At first glance, Liam Gildea doesn’t look like your typical muso. With his square glasses, software consultant day job, and quietly unassuming manner, he’s about as far removed from the cliché of the strutting rock ’n’ roller as you can get.

But looks, as they say, can be deceiving. When Gildea takes his place behind a pair of stacked keyboards, the transformation is startling. He bends into the music, eyes closed, utterly absorbed. Every note seems to travel through him before reaching the crowd. “If I can perform and have people watch me perform and feel it, rather than just watch it, that’s a win,” says the 20-year-old Born in Sydney, with a stint in Canada, Gildea grew up in what he describes as a supportive but not especially musical household in Bathurst. His father had once played in a band, his mother wasn’t musical at all, but neither discouraged him. “They were always very, ‘Yep, do it. If you like to do it, do it’.”

But his first guitar soon gathered dust. Then when his sister abandoned a school-reward keyboard, Liam gave it a go — and found his calling. “Here I am,” he shrugs. “And that was it, basically.”

High school at St Stanislaus College in Bathurst gave him the chance to take music seriously. He singles out his music teacher Victoria Roth as a decisive influence. “She was incredible. Probably one of the best teachers I’ve ever had. So supportive and always tried to push you for creativity and push the boundaries.”

Later came live revelations, like watching blues organist Lachy Doley (‘the Jimi Hendrix of the keyboard’) throw himself across his Whammy Clavinet and “hang off the instrument with his whole body weight.” For Liam, it was transformative: “You start to feel the music. You’re not watching a performance — you’re feeling the performance.” That, he says, is the blueprint for what he hopes to achieve himself.

Gildea moved to Orange less than a year ago, drawn by the city’s more welcoming music scene. In Bathurst, he found things “very gate-kept” but in Orange doors seemed to open. “I messaged Craig from the Groove Kitchen… not only did he go, ‘Yep, I’ve got a spot for you’, but he paid us as well. And it was just that easy.”

Now he splits his time between two outfits — The Odd Dogs and Javier and The Wave — while freelancing whenever someone needs a keyboardist. “I don’t like to be exclusive to bands. I’m a musician and what I want to do is play music. If someone wants me to play music with them, then I’ll do it.”

Ask Gildea what matters most and he doesn’t hesitate: “I just like making people happy,” he says. That might mean twenty people in a pub or two hundred at a festival; the size doesn’t matter. “If I play to 20 people who are all just like, wow, this is incredible… I would much rather do that than play to 2000 people who really don’t care.”

Part of that comes from dropping the self-consciousness of performing. “If you want people to feel it, you need to feel it too. And to feel it, you need to not pretend… if you can relinquish the notion of ‘Oh my God, what are people thinking about me?’, then feeling it becomes way easier.”

So who is the guy on stage? Gildea insists it’s not an alter ego. “That’s me on the stage. There’s no performance mode.” The adrenaline of a crowd, the camaraderie of fellow musicians, the swell of notes from his keyboards — that’s enough to animate him.

The photo he most proudly shares is one of him mid-solo, face contorted in pure concentration. “It’s quite possible people would look at that and go, ‘Wow, that’s stupid. He looks stupid’. But who cares? Because I’m feeling it and the people who wanna feel it are gonna feel it too.”

For now, music is balanced with his day job. “If I can make a comfortable living from music, that’s the goal,” he says. But he’s realistic about the challenges. “The realistic goal is have enough time to do that as my side-hustle… and not lose it in amongst everything else.”

That “everything else” includes long hours at work, which at least feed into his deep knowledge of the music tech he loves — Nord and Yamaha keyboards, Logic Pro and Ableton software. The living room of the house he shares with his bandmate isn’t a lounge but a studio. “We don’t own a television,” he laughs. “The living room is the studio. That’s where the magic happens.”

In his own quiet, almost nerdish, way, Liam Gildea embodies what music is supposed to be: connection, honesty, and joy. And when he says, “I don’t know what I’d do with my time if I didn’t do this,” you believe him. Because he may look more like a coder than a rocker but there’s no doubting the depth of feeling when he plays.

• Insta: _liamgildea