a verse for Ed Sheeran’s 2step in my car. Then I can go to the studio and just sit there all day because nothing has come to me.”
Budjerah knows there are many musicians in the world who struggle to make a living, and he is grateful every day. But he also knows he is in a business where people’s tastes can rapidly change.
“I am sure I will put out a song one day that people don’t like or are not as good as the others,” he says. But he can live with that: “I’d be happy if I can keep this income sustainable for the rest of my life. Living a satisfied, happy, creative life with my family – it is something that a lot of people won’t ever experience.”
The main thing he has learned in his short and hectic life is this: “I can only be me. I think if you are being real, people can’t put you down.”
Budjerah is playing around Australia on his Therapy Sessions tour throughout September
