Original music · Brisbane
Sweet name. Dark little songs. Big pub voice.
The covers pay for the petrol. These are the songs I actually wrote.
Out now
The Job of Life
The title is deliberately mundane. We talk about the meaning of life as if there is some enormous answer, but most of life is just getting up and doing the job of it. Loving people, screwing things up, going to work, making dinner — and nobody ever tells you whether you are doing it right.
The video is stitched together from pieces, and I left the seams showing on purpose. Life does not arrive as one coherent thing. You keep stitching bits onto it.
What it is about
Why do we keep going?
I have a philosophy PhD and I am Catholic, which means I am constitutionally incapable of hearing a Bible story and leaving it alone. Job fascinates me because everyone around him wants his suffering to make sense, and the story refuses to give them that.
Schopenhauer sits on the other shoulder saying maybe there is no grand reason — just a will to live that pushes us forward whether we like it or not. It rebuilds after disaster. It also makes you unable to sit still.
Which is roughly how a bloke with a day job ends up at an open mic on a Tuesday.
Local, original
Made in Brisbane
A year ago I walked back into the Brisbane open-mic scene. It has been the best thing I have done in a long time, and the originals came straight out of it — the rooms, the other songwriters, the people who stayed for one more.
Press kit
For radio, press & promoters
Short bio · 25 words
Sally's Candy Shop is Brisbane singer-songwriter Marco Motta: sweet name, dark little songs, big pub voice. Latest single The Job of Life is out now.
Longer bio · 100 words
Sally's Candy Shop is the project of Brisbane Bayside singer-songwriter Marco Motta. The name goes back to a band with his brothers; he kept it because it is so wrong it became right — a 1950s candy-shop name on a bearded bloke with a grunge voice who is as likely to play Chappell Roan as Powderfinger. He came back to music through Brisbane's open-mic scene after years away raising kids and running a business. His latest single The Job of Life, a song about why we keep going, arrived with a video stitched together from pieces, seams deliberately left showing.