Were you pleased with
the reception for ‘Forbidden Fruit’, the single off your EP?
Yes, definitely. It’s been surprising in a good way.
I suppose it’s your
first single so you’re not sure what to expect.
Exactly. When it’s your first release you have no idea what
can happen next. So it’s been really, really wonderful to get so much airplay
on the community [radio] stations around Australia, and a really positive
response from the audience as well.
Given that it is
being played around Australia, can you work out where it’s being played because
suddenly people start following you on social media or they’re contacting you
in other ways?
Sometimes you know from the radio stations themselves, or
people who are using it through the airing services. Sometimes it’s from
getting a message from somebody far away who is letting you know that they’ve
heard the track and they’ve enjoyed it.
The themes of most of
the songs on this EP seem to trend towards love and desire – not all of them,
but a lot of them. How difficult is it to capture those themes and those
feelings, not just in lyrics but in tone?
I guess the tone’s quite important for me and I like that to
come across with each song. I get a feeling when I’m writing it that I want it
to have a particular sound to it to emphasise what the lyrics of the song are
about. I went in with a lot of notes about that kind of thing when I went to
record, and the producer was pretty understanding of what I wanted, which was
fantastic. I was nervous going in to my first recording wondering whether I was
explaining myself well enough or whether I’ll be able to translate what’s in my
head into the right words to tell the producer. It turned out [to be] pretty
much what I had in my head, so that was fantastic.
Sometimes as a singer
there are times when it’s just not coming out the way you want it to – it’s
that mystical thing about singing that there can be something else blocking
what you really want to do and you don’t know how to fix it.
Yes. It’s one of the challenges with the writing process as
well, when you know that you’ve got something that’s starting to form and maybe
you’ve got to spend some time on something else, and you’re kind of stuck and
you know you’ve got to spend time on the song. Or something else is interfering
with your thoughts about whatever the subject matter of the song is. It can be
quite distracting. I choose at the moment to live by myself so I have limited
distractions at home when I’m writing.
Do you have any
tricks or techniques when that happens? Some people might go for a walk or they
might take ten breaths.
Sometimes I find it helpful to put it down and walk away,
whether it means I leave it for an hour or ten minutes, or whether I need to go
right away from it for a while and let the idea develop a little bit more in
your head, or just give it some space. Some of the songs come quite easily, I
suppose, and others I need to sit on for a bit longer and figure out what the
story’s really going to be about and develop it a bit further.
Some of the songs are
about an ‘other’ – there is a character, for want of a better term, who is not
you.
[Laughs] There’s a second party.
Did you write those
‘others’ literally – you’re thinking of a particular person – or are they
idealised others?
Sometimes it is a specific person when I write but I have
heard other performers announce on stage, ‘Oh gosh, I have to do this song but
it’s now about somebody I hate.’ I guess what I prefer to do is not to attach a
permanent feeling to a song – well, the songs that I’ve written so far have
been fairly positive stories anyway, so there’s certainly nobody that I ate
who’s been [an inspiration] in these particular circumstances [laughs]. But
something that I’m a little bit conscious of is not letting that other character
take over my feeling towards a song if it was a negative situation – but
they’re all positive situations. And a lot of the time it might be a specific
person or situation that’s inspired a particular song but I think you draw on
other experiences as you write – at least, I do. So it might have started with
the seed of one particular situation or one idea but I might start thinking
about other things that aren’t specific to one particular situation might have
continued the story.
And I suppose that’s
the art of taking your work to a broader audience – realising that there are
experiences that we all have in common as humans, and making sure that you’re
transmitting what’s happening to you
personally in a way that everyone can relate to.
Yes, I think so. Songs can mean different things to
different people. I know I’ve heard songs and thought, That song is about me! I know exactly how that feels. And then your
friend might be sitting next to you and say, ‘This is exactly like what
happened to me.’ And if you were to tell each other the story of why you think
it’s about you, they could be two very different stories. I think it’s
interesting the way people interact with songs and lyrics, and what they mean
to them.
The way you sing –
and I am sure you have heard this because you have that torch-song quality to
your voice – it sounds like a seduction. If the song has an ‘other’ then it
sounds like a seduction of that other, but there’s also that thing that happens
with a singer, that the audience is necessarily involved. I hesitate to say
that it’s a triangular seduction …
[laughs]
But there’s an
element of seducing the audience. Every
time you’re performing – and especially, I would think, when you’re recording
and there’s no audience there – how do you summon that?
I try to think about what I was writing about, whether I’m
attaching a particular person to the song or not. I try to think about the
emotions that are involved in the story – I try to draw on that as much as I
can. I think I’m fairly emotive when I’m performing and I’ve been known to shed
the odd tear in a sad song. I think I would feel really weird if I stopped
connecting some kind of emotion to a song. It would be harder for me to sing.
