My first Album “ORIGIN” was released in 2006, and remastered late 2021. My second album “ETERNITY”, was released in March 2022 on all digital streaming services via MGM Distribution. This is my songwriting story.
Its 2022, and it had been 16 years since I released my first album ORIGIN, when we were living in Lennox Head. Almost immediately after that, I accepted a new job opportunity in Canberra. I was back in the mainstream, ‘walking the road thats worn in the middle’. I didn’t think much about songwriting after our mid-career sea change to Lennox Head. I figured ORIGIN would be it for songwriting – a one album wonder, but at least I got it done. After a few years in Canberra I was offered a new opportunity in the resources industry which took us back home to Brisbane and put me on a new career path.
After almost ten years of senior corporate life, I resigned in 2018 in pretty bad shape. That became a long break which morphed into retirement in 2021 – but still I had no ambition or thought of songwriting again. Not long after, I was diagnosed with brain cancer and life changed dramatically. After my first surgery in June 2021, the songs just started appearing. I had no choice in it, and it wasn’t a planned conscious effort. I was totally shocked by this surge of creative energy. But it wasn’t my first songwriting rodeo, so I knew what to do – sleep with my guitar, keep a voice recorder handy, perfect the art of catching songs in my dreams and hope that they don’t get away.
Within a few weeks, during July-August 2021, I had written a whole new album. I am probably more surprised than anyone about it. It’s still very hard to believe and I find the entire songwriting process to be a mystery, one which I struggle to explain. But I’m incredibly grateful for the gift and for everyone who has ever believed in me. Here is my extended songwriting story and bio…
After we launched my debut album ORIGIN in Lennox Head in 2006, I was offered a job as Senior Advisor for Primary Industries in the Rudd Labor Opposition, and in his 2007 Government. We loved Canberra as a family, and I loved that job – meeting people and solving important problems from a position of influence.
I stayed for a few years, and had already left Canberra when the Labor Party machine cut Kevin Rudd down and like most other Australians watched in horror and disbelief as they tore each other apart. We didn’t know it at the time, but our family had some major challenges around the corner. As hard as it gets. We endured and we are winning.
Born: 1974
twitter: @martybreen
insta: marty.breen_
web: martybreen.com
Born: Brisbane
Education: Brisbane State High School
Tertiary: BAppSci (HonsIIA) (Environmental Studies & Geography), JCU Townsville, 1996
Married Sian in 1999, two daughters Olive and Hazel @ Somerville House. The Breen family emigrated to Australia from Tipperary, Ireland. We have common ancestors from the family of ‘Uncle Dan Breen’ – loved and loathed he was one of the most controversial and infamous IRA leaders from the Third Tipperary Brigade. After the Irish Civil War, ‘Uncle Dan’ became the first Republican to be elected to the Irish Free State Parliament, where he represented Tipperary for more than thirty years. I’ve always felt a very strong affinity with the Irish, even as a child, despite never having been there. As I was growing up, the child abusers from the Augustinian sect of the Catholic Church at Villanova College ridiculed my brothers and I for being “Irish Gypsies”. I never understood what they meant, or took offence to it. But now that I’ve read my history books, I would consider it a badge of honour.
I’m a geographer at heart. I see the world as people and place. So it feels natural to have an affinity for politics and songwriting, nature conservation and the ocean. Geography happily accommodates all those things. I have friends in many different fields and at every level, some rich and some not rich, but all hard working family types with good values. This is thanks to my brothers, Sian and the girls, and through my past associations with rugby union EDJRU Tigers, BSHS, JCUNQ, the Northern Rivers music community, Somerville House, Australian Rural Leadership Foundation ARLF, and the communities we’ve lived in Coorparoo, Lennox Head, Canberra, Brisbane, Townsville, and around the world through my business and industry career. Also many dear friends from our work in the seafood and agriculture industries, nature conservation and politics.
I have played guitar from age 13yo. When I left school, I didn’t have what it takes to become a musician – I wasn’t cut out for a life on the road or playing pubs and bars. So ultimately I pursued my other big life passion – environment and conservation, and went to James Cook Uni in Townsville as an adult entry student in 1992 to do a double major in Geography and Marine Conservation. That’s where I met Sian in 1992, and I will always say going to JCU was the best decision I made in my life.
