Canberra busker Genie Roberts releases debut EP Lifeless Things with help of ACT government's Homefront grant program to help artists in Covid

And perhaps Canberra's Genie Roberts is on his way to doing the same thing.

The singer has just released his debut EP, Lifeless Things, after busking for the past two years. It's a success story to come out of the ACT government's Homefront funding that was designed to support local artists to develop and sustain their arts practice during the pandemic.

More than 300 Canberrans applied for funding and Roberts was one of the 66 successful applicants who received up to $10,000.

"I had been planning on writing an EP for a few months at that point, by taking some of my songs that I busk with and recording them - just doing something simple, relatively cheap," he says.

"I thought, here's a great opportunity where I could actually use this time effectively, to do something that is probably more important than busking."

Busking is Roberts' main source of income. He admits it isn't a lot but it was enough to pay the rent and the bills.

Plus, over his time performing, he has become good at predicting where he should perform and when a good time to do it would be.

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He's had such success that, although he started performing his sets with a 50-50 mix of cover songs and originals, Roberts can now play for an hour - and engage with his audience - with mostly original music, despite the tracks being unknown to most people.

"People can listen to it if they want to and they show some support if they wanted to," Roberts says.

"I think it's also a great way to get your music out to a larger audience potentially. If people come to see me play a gig, I might get 20 people or so come. But if I'm standing out the front of a shopping centre, I could get 500 people walking past me and I could potentially get a larger reception that way, than playing at a gig."

However, when Covid hit, obviously the opportunities to perform and the money that came from that dried up. Even before Canberra went into lockdown, Roberts noticed a decrease as people started to avoid leaving the house. It was about that time the applications opened for Homefront and the singer started his bid to record his first EP.

"It was more difficult than I anticipated. When it started off, I had no idea how to use production software, no idea how to record music and put it on a computer and play around with it to get it to sound the way you want it to," he says.

"For some reason, I just expected it to be easier. But it took me quite a while before I was effectively transferring tracks.

"For instance, the first track on the EP that I recorded took me probably three months of work, before it got somewhere. As opposed to the last track that I recorded, I did the entire song in two weeks and it wasn't even a busking song before that - it was entirely original for the EP. It was a steep learning curve."

Lifeless Things is available on Spotify.

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