Nearly a decade removed from the twilight years of INXS, Andrew Farriss is living a much quieter, “normal” life. Farriss, who teamed with Michael Hutchence to write some of the biggest hits of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s—Hutchence the lyrics and Farriss the music—is happy on his ranch near a small outback town inland and equidistant to both Sydney to the northeast and Brisbane to the southeast.

The ranch is remote. To ensure this conversation he had to drive into town to get internet access.

“Most people who work in my industry don’t move out where I live, but I like it. It agrees with me. It’s a more relaxed pace of living,” Farriss says. While he’s talking about making music, where he lives with his American wife is perfectly suited for raising cattle and farming grain, which is now his primary occupation.

“Even though I dress like a cowboy, I actually am a cowboy,” he says of his attire, which in the shoulders-and-up video call is wide-brimmed cowboy hat and blue pullover sweatshirt.

Farriss’ typical days consist of “making sure everything works correctly,” such as machinery and cattle. “Most of the time it’s just fixing things.”

Hutchence tragically died in 1997. It might surprise some that after INXS—which includes his brothers Jon (drums) and Tim (guitar), as well as bassist Garry Gary Beers and guitarist Kirk Pengilly—took an indefinite break in 2012, Farriss waited until 2019 to release an original song. An EP followed in 2020, which he recorded after he completed his highly touted self-titled solo album this March.

What may be even more surprising is that his new genre of choice is country and Americana.

After Hutchence’s death, INXS carried on, releasing two more albums with other singers. Even though the band never broke up, it stopped being active in 2012. Farriss has worked with numerous Australian artists since then, but mostly is committed to a home life with his wife Marlina.

“My journey has always been about writing songs and I’ve had to write songs during my career, especially within INXS, under an immense amount of pressure. Everyone expects you to keep coming up with these hits,” he says. “So I just decided to enjoy life for a while, but I kept writing music during that time. The other thing is, how can you write songs that people can relate to unless you’re living a normal life?”

So he focused on family, found hobbies and worked his farm.

“Of course, I got ideas about music and songs and lyrics running through my head, but I think it was because I did pull back from it all and was able to look down on my life a little bit more like a hummingbird, and kind of go, ‘What am I doing? Why am I doing this? Why am I doing that?’”

Andrew Farriss is best known for co-writing all but one of INXS’s U.S. hits like “Never Tear Us Apart,” “What You Need,” “Devil Inside,” “Need You Tonight” and “New Sensation.” And while he was inducted into the Australian Songwriters Hall of Fame for these alternative rock successes, he grew up listening to country, alongside pop, classical and jazz.

Australia has a pretty healthy country music scene, which just happens to be based in a city about 100 miles from where he lives, Tamworth. It’s known as the Australian equivalent of Nashville.

Farriss’ wife is from Ohio, which he learned through experience is about a six-hour drive from Nashville, where he got to know that city’s musicians and producers, and started re-recording his demos with country arrangements after taking a deep dive into American country music culture.

He wasn’t planning on singing lead, but his friends talked him into it. And when he continued to re-record demos in his home studio at the farm in Australia, he was the only singer around. He realized that he enjoyed singing in his lower register to country Americana arrangements. Although he sang backup in INXS, he had never led a group of musicians before. Farriss also dug into the storytelling tradition in country.

Still, he wasn’t yet thinking about making an album. He was—and is—just having fun.

What finally convinced him otherwise was a horseback riding vacation he and his wife undertook near the Arizona/Mexico border. Over several days, Farriss was seduced by the history, culture and topography of the American Southwest. He saw old stagecoach routes, sites of battles between the U.S. Calvary and Apaches, and historic forts.

“The cultural aspect of it is very similar to Australia, where you had Europeans bringing in their foreign culture and clashes with indigenous peoples that lived on the land,” he says. “They would bring classical instruments, which became folk music, which turned into country music. … As a foreigner, to come into the U.S. and experience that part of your culture and history was a really amazing thing for me.”

When he got back to Nashville, he realized he’d finally had a story that excited him enough to make an album. Without an inspiration, he’d had no desire to jump through music industry hoops. He wasn’t interested in the kind of success the industry promises to success stories. He’d had his share of that already.

“So, what, I get 10, maybe 12 songs, … I dress up like whatever the modern fashions are, then I try to steer my songs towards whatever other charts success is based on,” he explains. “You’ll have labels and all these other guys going, ‘Hey look, you got to sound like this, you got to sound like him or her, or you’re not going to make it, man.’ … That’s why that horse riding adventure was the ignition, where I went, ‘Now I know what I want to do.’ … I’m going to write songs because I feel like writing them. I’m not trying to compete now with what I was doing before. I’m just I’m just enjoying myself and making music.”

The first thing Andrew Farriss left behind was the kind of music he wrote for INXS.

“I know how to work with the guys in INXS to make an INXS album, but that’s not what I wanted to do when I went to do this thing. I don’t need to borrow from that experience,” he says. “It sounds really selfish, but I’m just trying to enjoy myself. I’m not trying to entertain people, I’m not trying to change the world.”

Besides capturing the stories and ambiance of the Old West, such as on “With The Kelly Gang,” “Apache Pass” and “Son Of A Gun,” Farriss wanted to draw parallels between American and Australian cultures, show appreciation for wild places, and highlight the sound of musicians sitting in a room and playing largely acoustic instruments together.

He said his goal was to strip away as much technology as possible. To that effect, each song includes either lap steel (which Farriss played) or pedal steel guitar.

He’s especially proud of “My Cajun Girl,” which was recorded in one take.

With INXS, Farriss traveled to more than 50 countries, he said, and he grew to appreciate nature; one of the reasons he loved the American Southwest so much. In writing songs about the Old West, he wanted to “remind folks to look after our wilderness while it still is a wilderness, because we tend to concrete everything.”

He appreciates technology, both for making music and for communicating with one-another, but knows “you can’t eat a smartphone.”

Some of the songs on the album are newer, while some he originally wrote years ago, such as “My Brother.” Farriss wrote the song with Jon Stevens, one of several vocalists who took turns fronting INXS after Michael Hutchence’s passing. The song is not completely about Hutchence, however. Stevens had his own brother in mind, who had also passed away tragically.

When it came time to pick the songs for the record, Farriss called Stevens and got his permission to re-record it.

Farriss doesn’t care how many albums he sells, nor streaming numbers. Instead, he values his effort and measures success by proving, both to himself and his family, that he can still make music.

“My family thinks I’m crazy because ‘all dad ever does is work all the time.’ But I try to teach my kids you got to keep [moving], because life can start strange things at us, like a pandemic, or a drought, a flood, or health [issues],” he said. “Honestly, part of the reason I’m doing what I’m doing now is I wanted to show my kids, ‘Look what old dad can still do. Pop has still got it in him!’”

He’s excited about performing in front of people again, including in the U.S. He’s about to get on the road in Australia, where he’s decided to also play some of his older INXS songs, but in his newer, countrified style.

“At first, I [wondered], ‘Is that a good idea?’ So many people have asked me,” he says. “Now I think that’s nice that they want to hear these songs.”

Follow editor Roman Gokhman at Twitter.com/RomiTheWriter.