Like most of his contemporaries, Mack Geiger was ranching cattle, thumbing through Travis Tritt CD’s and picking a guitar from a young age. The only difference was he was doing it on the opposite end of the world. The way he sees it, and the way audiences seem to be hearing it, distance doesn’t make much of a difference in the end product.
“It’s the soundtrack of people’s lives, you know?” Geiger said on the presence of country music in rural Australia. “You’ve got a massive agricultural industry and a lot of cattle and a lot of cowboys out there.
“I think recently, there’s been a bit of a new wind coming through with a lot of new artists who are breaking through, especially traditional artists, because that’s what we grew up on, and that shift feels good.”
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If it sounds a hell of a lot like the current country landscape stateside, Geiger would probably agree with you. He could count on one hand the number of times he’s made the voyage over to the United States, but you’d be forgiven for thinking he grew up in West Texas four bars into a two-step “Campdraft Queen” of his 2026 EP Walk a Straight Line. Somewhere in between a sunkissed George Strait album cut and a line dance you’ve heard at a thousand honky tonks. To us, it’s a project chock-full of callbacks to some vintage radio hits. To the 21-year-old, it just sounds like home.
“We pretty much grew up on a bunch of 90’s country CDs,” Geiger said about the Brooks & Dunn to Alan Jackson rotation in his parents’ car stereo system. “Me and my siblings would usually punch on in the back seat, so they were pretty cranked up.”
He explained that the similarities in upbringing didn’t start and stop with just the contents of the record collection. It continues into the early mornings of his upbringing, when he’d be rounding up cattle with his parents and five siblings. “You look back and think, there might be more of a reason they had five kids than just for the company,” he quips, but he recognizes that the work ethic is carrying over into cutting dozens of songs on a laundry list of tour dates every time he comes across the pond for a few weeks. It’s probably where his dry sense of humor comes from, too.
“I think in rural Australia, people are pretty up front,” Geiger said. “You know where you stand and if they don’t like something they’ll tell you. I think that’s really valuable.
Geiger has been playing music for about as long as he’s been helping out on the family farm, but it wasn’t until he went to college that he began to take songwriting a little more seriously. He’d alternate between branding cattle one day and playing cover shows at the local pub the next. In October of 2025, he caught lightning in a bottle with his solo-written heartbreaker “String By,” which began to make waves on social media and eventually washed up on shore not far from Music City.
The virality was followed by a warm welcome into his new normal as he begins to become something of an international star. In the last ten months, he’s played a stage at CMA Fest, Cain’s Ballroom, and made his debut at the Grand Ole Opry just a few weeks before this interview. It’s one he’s admittedly still getting used to, recognizing that “the reality is not long ago I was studying at college, working part time on a ranch and doing cover gigs on weekends where I’d try to put my originals in the middle of the set, which any upcoming artist knows how challenging that can be.” Now, he’s reminiscing on playing a set chock-full of solo writes at Billy Bob’s Texas.
Now, Geiger’s busy plugging away in writers’ rooms around Nashville or on the ranch helping out mom and dad when he can back home, if not squeezing in a solo write here and there too. The songs come at the most storybook times for him, like when he was driving in the rain to get groceries while staying on a 60,000-acre cattle ranch. “I was looking at the raindrops falling down the window, and I thought they looked a bit like tears,” he says of his latest single “Pouring,” another tearjerker about long-distance love, complete with the wail of an electric guitar solo toward the track’s close. Geiger said he’s starting to peek a little beyond his own county lines, and hopes that slight variation is just a taste of what’s to come for him.
“I guess that’s the way I go about things sometimes; I don’t want to put walls around my music,” Geiger said. “I guess I am a neo-traditional country music artist, but at the same time, I felt like this thing [“Pouring”] needed a big, dramatic solo in it. I’m really proud of it.”
Geiger is set to hit the road on another North American tour in the fall, anxiously awaiting getting to know new fans and new corners of the country. He’s young, but he’s eager, already circling in red some venues he’d like to sell out as he begins what’s sure to be a long trek through his new home away from home. While the broad-strokes similarities between Australia’s and America’s landscapes have helped him settle in quickly, he said he still gets thrown for a loop by some of America’s quirkier landmarks.
“Buc-ee’s was a culture shock for me, holy hell,” Geiger said. “In a good way, it was good. It was a bit scary talking about brisket on the board and carrying on.
“But I’ll go straight to the brisket burger; I’ll have them just harmonizing in the back corner of that when they’re cooking it. They get pretty excited about the brisket, so I had to get a piece for myself and figure out what it’s all about. I got some almonds roasted. I thought about buying a new barbecue and lawn chair and maybe a new couch while I was there, but I decided not to; we’re still a bit tight on space.”
