RENOWNED local musician and film director Richard Frankland has been tipped for a resurgence in popularity, with a new album on the way and a performance booked for this year’s WOMAD festival.

The album, Discovering Lerpeen Mara (song man in the Dharwuurd Wurrung language), is set to be released in the new year and is a selection of Mr Frankland’s work over the past two decades or so, but re-imagined and worked into a cohesive set.

Mr Frankland’s experiences as an Australian Aboriginal person, the hard truths of colonisation, and his hopes for the future are constant themes throughout the lyrics, though not exclusively.

Though he had been planning to work on a new album over the COVID period anyway, the project took on serious legs when new friend and collaborator 1970s Australian pop star Mark Holden (perhaps better known to the younger generation as one of the original Australian Idol judges) came on board.

The two met when Mr Holden was researching his family history for a book he was writing, and was put in touch with Mr Frankland as a person worth talking to regarding the State’s colonial history.

“I reached out to him for that project, and then during the lockdown, we kind of started communicating with each other and then sending songs to each other and art, and it was just fantastic,” Mr Holden said.

“I eventually got to meet him, and went to visit his house near Portland, I played him a song I was working on and we just immediately got to writing together, and pretty soon he said he was working on an album and asked if I wanted to help.

“I jumped on it, I haven’t worked on an album for 15 years, I’ve spent the last 12 years practicing law…and just put music behind me and thought that part of my life was over really, and then Richard came in my life.

“He kind of drew me into getting back into the music business…I would not have believed it a few years ago but I’m retiring from being a barrister and rediscovering my love of music and just having such an incredible cultural experience with Richard and it just feels like such an enormous privilege.”

Few artists would be able to compare to the Tyrendarra based Gunditjmara man’s creative output, Mr Frankland has been churning out music, films, books, plays and poetry, steeped in social consciousness consistently for the past 20 years as well as holding positions at universities.

Currently alongside the album he is working on an autobiography, an opera, is in negotiations on a TV series, has another album in the pipeline, and works with Deakin university as a Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts, but said he still has the fire for more.

In fact, Mr Frankland thinks that the social appetite for the type of music he makes is still maturing.

“A lot of people now are at the point where they’ve had enough of pleasant songs about having a cup of coffee and a nice bum walking down the street,” Mr Frankland said.

“This music on the album, some of these are songs and content that was around 20 or 30 years ago that I was writing about, for it to be heard and listened to now and people are excited by it, it’s pretty powerful.

“Back in the day, it was hard to find a place on radio for (my music), but nowadays social media has opened up people's ability to hear this type of stuff and access it on their own.

“In the old days we had Warumpi Band, No Fixed Address, great bands like that who would get limited airplay and limited venues.

“Those guys and girls are incredible musicians of a really high calibre, and couldn't get hold of that broader audience because the gateway to the popular media was pretty blocked at that time.

“Later on, we had Kev Carmody come through, Tiddas, Archie Roach all at various times as Australia’s social consciousness rose, but still limited by that in a way.

“I think where we're at now as people came to hear this lens on the state of the world, and unfortunately the subject matter hasn’t changed much.”

Mr Frankland, who is also a highly decorated and accomplished film writer and director, said that music is special as an art form in the way it can reach people emotionally.

His experiences of racial discrimination, particularly as a field officer during the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in the late 1980s led him to the realisation that art, and particularly music, had a rare power to educate and change people’s attitude.

“I believe that when you have art, you have voice and with voice comes freedom, and with that freedom comes a responsibility,” Mr Frankland said.

“I've sung in lots of places; I remember singing a song about the Condah Mission in a pub with all these big burly Caucasian men.

“The room was silent and I had my eyes closed while I was singing and when I opened them up, a couple of the blokes were almost crying, and I thought ‘it works’, this is how we help people humanise what's been dehumanised.”

The power of Mr Frankland’s music, his creative drive, and the cultural relevance is not lost on Mr Holden, who said the experience of making the album together has been “mind blowing”.

This is no small praise from a man who was once a household name as a performer himself, worked as a big-name producer in Los Angeles and cut out a career as a judge on Australian Idol and X factor.

“Just listening to his songs for the first time, it was just one great song after another and I couldn't believe that, that they were not cultural media hits,” Mr Holden said.

“There’s so many great songs and just so much incredible art that falls out of him. Over and over, it’s unbelievable.

“It’s his fifth album, but we are treating it like his first, to so many people out there he’s completely undiscovered.

“He really is one of the great Australian artists that just has not yet been properly realised, and I think this is the moment.”