Today, Countrytown premieres the latest music video from emerging Melbourne-based country music artist Dakota East, who’s shared the clip for the empowering new single, Moving On.
A rock-meets-country tune, Moving On, contains a wistful melody as East looks glamorous and affirmative as she sings about moving past a turbulent breakup. Singing in a car, outside a garage, strumming an acoustic guitar and making her way in cowgirl boots, East makes ditching a relationship that’s no good for you look like fun.
For Moving On, East drew upon influences in The Preatures, Morgan Wallen and Mackenzie Porter, finding herself leaving behind the life she knew and discarding unwanted memories by road-tripping across the country and embracing new experiences.
In a statement, she said about her new single, “I wanted to capture a feeling that most of us know, when you have given so much to something, but it all falls apart, and you feel like it's an impossible task to start over, yet as time unfolds, there is always the promise of moving on and better day.”
You can watch the music video below.
Before basing herself in Melbourne, East was raised in a log cabin on a small island in the middle of a lake in Ontario, Canada.
East has previously opened for Australian rock and country royalty, including Jon Stevens, Travis Collins and Wendy Matthews, plus Jo Camilleri & The Black Sorrows. Those shows happened before East appeared as a Toyota Star Maker finalist last month, where Wade Forster won.
East said about her musical journey so far, “After losing my dad when I was 24, I felt a resurgence of anxieties and fears that I thought were just based in childhood. Things that I thought I had grown out of. Fear of flying, fear of the ocean, fear of the dark. Life felt so fragile, and at any moment, it could break.”
She added, “As I’ve gotten older, I’ve been influenced by so much, but the essence of pure, raw and unrefined musical emotion has always stayed strong within me and is what I try to evoke as an artist.”
In 2021, Countrytown launched the video premiere for East’s debut single, Runaway, before she was named our Artist of the Week not long after.
