BIO

After hearing PJ Weston’s debut album “Songs About Home” in late 2007, an Australian local radio station presenter commented that it reminded her of a mix between Bob Dylan and Paul Kelly. It is a compliment PJ will gladly take.

After years cutting his teeth as a largely anonymous member of such Brisbane bands as Naked Apes and Poppa Mono, it was “Songs About Home” which established PJ Weston as a solo act within the musical marketplace. “It’s almost impossible not to break out in a smile, tap your feet and feel reinvigorated by tracks such as album opener ‘Plant Myself’, ‘Kids These Days’, ‘Don’t Grieve For Me’ and ‘All In Your Mind’... ‘Songs About Home’ is honest, organic, and straight from the heart.” (Time Off 28/11/07)

Produced almost entirely in Weston’s home studio, the album and particularly its opening track “Plant Myself”, proved prophetic. After its release fatherhood  competed rather successfully with music for PJ’s time. The John Lennon line “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans” sums it up pretty well. But life is music for PJ Weston and it is from everyday life that the songs come. Songs like “Fear the Fury of a Patient Man”, which was short listed as a finalist in the Q Song Music awards in 2008 and “Josephine”, a touching song about the challenges a man faces when fostering a child, which would end up on the “Faces in the Street” EP.

After the release of “Songs About Home” PJ and his band ‘The Precious Few’, honed their live act in venues around Southeast Queensland, including an outstanding series of shows as part of the 2010 ‘Residents Series’ at the Brisbane Powerhouse. They hit the studio to record the songs that would become the “Faces in the Street” EP, but that would have to wait a while.

2012 saw PJ Weston and his family move to the San Francisco Bay Area, on what was at the time a two year plan. It turned out pretty well though, and before too long PJ landed a residency playing in the Pioneer Saloon in Woodside CA, a bar that Neil Young had been known to frequent to test out his new material back in the day. “Walking into that bar was one of those pivotal, trajectory changing moments in life”, he recalls. It was there that he met the musicians with whom he would form Whiskey Hill Billies, a band who still perform regularly in the Bay Area to this day and who are soon to release their debut album.

It was in California also that PJ finally got around to finishing the songs that were recorded with the Precious Few in Brisbane in 2010 and released in 2015 on the “Faces in the Street” EP. “Faces in the Street” captured the live sound of the Precious Few, particularly in the title track, a rollicking number which took its lyric from the 1888 Henry Lawson poem of the same name. It also featured “Guilty Beast”, the title line of which came from John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden” and a film clip of which was made in various locations on the peninsula south of San Francisco.

While his released output has been sparse, when it comes to playing live in public, PJ Weston has always been prolific. “I played my first gig in a licensed venue when I was 16”, he recalls. “I think we were paid five pitchers of beer. More beer than I had ever seen. The older guys in the band got into it as my dad arrived to drive me home after the gig.” Since then, regular live public performances have been a given. A couple of multi year residencies in bars in Brisbane were followed by a seven year stint in the Pioneer Saloon, along with many other dates in the Bay Area. Covid put an end to the Pioneer stand but more recently PJ has found another residency at the Mountain House Restaurant (where Neil Young filmed the video to “Harvest Moon”), among the Redwoods in Woodside CA. 

With a couple of thousand live gigs under his belt, PJ Weston has developed a massive repertoire, ranging from carefully chosen, less well known selections by his favorite artists (think Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Paul Kelly, Ron Sexsmith, Steve Earle), to all time classics that are familiar to all (Beatles, Stones etc..), along with originals of course. He gigs regularly around the Bay Area on his own and with Whiskey Hill Billies and has no plans to stop anytime soon.

PJ Weston has a deep songbook with which to build his musical footprint - look out for the next release!