Ella Hooper Finds Her Swagger on Cowboy Man

Ella Hooper has spent the past few years finding a comfortable home somewhere between Australia and Nashville, country and rock & roll, grit and glamour. On her new single Cowboy Man, she leans into all of it — and has a fair bit of fun with the great cowboy fantasy along the way.

There has always been a little wildness in Ella Hooper. From the teenage rush of Killing Heidi through the many turns her career has taken since, she has never seemed particularly interested in staying in one musical lane. These days that road increasingly runs through Nashville, and with Cowboy Man, the fourth taste of her forthcoming fourth solo album Overnight Success, Hooper sounds completely at home there.

It's a swooning slice of country-rock filled with dusty saloons, neon lights, romance and just enough tongue planted in cheek. At a time when cowboy hats, boots and country music seem to be everywhere, Hooper isn't afraid to have a little fun with the whole thing. But as is often the case with a good country song, there's some truth hiding behind the joke.

“Cowboy Man is one of those songs that when it landed in my brain I laughed out loud,” Hooper says. “I'm having fun with and poking fun at the whole cowboy-cowgirl country-pop culture explosion, as I'm aware it is having quite the moment.”

The inspiration also came from Hooper's own trips to Nashville, where somewhere between writing songs and making the new record she apparently kept an eye open for something else — the perfect cowboy. Her requirements weren't particularly complicated: ethical, self-made, good-hearted, rugged-looking, old-fashioned but thoroughly woke, preferably an air sign. As she jokes, she's “not asking for much”.

Nashville hasn't delivered the husband yet. It did, however, deliver a song, and Hooper seems pretty happy with the trade. “I keep coming home empty-handed, still single, but with this great song in tow,” she says. “So it actually feels like I got the prize!”

The joke carries beautifully into the Cowboy Man video, which turns the search into a series of cowboy auditions. Working with director Lizzie Bailey and producer Lauren Simpson, Hooper assembled a wonderfully unlikely collection of prospective cow people drawn from Melbourne bands, actors, drag performers, friends and even crew members' parents. Australian drag performer Lazy Susan also joins the madness after Hooper previously made a cameo in The Witchy Girls.

It's deliberately silly, but underneath it there's something that says a lot about where Hooper is at these days. She's surrounded herself with people she likes, she's making the music she wants to make and she doesn't appear particularly concerned about whether it fits neatly into somebody else's definition of country music.

That same freedom runs through Overnight Success. Across its 11 tracks, Hooper moves between heartbreak, family, getting older, desire and resilience, balancing the reflective stuff with humour and swagger. Some songs feel made for a quiet Sunday afternoon; others sound more likely to find their way onto a Saturday night dancefloor. Nashville is certainly in there, but so is Australia.

Hooper isn't trying to pretend she grew up in Tennessee — she's taking the sounds she loves and filtering them through her own life.
It's something she began exploring more deeply on 2023's Small Town Temple, an album that debuted at number one on the Australian Country chart and marked a confident move into country and Americana. Overnight Success pushes further down that road, much of it created across multiple trips to Nashville.

The album title is also wonderfully appropriate for somebody whose idea of “overnight” success has now stretched across more than 25 years.

Hooper was still a teenager when Killing Heidi's Weir exploded onto Australian radio. Their debut album Reflector followed in 2000, reaching number one and helping the band collect four ARIA Awards. A year later, Hooper became both the youngest person and the first woman to receive APRA's Songwriter of the Year award.

It would have been easy for that extraordinary early success to define everything that followed. Instead, Hooper kept moving. Three Killing Heidi albums eventually gave way to a solo career that has wandered through rock, synth-folk, country and Americana, along with radio, television and plenty of time back where she seems happiest — on stage.

Maybe that's why Overnight Success feels like such a fitting title. There is a wry smile behind it, but there's also the story of what a long career actually looks like when you're still making records independently decades after the first hit.

“I've been itching to announce and release this album,” Hooper says, admitting there have been delays, team changes and plenty of “one step forward, two steps back” moments along the way. She also financed multiple trips to Nashville herself, joking that the process left her broke, sleep deprived and with a few more grey hairs.

But she says it was worth it.

“I worked really hard on this record, took risks and fought for things,” she says. “I couldn't be more confident and stoked with the end result.”

That confidence might be the most interesting thing about this chapter of Ella Hooper's career. Americana doesn't feel like a costume she's trying on. The guitars, country storytelling and Nashville influence have become another part of a musical personality that has never been particularly easy to pigeonhole.

“It definitely feels like a level up, in my writing especially,” she says. “I'm exploring my voice and my relationship to Americana, the sounds, the genre, its parameters. I'm not an easy act to pigeonhole; but God, I feel like myself on this record.”

Hooper will take Overnight Success on the road for an Australian album launch tour this October, something she describes as her favourite version of touring — the chance to build an entire evening around her own record rather than simply playing another collection of songs.

And perhaps that's where this whole story lands. More than two decades after Australia first met a teenage Ella Hooper singing Weir, she's still following whatever musical road looks interesting up ahead.

Right now, that road runs through Nashville, past a neon-lit bar, with a cowboy somewhere off in the distance.
Whether she ever finds him is almost beside the point.

She found the song.