Even if I decide to sing a cover I would want to choose a song that means a lot
to me, that I can emotionally relate to, otherwise there’s too much disconnect
– unless it’s something for fun, I suppose.
Especially if that’s
what your audience becomes used to – they know they can have a certain type of
experience with you, and if you weren’t having that yourself it’s not a
betrayal of the audience but certainly they’d be disappointed.
I think so. It’s something I had comments on fairly early on
when I started performing, about things like, ‘You’re quite emotive’, or ‘You
have a way to connect with people by sharing emotional stories with people’.
That emotional connection is a big part of who I am as a performer.
Listening to you talk
I’m thinking about the creative life of a performer and songwriter, and what
you need to summon each time you perform. It could be quite an isolating
lifestyle, in some ways. Do you feel sometimes not that you’re alone in the
world but that it’s your creative path to tread and yours alone sometimes.
It can feel that way. Writing alone feels sometimes like,
‘Oh goodness, this is just me by myself’. But I do get to perform quite often
in a trio, and they’re used to me getting a bit emotional in rehearsal. It can
feel alone, and the extra things you have to do around the writing and the
performing – which, obviously, is why we go into it. All the other business
that you have to do around it can be what feels the lonely part. But I’ve been
fortunate to have some people give me some good advice and I have support from
musicians who I play with, and a bit of help from a few key mentoring people.
And the other side of
that is that music is an irresistible force – if that’s what’s in your life,
and you feel that you need to obey it, there’s not a lot of choice there.
No. It’s something I always wanted to do but I was very
nervous about doing, and from the moment that I did get up and sing something
in front of a crowd – which was a cover – from that first moment I had a really
strong sense of, Wow, this is what I want
to do. And even though I still felt really nervous about it for some time,
I guess I felt that this was becoming who I am, if that makes sense. As soon as
I started writing probably even more so, I guess. It’s been quite a
life-changing journey for me. It’s very exciting.
I’ll go now to the
nitty-gritty of musicality. On ‘Wayward Girl’ you use a music box and on
‘Weight of Gold’ you wrote a trumpet part because you used to play trumpet. You
have your voice as an instrument and you’re writing the songs – are you
intrigued by the idea of adding these other instruments?
Yes. I know that my voice is my best instrument. It’s
certainly the one I’m the most confident using. I do love instruments generally
– I wish I could magically be able to play every kind of instrument but
obviously that’s going to take some time. But I learnt piano as a child and did
a little bit of clarinet and some trumpet at school. Now when I perform I’m
mostly playing acoustic guitar or just singing if I’m with the trio. But I
guess it’s something that I find very interesting, thinking about what else I’d
want to add to the instrumentation on a track, whether it be for a recording or
when I get the chance to perform with a bigger band. For my EP launch there
were eight of us.
And I bet your voice
was still the dominant intrument.
[laughs] I imagine so. Having a big voice, I’m conscious of
allowing space for other instruments to shine through.
I don’t think of your
voice as a big voice in the sense of it’s booming, but there is a rich tone
that would go across other instruments.
I think that’s a good way to describe it.
If you learnt piano,
clarinet and trumpet when you were younger, I’m guessing you read music. So my
question it: when you’re writing music, do you write it as music or are you
inclined to just note chords or something like that?
It depends a little bit. With some songs it’s chords. With
the music box song I started off with guitar and piano, and then to write the
music box part you have to transpose your sheet music. So it’s a little bit
writing out sheet music except you’re punching holes in a special card to wind
through the music box. In that case, it’s definitely about the notes. It [also]
depends on the situation. When I was writing trumpet lines, because I’m relearning
the trumpet still I’m not very quick at thinking what notes I’m playing, so
sometimes it’s a matter of recording what I’m playing and being able to look at
it later or, in the case of the EP, I had a trumpeter – Cameron Smith from
Brass Knuckle Brass Band in Canberra – come and play, so I was able to pass him
the couple of parts that I’d worked on myself, instead of trying to write out
sheet music for everything. I’m getting a bit rusty in that department!
[laughs]
You are thinking of
touring to support this EP – when’s that going to happen, if you do it?
It should be later in the year. At this stage I’m looking at
the last third of the year. We have to nut out a few things before I can lock
it all in. I have to get a bit of time off work. It won’t be quite as cold then
for us poor little north Queenslanders.
Your voice could be
affected by the cold, I guess.
It can be because I’m asthmatic, so I find that the cool can
sometimes get me a bit wheezy, so I have to be conscious of rugging up properly
if I go somewhere a bit colder and making sure I take a bit of care and look
after my instrument, I guess.
Temptation's Door is out now.
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