I continued to play guitar and sing classic cover songs by the greats of the 60-80’s through uni and beyond. Some of my best memories are busking outside ‘the Bank’ nightclub on Flinders Street Townsville, and at Byron Bay during uni holidays. A good night would pull $80 and fill my guitar case with coins. The US sailors were particularly generous. I still have some of their US quarters and dimes. I also kept the bracelets, anklets and notes that backpackers would leave in lieu of cash. Busking taught me that there is a lot of people who avoid noisy night clubs and prefer to sit in a quiet spot listening to organic music with friends. I came to understand that my mob were the busking crowd and the “folk music” people. That was an eye-opener for me, as when I was growing up in Brisbane and after school, I was part of a heavy drinking culture and I never really found ‘busking’. I wasn’t encouraged at home – what saved my passion for guitar was a dear group of friends who always encouraged me to bring my guitar to parties and to camping and surfing trips. It wasn’t until I left home, age 21, that I came to understand that I grew up in a heavy drinking culture, especially at home. I couldn’t see it when I was in the middle of it.
While at uni I thought a lot about the life of a musician, but I didn’t feel cut out for it. I felt the only way to succeed at it would be to live a life on the road as a solo singer-songwriter and keep moving, never settle down. But I couldn’t see that lifestyle working for me. I was 21yo and the idea of playing cover songs for a living was a genuine turn off. I dreamed of writing an album ‘one day’, but at the time I didn’t know how to tell my own story which was still developing. So these ideas swirled around inside me, but I was too deeply committed to tertiary studies and making a career-contribution to protecting the oceans rather than pursue an unstable life on the road as a musician. Looking back I feel certain I made the right decision, and I would do the same if I had my time again. I was genuinely passionate and excited to be learning at JCU, one of the best uni’s in the world to learn about the oceans and conservation, and in the end, I had a remarkable career which, by and large, I thoroughly enjoyed, and most importantly it allowed us to have a great family life and give the girls access to a first class education.
Throughout my career, I kept playing guitar as a hobby, with a quiet dream of maybe one day being able to write an album of original songs.
Pic: Airlock Studios, Sept 2021.
Sian and I were married in 1999, and we had been working for around ten years when our first daughter Olive was born in 2005. We were fortunate enough to have a small townhouse beside the beach in one of Australia’s best known surfing towns Lennox Head, near Byron Bay. Every weekend for a few years we would drive two hours to Lennox for a fix. A month after Olive was born, we pulled the pin on Brisbane and moved to Lennox. I was 30-something and had begun writing my own songs for the first time. I had recently completed a scholarship with the Australian Rural Leadership Foundation (ARLF), thanks to my sponsors Fisheries Research & Development Corporation and Australian Prawn Farmers Association. My friends at ARLF were very supportive of my song-writing hobby and pushed me out of my comfort zone, and for the first time, I felt I had something to say and could probably write songs after all. We were young, we were fit and we were okay. We had two mortgages, and I had a work-from-home consultancy that kept the money coming in. Sian was on maternity leave.
While at Lennox, I began trying my songs out at local open mic nights. I fell in with a wonderful community of musicians many of whom remain dear friends. I found myself in an incredibly supportive community in Northern New South Wales, Lennox Head, Alstonville, Byron Bay and Mullumbimby. Local musicians and the community helped me connect and find the support necessary to record and produce my first album, ‘ORIGIN’ in mid-2006.
I sent some demos around the place and jagged a MUSICOZ Regional Development Award, and my first album received a DOLPHIN AWARD at Byron Bay. ORIGIN was released in September 2006. It was crowd-funded by friends and family and recorded in about three days by Brad Wann at Top Cat Studios Alstonville, and distributed by MGM. It made a healthy loss, but I repaid my investors in full and I’m still very grateful to each of them for backing me. We launched the album on Father’s Day weekend in September 2006, and almost immediately our lives changed again. I knew by this stage that songwriting was a hobby, not a career.
Just after we launched the album, I was offered an incredible job as a Senior Policy Advisor to Senator Kerry O’Brien, Labor Party spokesman for Primary Industries, based in Canberra. It was 2006 and Kevin Rudd had just been appointed Opposition Leader and he was building a new team to take on John Howard at the 2007 Federal Election. Rudd wanted industry and policy experts to develop the policy platform and my role was to develop the Primary Industry and Environment policies for the KEVIN07 election. I grew up in Rudd’s electorate and I thought he would win the election. It was one of the best jobs I’ve ever had and Senator O’Brien was a wonderful man who treated his staff very well. And my colleagues were first class.
