The story
Sweet wrapper. Rougher thing inside.
Sally’s Candy Shop is Marco Motta: a Brisbane Bayside singer and guitarist playing live acoustic music across Brisbane and the Gold Coast, and writing his own songs.
The short answer
Who is Sally?
There is no Sally. Sally's Candy Shop is me, Marco Motta, a singer and guitarist from Brisbane, playing solo or as a duo across Brisbane and the Gold Coast.
It started as a band with my brothers in the 2000s. The name came off a shirt a friend of ours had. We just liked the sound of it. When we uploaded our first song, “Terrorism”, to triple j Unearth, that was the name we put on it. The song is still up there, and the name stuck.
These days it is mostly me, but my brothers and other friends still get up and play along whenever they are around.
The mismatch
So wrong it's right
It sounds like there should be a striped awning somewhere in 1957 and a woman called Sally selling saltwater taffy. Then a bearded bloke gets up and starts belting through a slightly wrecked grunge voice.
It gets better when the song is Sabrina Carpenter or Chappell Roan. I am not interested in songs that are supposed to fit me. Put a song you love through a voice it was never written for and sometimes you hear something new in it.
How it started again
I don't really run out
Kids, work, a business — for years music sat at the edge. But I have more energy than one day knows what to do with, and the house was not big enough for it. My wife was the first to say it: take it somewhere. So I took it to the Brisbane open mics.
One open mic became another. I met other musicians, started trying things, got paid gigs, started writing and recording again. The Job of Life came out of it. It has only been about a year, which is ridiculous, because it already feels like a whole other lifetime.
Brisbane
You bring yourself along
I came to Brisbane from Italy at nineteen. My parents were already here, and my life over there was falling apart. My first answer was no. Then, with nothing else working, I gave it a go.
I thought changing continents would make me a different person. It turns out you bring yourself along. What changed was that I stopped rearranging the outside world and started working on the inside. Brisbane slowly became home.
The rest of it
The pieces don't agree
By day I run a data analytics consultancy in Brisbane. I have a PhD in philosophy. I am Catholic and I cannot leave a Bible story alone. I am a dad. On a Tuesday night I am the bloke at the open mic.
I have stopped trying to make all the pieces agree with each other. I am not trying to go back to the musician I might have been at twenty. I am interested in what music sounds like coming from the person I actually became.
Bookings
Got a date in mind?
Tell me what the night is and I will tell you straight away whether I am free and what it looks like. No packages to decode, no sales pitch.