Jordie Lane's first musical memory is of watching his parents sing in a marching band while dressed in drag as part of a travelling clown theatre troupe.
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All the ideas I had about the outside world and my place in it changed.
- Musician Jordie Lane
The mother dressed as a man went on to become stand-up comedian Denise Scott, and while Lane was just two-years-old at the time, life on the road was already part of his soul.
"It must be a pretty intense memory to remember that so young," he said ahead of his performance at this weekend's 2019 Cobargo Folk Festival.
"When you are a kid you just go wherever your parents take you, then I spent all of highschool at home in Melbourne, so I just had the urge to travel again.
"It was something that stayed with me since I was a kid."
He fled to South East Asia on an adventure that would lead him to a journey of enlightenment.
"All the ideas I had about the outside world and my place in it changed," Lane said.
"The things you're smelling and seeing are completely different to what you know. It was a humbling experience, and inspired me to use music as a vehicle to see the whole world."
Now based in Nashville, Lane said he doesn't listen to much music, although he has taken a liking to six time Grammy Award winning American singer and songwriter Kacey Musgraves.
"It's really clever song writing and not lazy," Lane said.
"Music can come off as cheesy because artists want it to be something they want to sell. If you write for what the radio wants, it's not going to sound as good as you want it to."
Lane is flying out to Australia purely for the folk festival, and will be performing alongside the producer and co-writer of his 2018 album Glassellland, Clare Reynolds.
"The culture of music is slightly older in America, so I got a more instant feeling of people respecting music as an art form," Lane said.
"In Australia people are more cynical or negative. Being in America gives you the freedom to explore and grow without being tied down to your roots, or what you think you should be, or what people expect you to be.
"Australia is smaller and more enclosed, so I feel a bit more like I will be judged."
Lane will hit the folk festival crowd with new tracks from his upcoming EP, and performing in a duet bringing together both male and female perspectives on the world.
"Many of the songs have the theme of relationships between two people, so the male, female harmonies are everything to the show and these songs," Lane said.
"It's got a theatrical element to it, and it brings out a much bigger and fuller sound."
