Brent Hayhurst is a singer-songwriter, carpenter and music mentor from Daylesford, in the Central Highlands of Victoria. His songs are drawn from grief, brotherhood, faith and repair — the tension between brokenness and beauty that has shaped his whole life.
He grew up in Rowville, in Melbourne's outer south-east, raised by a single mother whose pantry was always open and whose kettle was always on. The first music he loved came from her CD collection — Billy Joel, Elton John, INXS, the Priscilla soundtrack. At ten, a neighbour's garage party put Metallica's "Sad But True" in front of him and detonated something; a Squier electric guitar arrived for his tenth birthday and never really left his hands. When Brent was fourteen, his father died suddenly at forty-seven. The night he came home from the hospital, he pulled the guitar out from under his bed and played. From then on, music was how he processed everything.
Through the long years his older brother Leigh spent finding his way back from addiction, Brent and his mother held the family together. Leigh has now been clean for the better part of a decade — a rebuild Brent calls "a bond of strong steel forged by fire." He wrote "Slowly Slowly," his 2025 single, for Leigh in the first year of that recovery.
Before stepping forward as an artist, Brent spent a decade inside the Melbourne music industry — managing artists, running publicity and radio campaigns, and writing for Mixdown and Beat magazines — while working as a carpenter to fund his own recordings. His debut release, the Tapestry EP (2022), was recorded across five countries, beginning at Rockfield Studios in Wales, where Queen recorded "Bohemian Rhapsody" and Oasis made (What's the Story) Morning Glory? It was engineered by Matt Butler — twenty years under Sir George Martin, with credits including Paul McCartney, Pink Floyd and Johnny Cash — and produced by Berlin-based composer-arranger Jonathan Dreyfus. Brent self-funded all of it with a tool belt on.
His debut album was recorded in an 1860 church chapel on a hill in Mollongghip, twenty minutes from Daylesford — studio time earned by building a cabin on the same property with producer Josh Barber, swapped day for day, documented as "Building an Album." The record is now in its final stages.
Alongside the music, Brent works as a support worker and music mentor with at-risk and neurodiverse young men in Daylesford — work he describes as the place where everything he has lived and learned finally lands.
For media and management enquiries: bh@brenthayhurst.com