Bailey Judd

Bailey Judd is a producer/songwriter emerging from a hotpot of blues, pop and jazz which has been brewing since childhood. Having received mentorship from pop writers and studying Jazz at VCA, Judd has curated a textured mix of musical influences.

From humble beginnings, Bailey Judd was first exposed to music from the calming vibrations of his mother’s singing and acoustic guitar strumming in the womb. From Country NSW, Bailey grew up as an introverted kid but found his voice through the guitar at age nine.

Frustrated by the then popular video game Guitar Hero, Bailey took on the mission to learn the electric guitar in an act of sibling rivalry. Learning by ear and from 2009 handicam youtube tutorials, he started learning the iconic riffs that he couldn’t play on the game.

Guitar became a point of social interest for Bailey, giving him a voice that was previously unavailable to him. He would play guitar before school, lunch time, on the school bus then after school in the mirror dreaming of the grandeur that his rock god’s had achieved.

With shoulder length hair and a love for 70’s and 80’s rock, Bailey’s builder father encouraged him to perform with his backing tracks to friends and local punters in a frequented dive pub giving Bailey his first performance experiences. These performances became more regular as word spread about his talent. Soon he was supporting his guitar teacher’s band before their prime time sets.

Bailey started to experiment with recording, making garageband demos on his mum's macbook with the built-in microphone up against the grill cloth of his amp and drumming on household items. Eventually, he put together a demo CD with covers of his favourite rock tunes and earliest compositions that his dad printed and duplicated from home on their inkjet printer.

From 2009, Bailey frequented the Australian Blues Festival, jamming with a multitude of Australia’s best blues artists and weekend warriors gaining experience beyond his years as a musician. He quickly became known as the “fedora kid” who wowed audiences. In this time, he also played Harley Davidson’s HOG Rally where we performed to thousands of bikers for a multitude of years. That is where he met Cole Rintoul (Mercury4) and began his next chapter as a songwriter.

Cole taught Bailey the fundamentals of pop songwriting and around this time Bailey began playing in high school bands, recording other band’s demos making music from AC/DC inspired rock, blues, metal and venturing into more commercial territory. Bailey recorded two EP length demos that fully self-produced and played all the instruments by the time he graduated high school.

Bailey then relocated to Melbourne to study jazz guitar at VCA, meeting like minded people who pushed him on the guitar further than ever before yet struggled to honour the desire to be a solo artist amongst the pressure to be a jazz musician.
In 2019 Bailey released his first (proper) single “The View” with fellow VCA band mates Ben Cooke, Dominic Stitt and Max Teakle followed by “Goodbye Brown Eyes” and a performance with Sofar Sounds Melbourne.

In 2020, released “Dance With You Now” released in early April’s lockdown, he has been played on Triple J Roots N’ All, 3MDR, featured on Obscure Sounds and a recent The Isolation Sessions live performance. He now continues the soaring, falsetto-based path laid out by his last single.
“An infectious pop dance sensibility combined with some daring, informed harmonic moves. I see an expansive future for Bailey Judd.” - John McAll, Producer, Keyboardist for The Black Sorrows, Musical Director for At Last with Vika Bull.

Now drawing from long time hero Jeff Buckley, Judd’s falsetto mourns alongside lush guitar layers, complimented by his new adoption of synths and production elements. Judd marries his diverse influences adding to his explorative genre-bending wheelhouse.