We worked exceptionally hard during 2006-07, and we were all absolutely gutted when Senator O’Brien missed out on a cabinet portfolio after Rudd won the election. He was dudded by Labor Party politics, and I think Rudd made one of his first bad decisions (of many) by not appointing Senator O’Brien to Primary Industries. I have no doubt Senator O’Brien would have made an exceptional Primary Industry Minister – he was very experienced, well-informed and knowledgeable and most importantly, well-respected by farmers around Australia. He needed no introduction to the sector. He didn’t need to be educated about it. And he cared about it – he would have had no need to fake it. He was a great listener and didn’t suffer from a huge ego, something which I came to appreciate is a very rare quality amongst Minister’s in Canberra.
It is well documented that the wheels fell off the Rudd Government very early after it was elected. As a staffer, I felt its impact immediately. It was a very unsettling time for the more than 130 opposition staffers who worked tirelessly to get the man and his party elected. All 130+ advisors were sacked by email just days after the election and told we had to reapply for our jobs. I ended up as a Senior Advisor for Primary Industry Minister Tony Burke. Looking back I think the best contribution I made in Canberra was to the Great Barrier Reef, supporting farmers through drought and drafting the policies that abolished the corrupt Australian Wheat Board. I wasn’t there to work as a Party Machine man or apparatchik. I cared about our farmers and our environment, and that was the driving force behind my motivation for being there. I also supported Labor values more than the others. I made friends on all sides of politics.
So just after the launch of ORIGIN, I had to leave it behind almost immediately. I played some small concerts and a Festival in northern NSW, but I never got a chance to launch the album in my hometown of Brisbane, and that still hasn’t happened officially.
The Canberra job ultimately led to an entirely new path in the resources sector, and I ended up seeing out my ‘career’ in a leadership role at a major US energy company. For the period 2006-2017, I was essentially working seven days a week, and never far from my mobile phone. I hardly picked up a guitar as we devoted ourselves to setting up our family.
In 2011, I reluctantly accepted a senior role as an executive in one of the largest US energy companies in the world. After almost ten years, there wasn’t much I had not seen or experienced of corporate life. We had built a $52 Billion LNG export facility and a team of about 400 people to operate it. Hundreds of millions in royalties had started streaming back to the State for schools, hospitals and community. After nearly a decade in the corporate sector I had seen it all – the top, the bottom, the very best and the worst of it. A lot of very talented and smart people, and a lot of pathological malignant narcissists, sociopaths and monsters.
During that decade, we had some major personal battles. Our townhouse at Lennox Head was destroyed in a freak tornado on 3 June 2010. Flattened. I had to muster the energy to fight the insurance company who were being dishonest bastards. We won and rebuilt, and sold.
Not long after, Sian was diagnosed with Stage 3 Grade 3 breast cancer. That was as hard as it gets. She fought. She won. She never once complained about having cancer and never once considered it might defeat her. Now she is one of Australia’s most senior advisors on conservation and management of the Great Barrier Reef.
Pic: Hazel, Sian, Olive 2018
Sian was 42yo at the time. Super fit. Non-smoker. Non-drinker. Vegetarian. Regular exercise. All the right things. And she took phenomenally good care of herself for her daughters, from even before they were born. Cancer came as a complete shock and surprise. We had never had anyone close to us have this experience. We had to figure it out pretty quick. And apart from Sian, your immediate thought is the children. What do we say? When do we tell them? Maybe we shouldn’t tell them? Do we do more harm than good if we hide it from them? If we tell them, maybe that will be bad for them? Will they get PTSD later in life? etc etc.
In the end we decided to be open and honest. Don’t underestimate the girls, their intelligence or their capacity to respond. So we waited maybe 48 hours to gather all the medical facts, and we told them straight out. From then on, we were an open book with the girls. And looking back, I would do the same thing all over again. I am sure that Olive and Hazel are stronger and more resilient people as a result of being involved in caring for their mum, and understanding what was happening and what all the medical options and complications were.
I was always in awe of how Sian responded to cancer. At the time, I couldn’t comprehend how she was able to keep it together so apparently well, while I felt like a mess. But looking back I think I get it now. And we both agree, it’s actually easier to be the patient than to be the carer or the loved one. It’s easier being in the hospital bed than sitting beside it. A dear friend gave me some great advice at the time. She said, “A lot of people are going to offer to help you. This is the one time in your life when you should accept it”. We got to experience the power of community in an entirely new way, and it changed us forever, positively.
