ACEY Monaro had for all intents and purposes given up on her US music dreams.
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic caused she and her American husband and bandmate Ben Burdick to flee Austin, Texas for the relative safety of her mother's home in Maitland.
Later living in Newcastle, for the first time in over a decade, felt like an epiphany for the 36-year-old.
"I spent most of last year and this year at home and it's really just made me realise how special Newcastle is and how there's nowhere I'd rather live than Newcastle," Monaro says on a Zoom call from Austin, dressed in a Tamworth Country Music Festival t-shirt.
"I can't believe I'm saying that, because when I was a kid I'd say, 'I can't wait to get out of Maitland, I can't wait to get out of Newcastle' and now I'm like 'take me back'."
Moving back permanently to Newcastle isn't so simple. Firstly Monaro has the not-so-small matter of an album creating a buzz in Austin.
Monaro's indie-rock band Go Fever is signed to Austin's Nine Mile Records and the indie label has high hopes for the five-piece's second album Velvet Fist, which was recorded in June 2020 during Monaro's trip back to Austin.
After deep contemplation, Monaro decided to return to Austin and give Go Fever one last red-hot crack.
"It was gonna go either way," she says. "We'll put it out there. I've even had conversations with our label where I've said, 'man, I really miss home, maybe we could do something long distance?'
"One of the songs on Velvet Fist, we recorded our parts in our bedrooms and just sent the parts to the engineer to make it sound like the rest of the record. I thought that was a possibility. We left it up to fate to see how it would go."
Fate, at this stage, appears to have sided with Go Fever and remaining in Austin.
Go Fever's first two singles off Velvet Fist - NYE15 and Long Run - have enjoyed heavy airplay on Texas radio station KUTX. The band were KUTX's artist of the month for September.
"We had the most played song on that station a couple of weeks ago, which was insane," Monaro says.
"We've had this huge thing happen and you know what, it might just fall off, who knows? But as it stands now we have to ride this out and see how it goes."
Monaro's relationship with Austin - a city world famous for the iconic South By Southwest Festival - dates back to when she first visited aged 18 on a US road trip with a former boyfriend.
"Every year after that I had a to-do list, which was - learn how to drive a car (which I only did recently), learn to fingerpick a guitar (I'm still not doing that) and move to Austin," she says.
After performing around Newcastle, Sydney and Melbourne as a country-blues singer-songwriter and supporting friends like Maitland's Zoe K and Demi Mitchell, Monaro travelled back to Austin in 2013.
There she met the Californian-bred Burdick who was in a band on the verge of "making it." The couple opted to remain in Texas for the band, but it soon imploded.
A terrified Monaro then started playing solo around Austin.
"I did a show at Hole In The Wall, this iconic bar here where Townes [Van Zandt] played all the time, and Lucinda [Williams], and that's where our current guitarists saw the show and came up to me and said, 'let's get a band together'," she says.
Go Fever released their self-titled debut album in 2017. Tracks like Folk Zero were inspired by '70s Americana, while Nobody's Business channeled '90s indie. The EP, Daydream Hawker, followed in 2019.
Velvet Fist's kooky, yet melodic mix of modern indie and new wave is a concerted improvement.
The album explores Monaro's battles with alcoholism and booze culture. The video clip for NYE15 was filmed in Maitland when Monaro was home last summer and features her riding a bike along the Hunter River followed by cyclists in kangaroo masks before they gatecrash a pub party.
Not surprisingly the charismatic Monaro and her Australian vocals has been the focal point of Go Fever for the US music media.
"It actually took me years to be comfortable singing in my full accent," she says. "When I first got here, and because I covered country songs, I had a twang.
"When I go home lots of my friends sing in American accents and it wasn't until I moved here I realised I couldn't do that. I started doing it and Americans would make fun of me, so I had to drop it.
"I remember a local muso came up to me after a show and said, 'I heard you on the radio and I thought you were just doing an Aussie accent because it's cool now because of Courtney Barnett'."
Go Fever have never performed in Australia, but Monaro hopes to bring the band home next Easter for a tour and possibly a show at the Gum Ball festival.
"It's really important to me," she says. "I had a country covers bands when I was 19 and we only played two shows and that's the only time I've played with a band at home."
Go Fever release Velvet Fist on October 8.
