In the past you’ve
written songs on piano and this time you wrote a bit on guitar – did that shape
the songs differently, to use a different instrument?
I think so. I really don’t play guitar well at all. I’ve
always wanted to, but piano’s always been the main instrument for me and the
one that I studied. But I think with songwriting any change in your process is
a good thing, it’s going to evoke different sounds and ideas, so I wanted to
play guitar well enough to be able to write and explore songs on the guitar and
see what comes. I think it really does change where things go.
I suppose there’s
also the fact that you play gigs and pianos aren’t that portable – a guitar has
that benefit.
Absoutely. I think I’m somewhat of a whinger when it comes
to lugging a big, heavy keyboard around [laughs]. I tend to do shows where
there’s a piano there already. But sometimes if it’s a folk club or if I’m just
doing a few songs, it’s a real pest. So I though if I can play the guitar at
least I can do a few songs. So I’m working on it. I have done a few
performances where I’ve got the guitar up for one or two songs. Still needs
time, I think [laughs].
I saw a video of you
playing guitar onstage, so I know you’ve done that. I saw something on your website – the song about the duck.
Oh, that’s a ukulele, that one.
Clearly I wasn’t
looking closely enough!
I’m quite short, so it probably looked like a guitar.
Since you play the
ukulele I’ll divert and ask you a question about that. What do you like about the
uke?
The funny thing is I only play the ukulele marginally better
than the guitar, but it was a very similar thing. Part of the reason why I’ve
never taken to guitar is that I have very small hands and I have a thin, small
spread between my fingers, so playing Bach has always been a huge challenge. A
few years ago I thought, Why don’t I get
a ukulele? They don’t cost too much money. So I did, and I wrote a couple
of songs on that. Then a year ago I woke up and thought, I’m going to get a mini guitar – and that was the problem solved.
So I have a ukulele and a mini guitar, and that’s how I’m coping with it all
[laughs].
You’ve been writing
collaboratively with Peta Van Drempt and your husband, Steve – what you do you
like about collaboration?
Two heads are better than one. I think that in the creative
process you’re trying to bring ideas together. You’re constantly trying to
generate ideas and ditching the bad ones and creating new ones and combining
them, and you get stuck when you run out of ideas. But when you’ve got someone
else with you, they throw in ideas and create new ideas for you. There’s more
rubbish to ditch because there’s two people generating lots of bad ideas, but
there’s also two people generating good material. All my favourite songwriters
out of Nashville cowrite and I think it’s the best practice. The only thing
that stops me is my ego that says, ‘I have to write this song on my own to
prove to myself or to the world that I’m a genius’. I do write on my own but
sometimes I think, Why not grab Peta, my
friend, she’s such a great songwriter and let’s work this idea out together.
So I do that a lot more now. I think both of us probably write better together
than we do on our own. I mean – she’s written great songs on her own and I’m
really proud of songs that I’ve written on my own but I think together we can
be more productive, because so many of the songs that never get finished
because you get stuck, we’ve been able to finish together.
When you were talking
about how it was your ego demanding that you write the song on your own – of
course, you are very well qualified to write songs because you have a Masters
in Composition [laugh]. When you have that background, are there things you
need to unlearn to write songs that you want to sing?
I think as a performer there have been things that I’ve
needed to unlearn. Writing wise, I haven’t found that to be so much of a
problem. I’ve always been able to separate the way I approach writing folk or
something really simple from the way that I approach something that’s musically
much more complex. Whereas I think performance wise that was a big jump for me,
particularly vocally, that I had sort of let go of the need to sing something
properly or even well. To just allow the voice to crack and show emotion and to
let it be no big deal – that was a process I had to go through. Not that I
regret doing the classical training but I think unlearning that really affected
way of singing is really important when you’re trying to sound like you just
spontaneously picked up the guitar and the singing and it’s just got to be so
relaxed and natural, and I think that’s a challenge for a lot of formally
trained musicians.
I guess you’re
trained to sing in service of the song, whereas when you’re performing your own
things, you’ve got to sing in service of the story you’re telling.
Absolutely. And emotion is shown in the vulnerability of
your voice, and if you’ve been trained for your voice to be flawless and
powerful, and suddenly it needs to sound vulnerable and weak, that just
involves a very conscious process of letting go of the need to control
everything, which is hard [laughs].
Very hard when you’ve
had professional qualifications in getting that way.
That’s right, and spent many years doing it. It’s amazing
how much becomes unconscious as well. I’ve listened back to – this was before I
started pursuing music, when I was about twenty, and I had recordings I’d done
of just singing folk stuff, but at the time I was right in the middle of my
classical training. And even though I thought at the time that the way I was
singing folk was completely different to my classical stuff, it’s very, very
obvious that I was classically trained in the way that I was singing there.
