Scott Toner smiles a lot, but the pain still often forces its way out from his broken heart.
"It's really tough to have fought some of those really dark times and the silence you hear that you haven't heard in so long when you're on your own," he admitted.
The musician has relocated back to Adelaide from Sydney after a painful divorce.
He is part of the Adelaide Fringe's street performers program that puts buskers on show from the city's bustling east end to the challenging confines of the Central Market.
But belting out his songs metres from the market toilets, cafes and a busy walkway does not faze the 36-year-old.
"Everything else in the world doesn't matter to me, I get to perform for a bunch of people," he said between songs.
"Whether they're throwing money in the guitar case or not doesn't bother me."
Power of music helped healing after family tragedy
Toner has had to deal with heartache since his teenage years.
"I was 14 when I started playing and my eldest brother had just passed away, so to me that was my first introduction to the healing power of music," he said.
Music has come to the rescue again following his divorce, and his struggles to deal with the separation are obvious in many lines in his songs, such as:
But the pain's back, these tiny heart attacks, but she is never coming back.
Like ships lost in the night, my heart is going to take flight.
"It's that silence that's probably the hardest to get through so if I can fill that silence with something, that's what's completely turned my life around," he said.
Being a musician is a far cry from his professional beginnings, where he spent several years in corporate jobs in the retail sector.
"Working with thousands of people at once and leading that amount of people, it gave me a lot of life experience I wouldn't have got otherwise," he said.
"I also learnt that you have to be true to yourself in what you're doing and … this is such a therapeutic thing to do, music.
"Although you may never be a millionaire, I think the value of the music itself is far more important than the monetary value than you can get in other corporate jobs."
Connection to music more important than cash
Toner has 22 self-made albums and has also branched out to produce for bands who would not otherwise be able to afford it.
He is also planning to tour internationally, with America a particular focus.
Toner does not care about the size of the audience — he just wants to play, be it in pubs and clubs or busking on the streets.
"Some people get touched by it and that's the important thing, whether it's one line out of one song, people connecting with the music is much more important to me than how much goes in the guitar case," he said while at the market.
"Even if it's the two-year-old who was here before, dancing, that to me — it plants something in their mind of what they can do."
