by Glenn A. Baker (from www.diannacorcoran.com)

“I’ll be honest’, Dianna Corcoran told an interviewer after she had a ’Best New Talent’ Golden Guitar bestowed upon her at Tamworth for her impressive debut album Little Bit Crazy and charting single I’ll Fly Away, “because I’m still young there’s not that much to write about.” Not much more than two years on, it’s a comment not likely to be repeated.

These are heady days for the girl from Parkes with the high, expressive, distinctive voice who hurled herself into the country music orbit at the age of 12 and voraciously pursued the country talent quest circuit until she was 17, receiving a staggering 350 acknowledgements for songwriting, female vocal, gospel performance and even the rare art of yodelling.

Experiences have come tumbling one upon the each other; each expanding her horizons and fuelling her desire and capacity to write songs. Not just touring with the likes of Adam Brand, collaborating on songs with Melinda Schneider and Karl Broadie, getting to know and enjoying the admiration of premier poet Graeme Connors, appearing at festivals in Australia and New Zealand, and joining the increasingly prestigious Compass Brothers stable of premier Australian country artists, but also being one of seven emerging creative talents to be handed a $10,000 grant at the second APRA Professional Development Awards.

Soon after the presentation at Sydney’s Fox Studios, opened by the Minister for the Arts and compeered by Triple J’s Robbie Buck, the determined Dianna was on her way to Nashville for a two month stint of writing and recording which would become the backbone of her eagerly-awaited second album, Then There’s Me – the album that, at age 27, has crystallized the enormous promise and potential that has been so evident for so long.

What had been a great adventure from the time when an eleven year old girl near drove her mum mad with her passion to make music, writing a bathtub wall poem in soap crayons, became an even greater adventure as so much that the global country musical capital has to offer seemed to land in her lap.” As soon as you land you can sense the vibe of the place and you just get carried along on a wave of writing and playing, it’s very exciting.

“With the first album I was very young but this time around I was more focused. Working in Nashville showed me a different side to music and writing. It’s where you learn how to do your job because everyone there is doing theirs so well. It might be a very structured environment over there - they approach songwriting as a business – but they also know how to extend the boundaries. The music is very broad, sometimes going from one extreme to the other, but it is still identifiably country, and that will never change for me. I found the people are very respectful and they love Aussies so I came away just loving Nashville.”

Dianna, and producer Graham Thompson, also came away with an album substantially changed from the one that had been mapped out before the journey began. “Graham had arranged for me to do a bit of writing there prior to going into the studio to maybe get an additional track or two,” she relates. It proved to be two pivotal weeks of creative endeavour. “It was so productive” she enthuses ”that we ended up bumping six tracks off the album and putting six in which were written there. The album was being continually improved upon while we were in Nashville.”

At the centre of that improvement was Dianna’s association with highly regarded American singer-songwriter Rebecca Lynn Howard, who ended up with three song credits on Then There’s Me, one of them a collaboration with Rachel Thibodeau and Dianna on the title track. Acting on a sense that the album needed a song that was about herself and her life, she “hooked up with the girls and had that song in three hours.” It was very much a declaration of intent, a statement of policy, hinged upon the line “No I would never compromise and I would never live a lie”.

Howard is also represented by the striking songs I’m Not Who You Think I Am and Spackled Up Heart. “I did not leave her alone! I love her songs, love her. She related to my life. After we met she came back to me with those songs – she played them in a hotel room.” Another Nashville collaborator was Dennis Matkosky, who helped her finish the moving If You Hear Angels, the lyrics of which had come to her while she sat by her father’s hospital bedside while he was on life support. “I wrote the chorus in my head” she reveals. “I do a lot of this for him. You see, starting at the age I did, I could never have done what I did if it wasn’t for the fact that my parents did everything they could for me. They bought a car from a wrecker’s and got it working so I could go on the road. Dad made me a mixed tape of Australian country music; all old school, and it gave me real grounding. I played it until it almost broke. When I sang in a church choir it was mum and grandma on either side of me, singing soprano and showing me the way. I was never going to be a baritone!”

Seven of the thirteen tracks on Then There’s Me are fully or partially from the pen of the lady singing them and those that are not reflect her sentiments, her emotions, her world view. Or as she puts it herself: “All of the songs on the album specifically chosen because they relate to my life. I have a connection to every song, even if I haven’t written them myself.” Among those she did write are Little Crush, which she is perfectly willing to reveal is actually about her car, a RAV4 that she saved up for years to buy; the lyrically intriguing Don’t Go Talking Down, which comes from time spent in ‘day job’ environments (including a dog food factory and a car parts plant) and her memories of persons and procedures not kind to the employees; and Lovin’ Recklessly which was knocked out in fifteen minutes or so as a jaunty, tongue-in-cheek reaction to what she saw as her “goody two shoes” role in relationships. The deftly crafted All Gone Blue was one of four songs which she wrote with her “wonderful friend”, textured Australian singer-songwriter Karl Broadie. “Karl doesn’t settle for second best and this one was just a stand out.”

Of those she didn’t pen, Love Wins by Tasmanian Rowan Smith resonates most strongly, as does Stepping Stones which comes from the catalogue of tough American country outfit Black Hawk. Weight Of The World by Chantal Kreviazuk, was something that Dianna took a liking to when she heard it on the soundtrack of the quirky romantic comedy How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days. This Woman, by Mark Stephen Jones and Travis Meadows, was a work that Dianna “related to right away. It’s about being battered and bruised by a relationship. We all go through stages in relationships and the end of them when we need our space. So I think that a lot of people will know what that’s about.”

The Nashville sessions concentrated primarily on the band tracks, with most of the vocals being put down in Australia. The core of musicians - hot, fast, slick, inventive and accurate – was Greg Morrow, Mike Brignardello, Mike Rojas, Scotty Sanders, JT Corenflos, Glen Duncan and Biff Watson. Legendary sideman Stuart Duncan was a ‘special guest’ adding his distinctive and breathtaking fiddle work to four tracks. “We were able to get him for just one day and he was very generous with his time and a lovely guy” Dianna explains. “He looked so young too – it was hard to imagine how he’d done all those famous sessions.”

What particularly overwhelmed and enchanted the young singer was being able to, as she put it, hear songs that I had written myself being played and brought to life by these wonderful musicians. There are things that you just don’t forget. Like being played the final mix of Then There’s Me at Graham’s holiday house in Hardy’s Bay and realising how far I’d come from winning that Rising Star Award. I keep thinking about this line that my dad used to say: ‘Find something you love and you’ll never work a hard day in your life’ and that’s really how it feels to me.”

When she made her first album Dianna described herself as “A breezy go-with-the-flow kind of person,” one who “didn’t fit in particularly at school because all I wanted to do was sing country music and yodel. But I put up with all the bad stuff because I knew it would come together one day.”

That day would appear to be somewhere around now. And you can’t half tell by her ebullience. “With this album I got a lot off my chest. These songs represent things hat have happened to me, things that I feel strongly about, where I’ve been, where I’m heading. Overall it’s about and it’s for the people in my life – family and friends. Hopefully it tells them how unbelievably important they are to me. Sometimes when I think about all that it just makes my head spin.”