It’s something that you just do unconsciously because you’re in a world. I
don’t think I would ever go back and do further classical voice training
because I think that would interfere with singing the folk-rock stuff too much.
And because you are
classically trained, your voice could have gone several different ways – you
could have become a jazz singer, or you could have become a classical singer,
and you’ve chosen a style that really suits your voice. I think it takes a
certain amount of courage to come from that background and say, ‘I will sing
the way I want to.’
Yes, it does. My old singing teacher has been such a
powerful musical mentor for me and it took me ages to get him out of my head.
The very first professional gig I did was a one-woman show back in 2012 and
when he came along to that opening season, I was terrified that he would
disapprove of all these horrible technical things I was doing that he’d taught
me not to do. But of course he didn’t – he was pleased and proud. But that was
a big fear at the time. Now it feels like no big deal.
Your voice certainly
sounds relaxed, so you must be at a point where you’re comfortable.
That’s right [laughs]. I’ve gotten over it.
I saw a note saying
you’d started writing songs five years ago for the first time since you were a
teenager. I’m curious about what made you stop writing songs then.
I think fear. Probably lack of self-esteem. I’m a big
believer that one of the most important things in being able to be creative is
that you need to have a strong sense of self-worth because you have to be able
to tolerate your own mistakes and trust your own instincts. And I think that
there were times in that period when I wasn’t writing that I would try to write
again and I just had no compass for, ‘Is this any good?’ Because I just didn’t
trust myself even remotely … I think something just switched in my brain when I
decided to start writing again and I just said, ‘I’m going to write something
good. That’s all I have to do. If it’s not good, just write it again until it
is.’ But I think it takes a certain amount of confidence as a person to be able
to do that. And I know some people don’t ever struggle with that but for me
that was a big thing, that I had to get over that anxiety about not being
perfect, about not being brilliant all the time. I gave myself permission to be
terrible – [that] was also part of that transition, was to go, ‘I’m going to
start writing songs and I don’t care how bad they are.’ And then I was
surprised when people were suddenly turning heads and I thought, Oh, I might actually be all right at this.
So that was a lot to do with it. And I didn’t have the courage to pursue a
music career so I pushed all that aside. I still played a lot of piano because
I would get work as a piano player but in terms of doing my own stuff for a
while there it just disappeared off my radar.
It’s a good thing
that it’s back now – and speaking of songs, do you have a favourite on the
album?
I have two. One is ‘Twenty to Nine’ which is a song I wrote
based on Miss Havisham from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. And the other favourite is a song called ‘Rest
Assured’, which is this sort of unpretentious track buried all the way – I
think it’s track seven – it’s just such a simple lullaby-type song. I really
love songs that are simple lyrically and musically but are elegant and I’m
really proud to have written something like that. I guess referring to the
classical training and the composition training, it’s kind of easy to make
something interesting by adding complicated features to it but to write
something that really only has a couple of chords to it and not that many notes
and not that many words and make that interesting is always a great challenge.
How did you choose
your producer, Sean Carey?
I worked with Sean for my last album. My drummer, a fellow
called Mike Quigley, does a lot of session work for Sean. Mike played with me
for my first album and was gigging with me, and I was talking to him about the
things I wasn’t pleased with on the first album and what I wanted to achieve,
and he said, ‘I think you should check Sean out. I think he might be a good fit
for you.’ So I madly researched Sean’s music and people who he had recorded and
listened to the sound, then I went into a meeting really prepared – just really
clear on what my ideas were, what sounds I liked, what sounds I didn’t like,
which artists I liked, which artists I didn’t like and why, and presented that
to him and he was absolutely on board. I’d say, ‘I think the piano sounds
disgusting in this track’, and he’d say, ‘Absolutely – it sounds like they
shoved it on a football field and covered it with a blanket.’ He understood exactly
where I was coming from and I thought, This
is somebody who has similar taste to me. Because what I took for granted beforehand
is that everybody’s different, everybody has a different style and taste and
you can go in any direction, and it’s so important to find somebody who agrees
with you so that you’re not pushing this uphill battle where you’re trying to get
them to create a certain sound. They have to be inspired by what they’re doing
too. So we did Nightlight together
and it was a no-brainer to work with him again for this album.
It sounds like you
had a lot of fun recording it and it sounds like a blended whole, if that makes
sense.
Yes, absolutely.
The Remains of the Day is out now and availble on iTunes.
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