Ladies Love CountryLadies Love Country is a podcast and community lead by Holly and Grace (like Madonna, too fabulous to need to use their last names), who describe themselves as “two wannabe Aussie cowgirls with big playlists and even bigger energy”.
Based in Sydney with connections across the country (and across the Atlantic to the US), their fandom and commitment to building country music community in perhaps unusual places is what drives them. In addition to the pod they recently started live gigs and meet ups, with an ever-expanding agenda to keep country music growing.
“We kind of joke sometimes because people always talk about gatekeeping – we want to open the gates, we do not want to gatekeep at all,” Holly explains. “We want everyone to be able to be in this community because it is honestly the most amazing community.”
Drawn in by the energy of a scene that is multigenerational and inclusive, Ladies Love Country is a podcast and community that is building from the ground (and speakers) up. Their only criteria? “You just need to like country music. That's all it is,” adds Grace.
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“We're just trying to grow the community who love country music. If we had a ten-year goal, it would be for country to be mainstream and to be available to everyone.”
The pair met at uni where they had zero formal engagement with the music industry, but a chance trip to CMC Rocks sealed their friendship, and their fate as country music champions. “I’d been to CMC Rocks the year before, and I needed to go again – this was the best weekend of my life!” remembers Holly.
“But I didn’t want to go by myself, so I thought ‘who's someone that will say yes to anything? Grace and I didn’t hang out all the time but I thought ‘I’ll give it a shot’.”
“I remember I was freaking out because tickets were going on sale the next day, and I called her and asked ‘Is there any chance you want to go to this country festival with me?’,” she adds. “I tried to not give her too many details and didn't say much. I just said ‘it's going to be so much fun, there'll be a bit of line dancing’ and she said ‘yep, no problem’.”
“She didn't tell me that we had to take three days off leave, and we’d have to drive up there [to Ipswich from Sydney] and drive back,” Grace adds, smiling. “So when I said ‘yep fine’, it was a leap of faith!”
“We went that year, and after that we went to so many festivals,” Holly continues. “The next year we went back to CMC and we watched this artist called Wyatt Flores, whose performance was just, Grace calls it cathartic.
“We were just so mesmerised that we ended up just listening to him on the car ride home from CMC. We did not listen to one other artist, just Wyatt Flores – for hours. He only had one album, but we just listened to it the entire way, on repeat. We'd both look at each other after the album finished and be ‘yeah, let's go again’.”
The podcast began with a spark of fan energy, a want to know as much as possible about the music and the people that make it. “We thought ‘let's just not listen to his music, let's listen to everything else’,” explains Holly.
“We wanted to know everything about them, we want to know more about his personality, we know [from his performance] that he's so funny, and we wanted to see and hear that part of it.”
“So then I went away and brought microphones and said ‘Holly, we're doing the podcast!’,” remembers Grace. “We recorded three episodes in my front room in my house and we had such fun doing it.
“We then sat down and cut 12 reels and ended up getting traction on the content. It was great to find out people actually want to hear this and then a couple of artists reached out to us.”
As the platform and community grows Holly and Grace are clear that all are welcome, but that their content has to stay authentic. “We put out whatever we feel is true to us,” Holly outlines.
“So if we love a single, we're going to talk about it. If we love an artist like Wyatt Flores, we're going to talk about him. I think that's always stayed true for us with whatever we've done.”
While Nashville and the US is undoubtedly the international country music Mecca, the pair are keen to celebrate what’s happening here and show it to be absolutely world class. “And at the end of the day, our primary goal is to grow country music in Australia,” Grace explains.
“It's just growing the space, particularly because we're both from the city. So I guess we're advocates for what we're calling this country curious crowd. Particularly for people who perhaps didn't grow up on country music, like Holly and myself, but do and have adopted a love of country music and the country music community, which is so incredible in Australia and internationally.
“There's girls in cowboy hats and cowboy boots everywhere from not just country festivals but mainstream festivals,” she adds. “It's becoming a bit of a moment with line dancing classes in social clubs.
“The market is really growing, not just in the regions where it was always strong, but in the city spaces and I think that's kind of part of our role now.”
Ladies Love Country release new episodes every Friday, with updates available via their YouTube and Instagram pages.
This piece of content has been assisted by the Australian Government through Music Australia and Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body
