#Xavier rudd better people how to#

“I don’t think I’ve ever sat down and gone, I’m going to write a song. I wasn’t trying to create pop songs or even create a career. “I was never trying to become a famous musician, I was just mucking around with tones, tapping didgeridoos to chairs, stuffin’ around with interesting sounds, wooden instruments. When I play live, it’s a ceremony for me. “I don’t mess with my music for the sake of what people want to hear.

She has some kind of presence with me with music and I’ve always understood I need to respect that 100 per cent. “Even as a kid I understood I had this old woman around me. “There’s a spirit that comes through me,” he says. The strongest influence in Rudd’s life since childhood is what he believes is the spirit of his Aboriginal great-grandmother.

#Xavier rudd better people how to#

“I learnt how to stand outside my own ego and my emotional body and see the difference between that and what was reality and I was able to let that stuff go.” When I went to the jungle in Peru, I was carrying some depression, anxiety and emptiness. The biggest thing I’ve learnt is to separate myself from my ego. “When I say ego – a lot of people mistake ego for self-inflation. In relationships, things to do with my kids, where I should be, what I should be doing and what I shouldn’t be doing. “There hasn’t been a day in the last 15 years where I’ve let my ego get the better of me in my music, but in other parts of my life, I have struggled. Rudd’s healing journey has taken him as far as the jungles of Peru, where he worked with a shaman who prescribed eight plants, including the hallucinogenic ayahuasca. I stay super-fit and make sure I’m the clearest vessel I can be.

I got off the grog and I’ve been a lot clearer in mind and spirit. “As my back fell apart, stuff came up that I was carrying since a little kid. I was out there giving myself to the world and abusing my own temple at the same time, just not taking care of myself, letting my physical self deteriorate. Freeman calls Rudd her “best friend”, while he says he’s never been happier. I had emergency surgery and she helped me recover.”įreeman was by Rudd’s side as he fronted up to the Byron Bay Local Court on August 11 to fight an assault charge over a ‘dog rage’ incident, an allegation he strongly denies. Before we met I got to a point where I almost couldn’t walk. I’d had back surgery and was on a spiral downwards when I met her. “She makes people feel great about themselves. “She’s amazing, she’s a trainer and a motivator,” he says. Today, Rudd is in the best shape of his life and is excited to be playing his first headline show in Australia in two years at Caloundra Music Festival on September 29.Īfter playing to crowds of 50,000 in Europe in June and July, he’s on a career high and enjoying newfound health and happiness, thanks in part to the support of his second wife, Ashley Freeman, a fitness instructor from Byron Bay who he married late last year.

I was touring with the United Nations and was on heaps of painkillers just to get through the shows.” “It was such a crazy thing to go through, it was wild. “The nerve pain was unbelievable, it was 24/7,” he says. A month later, he was in hospital having disc replacement and spinal fusion surgery and had to cancel his overseas shows. He performed a spellbinding show with his newly formed band, the United Nations, the crowd blissfully unaware he was suffering severe back pain from three herniated discs and was dosed up on opiates to get through the show. When Xavier Rudd headlined the 2015 Caloundra Music Festival, no one among the crowd of revellers would have guessed he was in a bad way.