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Deadly Sounds Episode 119 – Dewayne Everettsmith

You may already be familiar with Dewayne Everettsmith’s music without even realising it. Not only has he been a contestant on Australian Idol, but his song ‘It’s Like Love’ has been featured in one of the Tourism Australia television campaigns.

This week he joins Rhoda Roberts on Deadly Sounds.

“I often tell people that when I do my live shows I’ve been in your lounge room without you even knowing it. It’s fantastic to have that played in everybody’s lounge room for the last year and a half,” Dewayne tells Deadly Sounds.

The opportunity to work alongside Tourism Australia was presented to Dewayne back when he was 19 years of age, just after Australian Idol.

“I started doing stuff with Tourism Tasmania and the next minute Tourism Australia give me a call and say, hey, you should do this program that they’re running called Making Tracks, where I collaborated with a classical musician and we came up with ‘It’s Like Love’ in four days, which is pretty amazing,” Dewayne says.

A big part of Dewayne’s life now is his wife Michelle who he met in high school, and later rekindled his relationship with. She is the inspiration for his song ‘Court On Your Lips’.

“It started when I actually had a crush on her in high school, then we went our separate ways and then we came back; we later on we met up again,” Dewayne explains.

“But I instantly fell in love and we went down to a beautiful beach about 30 minutes out of Hobart and I was too shy to kiss her, so she kissed me instead and the story goes I’ll be forever caught on your lips – on her lips since.”

One of his songs, ‘Surrender’ has a very personal story in it involving Dewayne’s experience with domestic abuse from a young age and into adulthood.

“The song represents domestic abuse and what happened with my abuse. As a child I grew up and I thought that was normal, the relationships that I viewed and the relationships that I’ve seen; I thought it was normal,” he says.

“And I was inconsiderate; I could be verbally abusive, at times unknowingly. But it’s also interesting because it was happening both ways in my relationship at that time. My partner Michelle is still my partner. We’ve had the same similar background as well. We were both going through a stage in our life where it was very difficult and we weren’t very considerate. We were verbally abusive.

“I’m 20 years of age. I have to take responsibility for my life now. I can’t blame my life on the things that have happened in the past, and also when I come through this I have to talk about it, I have to share because I’m a big believer we have to remove the shame and enforce responsibility. It’s a community effort to do that.”

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