A musician, a journalist, and a rally driver appear on a panel. They’re there to talk about how “fear shapes decision making, creativity, and resilience.” Surely the rally driver suffers way more fear than, say, the musician?
“Everything I do every day scares me,” the musician in question, Adam McGrath, exclaims. “There’s a thousand things that scare me every day! My whole life is a battle against fear, getting up in the morning, you know what I mean? And that’s sort of been my whole life.”
Once described by RNZ as a “national treasure,” McGrath is an Aotearoa folk singer-songwriter who could reasonably claim to be the hardest-working musician in the entire country.
Best known as the lead member of The Eastern, he spends months at a time on the road, and has shared stages with big names like Paul Kelly, Jimmy Barnes, Steve Earl, and Old Crowe Medicine Show.
He is, to be trite for a second, a musician’s musician. For McGrath, being constantly on the road, playing his personal and political folk songs to different people, is what life is all about.
When we speak over the phone, he’s just finished a run of shows, including one in Auckland and one as far away as Golden Bay.
Following a show in Geraldine on March 13th, he’ll turn his attention to something a little different: he’s one of the speakers for the ‘Feel The Fear’ session at Aspiring Conversations 2026, a Wānaka-based festival.
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On March 29th, McGrath, rally driver Emma Gilmore, and award-winning journalist Lisette Reymer will discuss all things fear.
“The session unpacks the familiar advice to ‘do one thing every day that scares you,’ through lived experience rather than theory,” according to a press release.
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McGrath says he was actually due to appear at the event last year, until an unexpected health issue — he had a “little mini stroke” — meant he had to miss it.
He’s no newbie to panels, though. “I like a yarn, so sometimes it’s hard to shut me up,” he says, followed by a booming laugh. “So that’s good and I do talks.”
“You know, every year I do a couple of talks for a university course here,” he continues. “Because I do folk music at a lot of folk festivals. If you’re [an] authentic artist, you have to do workshops and stuff, so I do things like that. So talking in front of people is my goal… yeah, I’m good for it.
McGrath says his gift of the gab developed when he “started trying to give the song some context” in his live sets. “[B]ecause a guy with an acoustic guitar showing up… it’s not something that anyone hasn’t seen before a billion times… I hope [it] makes the songs better as well.”
On the theme of the session, McGrath says he relates hard.
“Right next to my bed, I have a ripped out page from an art book and it has a painting by the great New Zealand artist Colin McCahon and it’s called ‘Scared’ and it’s just sort of like white letters on black and it says, ‘I am scared, I stand up.’
“That’s how fear is a great motivator, you know? When I was a teenager, I was scared of all the heavy dudes around me and that kept me going. you know, as an adult, I’m scared of fucking up… And especially doing things in public, that’s all about the fear.”
McGrath still gets nervous before each and every show, but he says his “nerves are excitement.”
“[W]hereas most people if they’re fearful they go inside themselves, I go outside myself… The problem for me is not so much before the show — it’s after the show and that’s where the fear gets me,” he explains.
Another way McGrath tests himself: he never has a setlist for a show.
“[…] I go in and whatever happens, happens… and generally it’s always good, and I’m always lucky in that way, but I’m walking a tightrope, you know what I mean?
“But it’s good because it keeps me alive and it [gets] my heart beating and so I’m never complacent… because I play so much, the shows are always interesting and exciting for me because they’re always different and that’s good because the audiences are always different.
“Everyone has a different experience in their life and what’s going on for them and so I try to make the shows reflect that in a way. I’m working for them so I’m not just there to present myself, I’m there for us to have a little thing together, you know?”
Following his Aspiring Conversations appearance, McGrath will release his new solo album, Wrecker Songs, on May 1st. Listen to the first two tracks below.
Check Rolling Stone AU/NZ for a wider interview with the musician about the record and much more soon.
More information about Aspiring Conversations 2026 can be found here. Check out Adam McGrath’s upcoming tour dates here.
