Hobart Muso Zac

Hobart Muso Zac Henderson

Zac has been an active young musician in the Tasmanian music scene for a number of years. He started out playing his dad’s acoustic guitar and learning the basics, then went on to create his own band and develop his unique style of song writing.

Tell us a bit about where your music journey started, Zac.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, because I never really thought I had a musical family but then as I got older I started to realise that everyone in my family was either an artist or had been a musician at some point in their life. For instance, my dad plays jazz piano and guitar, but I only really found that out when I was about 19 years old! My mum also plays the trumpet and my nanna plays the piano, so yeah. I learnt how to play the guitar with my brother when I was about 12 years old. I remember little jam-bands in high school and stuff like that. I wanted to be making punk music or be a rapper or something like that. I wanted to do something that was outrageous (haha)! But we just played in average bands making

lots of noise and that’s really how I got into it all and started enjoying the performance aspect of it.

Can you remember your first ever performance?

It was a primary school talent show! My friend and I had co-written a song which we absolutely butchered (haha). We forgot where we were up to and we were playing different parts on the guitar and sweating (haha)! Then we just stopped as we were really embarrassed! But the judges gave us all 10s for originality, despite the fact that we probably didn’t really get a single word out! That was probably my first memory, but after that, the next one I did was a high school gig. My first ever public gig was ‘Gig in the Gardens’ in 2012.

How did your brother teach you to play guitar?

My dad had an acoustic guitar laying around; a big round thing that was twice the size of me when I first picked it up! My brother Andrew wanted to learn all these ACDC, Guns’n’Roses and Metallica solos: bands like that. When I was in grade 6, he was in grade 8, playing covers of bands like Iron Maiden. He’d be there shredding all the bits and 12 year old me would just be sitting there like ‘Yeeeaaahhhh!’, with my brain melting. I really wanted to learn how to do that! But I learnt pretty quickly I couldn’t do it. Solos for me were just challenging. Andrew would sit there and try to teach me how to play from tab, but it drove me insane. So instead I went straight into learning how to play chords and writing music because I was already writing stories: I was writing comics and stuff like that. I wanted to be an animator or a comic writer, so I was developing that at the same time. Though I still don’t necessarily consider myself to have much of a voice in the conventional singing sense. In my dad’s own words, I sounded like a dying dog when I started learning how to sing in my bedroom (haha). I’m pretty sure I killed everybody while I was practicing, and I spent years wanting to do it. My friend Sam King and I used to sing pop-country and stuff like that together in grade six. I guess I just really wanted to learn to sing. and between then and now I can say I definitely went through a conscious process where I tried to kick my influences out of how I sung, while still allowing myself to be influenced by them at the same time. For example, if there was a tonal quality to a singer’s voice that I liked, I’d try to find my way to sing it without using their accent. It was a hard bridge to cross actually, because as with a lot of other Australian vocalists, there’s something strange about singing in your own voice. There are reasons why people are insecure about it because there are people out there who express that they don’t like a certain vocalist’s accent. But I just think to myself, ‘It’s my voice! I quite like it and it’s unique to who I am!’ In relation to the stuff I wanted to write, I learnt that it’s better to be honest. So if I’m singing in my own voice, it’s going to come across more naturally, I suppose.

Tell us about some of your band projects, what you've learnt along the way and where you are with it all.

The first time I thought I really wanted to make a band outside of high school music classes was with a friend of mine, Noah, who taught me heaps of stuff and showed me all the music that pretty much influences me now. It just blew my mind. We used to jam heaps and I definitely started setting goals at that point like, ‘We’re going to make a band!’ and ‘We’re going to record songs!’ That band never happened, but it just became the motivation for understanding what I really wanted to do. Then the first band was pretty much a group of us called ‘The Surreal Estate Agents’, though we called ourselves the ‘Backseat Bakers’ first. That band came from having a great big jam party, which was something we were doing pretty ritualistically. Then once we were doing it, we were playing all the time and coming up with new ideas all the time. It showed me that gigging was a viable thing, and that taught me to reach for bigger things. Although I wasn’t necessarily chasing for anything, it always felt really good to play shows. We were all just having a really good time! The band had just been through