Hi! I'm Matt - the guy behind this little Wildlive project. For those that want to read all the way through, I just thought I'd let you in a little on who I am, where I've come from, and why I have arrived here at this point in time. 

It's kind of a long essay, but hopefully gives you a bit of a background on what makes me tick…

I’ve always loved music and creative writing. It feels as though it’s woven into my DNA. Some of my earliest memories are of words and melodies pulling at me, asking to be shaped into something. In Year 5, I spent most of my time writing poems, locked in a friendly rivalry with my best mate Gary over who could write the most in a year. I think I finished with around 135. Gary beat me by a handful. So close. But the important thing was that a spark had been lit that year—and it never really went out.

Writing and poetry would come and go in waves as life unfolded. Like many developing teenagers, I was shaped by my circumstances. I started high school in the top English class, only to slide to the bottom by Year 9 as I disengaged from school and from the people meant to guide me. My learning response was directly tied to what was being taught - and who was teaching it.

Some years were rich with creativity; others were sparse. That pattern would repeat itself many times.

Music, though, always stayed close. I had previously begun piano lessons in primary school, but abandoned them out of frustration with rigid theory and structure. Once again, a result of sensitivity to earning methods and who was teaching it. Guitar followed in high school, but by then my dissatisfaction with school itself was overwhelming. I left at the end of Year 10, briefly returned in Year 11, and then left again. In hindsight, I suspect my leanings towards an ADHD type personality played a role, though I was never diagnosed. But the pattern was there. Either way, the traditional classroom was never a place where I thrived.

Music had become my first true love. One of my earliest jobs out of school was with Rhema Records in Sydney, working in the warehouse—humble work, but it placed me right where I wanted to be. 

That role eventually led me to work with music promoter David Smallbone (David Smallbone Promotions), touring international Christian artists across Australia. David later moved with his family to the U.S. in the early 1990's after the collapse of his promotion business, where he would later oversee the successful careers of his kids Rebecca St James and For King and Country. David and his family's  story was recently made into the award winning movie “Unsung Hero”.

Then, at just 17 years of age (while still working with David Smallbone), I promoted my own concert on Sydney’s southern outskirts. Tickets were $3. It felt like the centre of the universe to me.

Those years were completely immersed in music, community radio, and live events. Throughout my late teens and early twenties, I would go on to promote a number of concert events, partnered on tours, and worked alongside various artists both local and international, with early mentoring from David Smallbone. I even produced a couple of my own radio shows for a number of years in Sydney, promoting and playing a lot of the music and artists I had grown to love. It was an extraordinary time—creative, chaotic, formative. I didn’t realise then how rare and special it was to be living so fully inside something I loved.

Then, in the late 1980s, everything shifted. My first overseas trip awakened a deep love of travel, and slowly, almost imperceptibly, travel began to pull me away from music. What started as curiosity became a career that spanned nearly 35 years. I worked for airlines, hotels, travel technology providers, and eventually ran my own business specialising in cruise travel. I became deeply embedded in the cruise industry—earning top accreditation, working ship turnarounds at Sydney’s terminals, and coordinating shore excursions for some of the premium cruise brands coming through Sydney. It was demanding, fast-paced, and strangely satisfying. 

Travel taught me service, adaptability, and how to think clearly under pressure—skills that echoed my earlier life in music.

Then the pandemic arrived, and the travel industry collapsed almost overnight. Cruise ships were entirely banished from Australian waters. Work disappeared. Friends in the industry were financially devastated, working for negative income just to repatriate clients and process endless refunds. I was forced to pivot. 

I gained a bus licence and ended up driving for a local school, while staying emotionally tethered to cruising through a YouTube channel, The Cruise Lifestyle, interviewing industry identities, cruise line representatives and exploring the latest cruise stories. When ships finally returned, I came back briefly—but something had shifted. My heart wasn’t in it anymore.

Then in 2023 (after many years of dreaming), my wife, my daugher and I packed our bags and left Sydney—the city that had been home my entire life—and moved to Queensland's Gold Coast. It was a sea change in every sense. It also marked the quiet closing of my travel chapter and a final farewell to cruise ships. 

By then, I had spent several years drifting, unsure where I belonged. The pandemic had stripped away certainty and exposed how far I’d moved from my initial sense of calling. I knew I was meant for something else. I just didn’t know what.

Something else was happening. As I approached my 60s, a strange and persistent premonition had settled in me: I couldn’t see my life getting there. So much so that I even shut down any talk of 60th celebrations. I couldn’t explain it, only that I felt my life would not be extending beyond that point.

Then, on 21 May 2024, that premonition very nearly became reality. After what was essentially a pretty unremarkable, normal day, I suffered a sudden and catastrophic aortic dissection. My artery had split from close to my heart down my left side into my leg. In a moment, everything fractured—my body, my assumptions, my future. I talk about that episode here, but by the grace of God and the skills of amazing medical staff, my life was somehow saved. And with it came a reckoning: I was still here for a reason. What that reason is continues to unfold.

It took 4 operations, dialysis, blood transfusions, 10 stents and nearly 5 weeks in hospital and then 6 months home to recover. I almost didn't make it, but at least the premonition was gone!

There are many stories to tell, and I will probably expand on some of those moments in separate posts, but the main thing was that I survived. But it brought my restlessness and hunger for meaning even more to the fore. I have now been given a second chance at life, and that second chance brings with it a responsibility to make things count.

So, I revisited music. My first love. But what did that mean? Could I somehow make sense and meaning of the countless songs, lyrics and concepts that had been swirling in my head since primary school? Is that indeed where I was now supposed to be putting my energy? Could those talents somehow be of use? 

A Biblical passage kept coming to mind. It was where Jesus was giving the parable of the talents. I was one who buried my gifts and talents for so many years, and after what I had been through and where I was at in this season of my (renewed) life, the passage was unmistakably calling me to make good on what I had been given. To not do so was simply no longer acceptable. While time was still ticking, but offering no guarantee on how long.

So I started exploring options to make good on those decades of lyrics, songs and unfinished concepts that had been collecting dust for year upon year upon year. And “Wildlive” was born. 

Now, I am not a singer. I can, but I really don't have the ability - or confidence - to pull it off. So the trick was to be able to put my songs together and publish them knowing that there are no explicit guarantees on available time given what I had been through. Or to be truthful, money either. Good production and song arrangement generally cost good $$!

So I have gone the most controversial route, and one that has already gotten me into trouble in traditional music circles. I am using AI as a songwriting and production partner to bring my songs and lyrics to life. That is, I am still writing every song, every lyric, but am using AI to put it together and produce the final result so that I can publish and distribute each song to streaming and download services. I will have some opinion pieces that I will be publishing around the controversies surrounding AI which I will put on the blog from time to time.

The hope is that as Wildlive is essentially a songwriting project (and I make no bones about using AI to achieve production worthy results), that the songs themselves will be picked up by upcoming and established artists to use in their own performing works. It's a learning process, and I am certainly achieving better, more polished results as I get more experienced at using these tools, but I am finally in a place where I believe I can be best used and closer to where God wants me to be in light of the talents He has given.

I will continue to cop flak for the AI angle, but truthfully, I have always been a bit of a square peg in life anyway. It doesn't stop me from continuing to be - and do - what I have been called to do. And while I still have breath, I will follow that calling.