9.23.14-Sevenhurtz

Brenton Meynell creates music with this bandmates in the way Outback with his friends.

They record their pieces in his home studio, Brenton strumming chords on his guitar in a house with a red-dirt yard off Rochester Street.

“They play my band’s music on a college radio station there,” he tells me as I say I’m from Rochester, NY, home of Kodak.

What? Rochester, NY?

Brenton’s band, Sevenhurtz, has a new CD out and it’s doing pretty well on the college indie-music circuit, as the previous one before. They were featured on the Billabong CD that did so well.

Rochester. New York? Wow! Small world.

His band is actually played on a handful of New York college stations with ties to people I know or that are close to home — Oswego, Plattsburgh, Geneva.
ELEVEN THOUSAND MILES AWAY, his chords are reverberating on the air waves back home.

Brenton’s a true indie music fan: He lives it, with his studio, professional equipment on one side, two plastic wind-up dinosaurs a foot tall on the floor from his boy, Taj. His bag is already packed for a release party in Melbourne, two weeks out.
“I have to. I work too much,” he says.

He’s in his “high-vis” (high-visibility) uniform for the mines. This is Northeastern Goldfields mining country — gold, nickel and if the protestors don’t win out, uranium down the road.

The country is harsh, scrub, but beautiful with its red earth, he says: He and his wife, Cally, chose it because they want their kids to grow up in real Australia, where people learn resiliency, away from shiny plastic life.

When he’s not recording or playing with Sevenhurtz, Brenton is teaching kids in his son Jazz’s school guitar.