Tyler Richardson
"As a dad, you have a lot of questions you want to ask other dads. We’re talking to each other about our feelings and doubts, if we’ve felt overwhelmed. It’s nice to know everyone has been there."
"I want to be a dad who isn’t just there for the fun stuff. I try to be on the ground and present. I try to keep the phone away, try not to be distracted. Being together — just me and Harry and all three of us — is so important."
Tyler Richardson’s job has him on the road a lot. But when he’s home, he’s home.
“I want to be a dad who isn’t just there for the fun stuff,” he explains. “While I’m on tour, Alix has been with Harry. And when I come home, it’s my turn. Maybe it feels hard, because I haven’t slept, but she hasn’t either. Now it’s her chance to sleep and do stuff with friends. I try to be on the ground and present. I try to keep the phone away, try not to be distracted. Being together — just me and Harry and all three of us — is so important.”
As lead singer and bassist for Tasmanian band Luca Brasi, Tyler lives surrounded by music. And he creates the same world for his child. “We listen to music constantly with Harry. I sing to him all the time. His head bops, he moves and wiggles. That’s how I settle him, by singing to him, because it’ll stop him crying completely.”
Some of Tyler’s own earliest memories are of music in his family home. He remembers his parents telling him to stop running around the house when records were playing. “They would be saying, ‘you can’t jump right now; you’ll make the needle skip!’ I’ll never forget that. We grew up with music. It was everywhere.”
When Tyler was about six years old, his parents gave him his first guitar. “My dad always said he wished he had learned to play an instrument, and I really wanted to learn to play something to play for him,” Tyler recalls. “I always felt like music was worthwhile and good because my parents made it feel worthwhile. They were hugely invested, which is how music became my happy place.”
Tyler grew up in St Helens, in north-eastern Tasmania. Even though St Helens had a large district school, he couldn’t finish his education there. “If you wanted to go through Year 12, you had to leave the coast. I went to Launceston because it was closer. I was in student accommodation four days a week and went home Friday to Sunday.”
He got an apprenticeship during Year 12. “I had no idea what I was doing or why I was doing it. I started learning to be a boiler maker, welder, a steel construction worker. I did that in Launceston for about five years, and it was then that Luca Brasi started playing as a band and became what we are now.” Tyler took a job in Queensland, flying in and out of Tassie. The band stayed together the whole time. Things started to gain momentum, and he decided to come home.
Maybe this would seem like a moment when the band gave everything to their music. But that’s not how they did it. They made a group decision to pursue something more. “You want to chase your dream, to throw everything else away. But we wanted both worlds: a regular life here during the week, our partners, our families.” Tyler decided to study Education. “I studied by distance,” Tyler remembers. “We were touring Europe, and I was using the wi-fi in the van to write essays in between shows. I wanted to study but without losing the opportunity to play in a band. We were all studying or working in a way that we could make that work. It was a lot of hard yards, but we just kept going.”
Tyler says growing up together in St Helens and having decades-long friendships helped them stay in Tasmania and succeed together. “We never had any big aspirations other than wanting to play music, have fun, and connect with people. If you’re from Tassie, you’re an underdog. We kind of love that and wanted to take it and flip it, to show people what we could do. Every piece of merchandise, every banner behind us has something Tasmanian on it. We’re fiercely proud of being from here, and we wanted to succeed and be Tasmanian. I love when someone Tasmanian succeeds, every Tasmanian feels like they succeed.”
When Tyler isn’t touring with Luca Brasi, he teaches metalwork, woodwork, and design to high school students. “I didn’t realise I wanted to teach,” he says. “And then when I started doing it, I realised I could really change someone’s day for the better. The things kids can be going through, it just blows your mind. Teachers spend a lot of time as an emotional support person. It can be hard. But when kids are busy working with their hands, it gives you a chance to talk to them about what they’re doing in life. I’ve found they really want to be heard. To give them the chance to talk about who they are and to be treated like an adult really does change kids sometimes.”
Tyler loves being a dad and dreams of helping create a beautiful childhood for Harry. “I want to be patient – that’s number one. I want to be present and calmer, because I know sometimes I need to take a moment to just pause and think. I want to be supportive, for him to feel like he’s valued.” For Tyler and Alix, their friends are like family. “If you come from the East Coast, a lot of our friends have the same story as us – their families are elsewhere. We say it takes a village. We rely on our support network of friends a lot. We use everyone we know as a sounding board. As a dad, you have a lot of questions you want to ask other dads. It’s vulnerable and open, and we want it to be that way. We’re talking to each other about our feelings and doubts, if we felt like we’ve done something the wrong way, if we’ve felt overwhelmed. It’s nice to know everyone’s going through the same stuff or has been there, and they’re fine. Especially in our band too, because a couple of us had kids earlier, knowing how to make it work with touring and work. Everyone has stuff that’s not easy, and you can figure out a way to make it possible.”
A family is built with so many gradual steps, maybe it doesn’t seem like a lot. But anyone who starts thinking about how they do it all – juggle life, work, relationship, family, friends – there’s a lot there.
Parenting can be full on, and mental health advocacy is important to Tyler. “A family is built with so many gradual steps, maybe it doesn’t seem like a lot. But anyone who starts thinking about how they do it all – juggle life, work, relationship, family, friends – there’s a lot there.” As a Tasmanian ambassador for mental health organisation Lifeline, Tyler focuses on men’s mental health. “I’ve had a lot of experience with suicide in my own friendship group. It’s massive, unfortunately, especially in rural communities. That’s what spurred me to get involved. There is a lot of very negative male culture, and men – young men especially – deserve the chance to learn to do the right thing. I teach 13 to 16-year-old boys and get to see and hear what they think is normal and valued. We have the chance to pull them up on something they might’ve said, and they’ve been like, ‘Whoa, is that really what I’m saying?’ They didn’t understand it, that their words could be so loaded. I didn’t hear that from teachers when I was a kid, so it took quite a lot longer for us to realise a better way to be.”
For Tyler, this culture extends to parenting, and he believes fathers have an essential role in children’s lives. “We talk about modelling so much – our behaviour is so important, because kids do what they’ve been seeing. I got involved in Little Tasmanian because I want to reach young dads – any dads – and help them see that being involved in their kids’ lives is super important. They have so much to give. Not just the fun stuff. For their child to have the full experience of what they can offer.”
For fathers and all parents, Tyler’s biggest message is that they can make it through. “There are times, especially in the first few months, where it’s like, ‘What have we done here?!” The best advice I got was that it’s okay to step away and regroup. Have a breather. Let go and decompress. Go for a walk or change something up. Nothing lasts forever, no matter how much it seems like it will. All those times you think it’s not worth it, it’s bloody worth it. The positive outweighs the negative a million times.”
We worked with southern Tasmanian photographer Moss Halliday-Hall for this Tasmanian story.