I kept working for several more years before resigning in 2018. Looking back I’d say corporate life was odd. I am proud of some of the work I did there, but mostly it’s battle scars. With corporate life, like politics, the phone stops ringing the moment you leave. People make out that they like you, but they don’t – they like what you have (power and influence) and what you can do for them. Like politics, the relationships are power-based. But unlike politics, genuine friendships are hard to find. In corporate life it’s rare to find friends through shared values, whereas in politics it’s common. Like politics, ego is a major factor. But unlike politics, the majority are attracted to corporate life for the money which takes precedence over personal and community values, empathy and decency. “Safety is our highest priority”, until it comes down to a choice between safety and profits. Thats the truth.
Where politics is about ego and power, corporate life is about ego and money. And in corporate life some people will do anything to get it. Most people in politics want power so that they can do good things. The same does not apply in corporate life. It’s almost entirely about the individual. It is the perfect breeding ground for narcissists and sociopaths. The corporate scars I have today are mostly from trauma and shock at how horrible people can be to each other. Life has taught me that kindness rarely features in corporate life, but it thrives in community.
After almost ten years, I resigned from corporate life in 2018, and started a long break which morphed into early retirement in 2021. I kept very fit, exercising everyday at COORPAROO BOXING GYM and also came to discover the healing properties of contrast therapy in the sauna and ice bath.
In early 2021, I began feeling extremely tired. After several months of worsening symptoms my doctor sent me for an MRI on 14 June 2021 and five days later I was having brain surgery to remove a life-threatening tumour from my right frontal lobe. I had a second surgery in August 2021. Immediately after the first surgery my creativity came surging back, and my energy levels picked up. Between the first and second surgeries, without having any plans or even a goal of writing songs, I wrote an entire new album, ten songs plus some extras which I’ve put aside for album three. I slept with my guitar beside my bed, as I had done when I wrote my first album, as my songs often come to me in my dreams. It still surprises me that this is how it happens.
We would never have contemplated cancer happening again. I know only one other family where both partners have cancer, and they are older. But I don’t know any young child who has had both parents get cancer so young. I feel for our daughters having to face that worry at such a young age, but looking at them now I think it helped make them more resilient and forged their values. Our children have witnessed us survive and have been part of the effort to win and live positively. You get the news. You listen to your Doctors. You get informed and educated, ask questions and make wise decisions. Stay fit. Eat well. Live.
Creating music and songwriting is the closest feeling I’ve ever had to being completely happy, comparable only to when my daughters were born. So I think this is what I will do for the rest of my days, or for as long as I’m well enough.
I have a tattered old songbook from the 1980’s. It has dozens of failed attempted lyrics about greedy corporations and their impact on the environment, oil and war, power, injustice and the land of the free. The things I cared about. I was never able to finish any of those songs, because I was too young and didn’t feel comfortable enough in my knowledge about people and the environment, the world or how things are. But since then, I have spent three decades working at the top of power, in government, and oil and gas, and in conservation and environment. My greatest fear back then was writing something down I would later regret. I no longer have that fear.
Inspired by life’s events, ETERNITY was written after my first brain surgery and recorded at AIRLOCK STUDIOS during radiation and chemotherapy. The songs started coming to me in my dreams in July-August 2021. For all the time I was working in corporate/government, I figured I had done as much as I would ever do with my song-writing hobby. My youngest daughter Hazel, who was born in Canberra, had hardly ever heard me play guitar until 2021 when I picked it up again. I sent her a demo of one of my songs, recorded on my mobile phone, and she wrote back: “OMG dad that’s beautiful. WTF”. Best feedback I’ve ever had!
I was on chemo all year in 2022, as well as trying to recover from radiation which frankly was brutal. Im not sure if we ever “recover” from cancer. It seems more like a huge disruption from which we change and adjust, and hopefully get to live on in a new way. I am slowly making progress back to playing guitar and stepping out occasionally to perform. Im back at Lennox Head now playing the local folk clubs and listening audiences with my first and second albums, and waiting for the last few songs for my third album.
I plan on staying independent and free. Play music for fun. Support community and young people. Do what my doctors say. Survive. See what happens. Whack away at album three. Surf again.
Pic: Mulgumpin circa 2017