This Album Changed My Life: Bryce Sainty on Keith Urban’s ‘Golden Road’

Our current ‘Centre Stage’ artist Bryce Sainty was raised in a big sporting family. Encouraged by his parents to learn something his creative, he started learning guitar. It was his first listen to Keith Urban’s Golden Road that put him on his musical path.

Around 18-years-old the contemporary country singer-songwriter won a local singing competition on a local country music radio station and part of his prize was to record a single with Rod McCormack. That single, Message In A Bottle, was picked up by radio and peaked at #8 on iTunes – and he has since never looked back.

Following the success of his 2018 breakout single, Never Going Back as well as Eleven Eleven, co-written with Morgan Evans, Sainty performed at the Tamworth Country Music Festival on the main stage as part of the huge 'Live and Loud' concert. The CMAA Academy of Country Music graduate has performed at some of Nashville’s most iconic venues and with some of Australia’s biggest artists including The Wolfe Brothers, Tim Freedman (The Whitlams) and Andrew Farriss (INXS).

In 2022, he released his EP, Hometown, which accumulated over 3 million streams and features the single This Summer’s The One, which ranked #63 on our biggest songs of the year chart, after peaking at #4 on the Countrytown Hot 50 Country Airplay Chart. 

To learn more about Bryce Sainty, we asked him about an album that changed his life.

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Bryce Sainty on Keith Urban’s Golden Road:

“I grew up in an athletic family with an older and younger brother. Everything in my life revolved around sport. When I was about 12 years old, I’d to go into my older brother’s room and “borrow” albums from his CD collection. I liked music but honestly, I was just trying to copy what he did.

On this particular day, I “borrowed” the Golden Road album by Keith Urban and when I listened to it, it was the first time I heard and consequently fell in love with country music.

I was currently getting guitar lessons at the time as my Mum had forced me to learn an instrument and to be honest, I never practised, and I was terrible. After hearing this album, I remember being so excited for my guitar lesson that week and I told my guitar teacher I wanted to learn the songs from Urban’s album.

My favourite song was Somebody Like You (for obvious reasons) so we started with that and moved on to Who Wouldn’t Wanna Be Me and Raining On Sunday. I think I completely shocked my guitar teacher that I was actually practising.

As I became a little older, my parents took me to see Keith Urban live and I was hooked. I remember sitting in the audience thinking all I want to do is… THAT. One particular song stood out the most and it was an acoustic performance of You’ll Think of Me. After that concert and that album, I began writing songs and singing. As a kid I always wanted to be a builder when I grew up, but this album and the many more country albums to follow, changed every aspect of my life. I am so lucky to be able to do music as a living, writing, recording and performing my own songs.”

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To keep up to date with Bryce Sainty, follow him on Facebook here.