How long were you in
Nashville?
Five weeks, it ended up being. It was a pretty lengthy trip,
doing lots of songwriting. I think I came back with about thirty-five songs, so
it was pretty busy.
Do you arrive and go
straight to work? Is it set up as appointments with co-writers every day? How
does it work?
I went from the 17th of July to the 20th
of August but I started booking in the songwriting sessions probably from end
of March, start of April. Sending out emails – These are the dates that I’m here, I’d love to write – can we get a
couple of sessions in? Or if it was a new writer, just trying to get the
one session with them, see how we worked together. So it was pretty crazy and
some people booked that far in advance and some didn’t, so there was less to
choose from and it was hard trying to fit those in at the end. But it worked
out quite well. There was a couple of days when we were doing double-writes a
day, particularly towards the end of the trip when we were just trying to make
extra sessions fit in. But it was great. Èvery writer over there was great to
work with – we didn’t have anyone we couldn’t get a song out of [laughs]. It
was very productive. But then on the weekends we had some time off.
What happens if you
get to the end of a session, and it’s your last session with that person, and
the song’s kind of hanging? Do you go away and finish it?
I think I’ve got one song like that, that I have to just
tidy up a little bit. We’ve got the first verse and the chorus – it’s the
second-verse curse, we call it. You get to the second verse and go, ‘Now, what
have I got left?’ So there’s only one song that I’ve got to finish up and agree
to what the exact lines are for the second verse, but we’ve got the bridge and
the chorus and the first verse, and we’ve got the melody for all of it, it’s
just lyrics. So the fact that we all know how that melody goes, and how it’s
going to be phrased and how many words have to fit, it just means we can send
each other an email back and forth to finish off those lyrics. But it’s not
very likely that that does happen. Some of the songwriting sessions it depends
how busy the writers are. Generally you get three hours to write a song.
Sometimes, particularly if it’s an afternoon, we’ve gone four hours and we make
sure we get it done. Sometimes that extra hour can help with those little
tweaks and getting the song together structurally.
When you go into that
structured songwriting do you find it easy to switch on to that mindset of now
you’re writing a song, or does it take a little bit of preparation?
There’s a bit of everything. Basically from when I start
sending out those emails and trying to book in appointments, I’m trying to jog my
brain into just writing down, whether it’s a title or just a few random lines
for a song. I go there with what I call the red folder – it’s a basic plastic
red folder. But everyone says, ‘What’s in your red folder today?’ because they
all know about those folder of random scribbles and titles. I flip through the
pages and shout out a few titles or some lyric lines and see what jumps at
them. Because sometimes you might be feeling like writing a particular song but
your co-writers don’t click with that idea, so you have to have multiple ideas
when you go in there. So it did take that preparation to get that red folder
ready. And then as you’re there – particularly as I was there for so long – I
had to try to block out what I’d just written, go into another session fresh,
and just keep blocking them out so I didn’t keep writing the same song. But
then at night I’d think, Okay, what have
I already written? How many up-tempos do I have? Do I have too many ballads? Do
I have too many up-tempos? What’s missing?
And then I have to go into the session the next day and say, ‘Can we
kind of write a song like this? I’m missing that kind of a song.’ So it is a
lot of constant work. You have to do the prep with the ideas beforehand. You
have to go in there open-minded with a whole bunch of ideas and be able to jump
onto the idea that your co-writer wants to write and liked of ours. And then
you’ve got to be able to block them out as well so you can keep writing fresh
things and you don’t keep writing the same song.
It’s almost like you
need a brain holiday at the end of that five weeks.
Pretty much. And I think that’s why most songwriters over
there will not write with you on a weekend. So if I landed on a Tuesday I wrote
a song Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and then two days off so that your
brain can have a little break and be fresh, ready for another week, because if
you don’t stop it does get a bit overwhelming. `
You have an education
in music – you have a Bachelor of Music and you’ve been to the CMAA College and
done some other things. Was there anything in your education that prepared you for
this exact way of working?
With a Bachelor of Music it’s more theory based and sound
production and performance, whereas the college course was more tailored to my
specific genre of country music, and collaborating, and that’s where I got that
introduction to co-writing, which I hadn’t done much of before. So that was a
good preparation for me in being able to chart the songs that I’ve written and
things like that. But it’s very different over in Nashville – you don’t know how
intense it’s going to be until you’ve got that schedule in front of you with
double writes. Sometimes you’ve got ten songs to write in a week – and we you
don’t really do that when we’re at home because it’s so easy to get distracted
with other things you’ve got to do being an artist back home. That’s why I like
going to Nashville so much – there’s amazing writers there but it’s also that
clean break from being at home.
You mentioned that in
your red folder you have ideas. The current single, ‘Judgement Day’, did that
start out as an idea in the red folder?
Most of the time writers expect you to come in with the idea
yourself because they want to help you write something that you’re going to
relate to, but ‘Judgement Day’ was actually a song that I didn’t write – I would
love to have written that one. It was from a lady over in Nashville. I ended up
doing a co-write with a guy called John De Algostino and a couple of ladies,
and one of the ladies had just gone through a break-up and came out with the
first lines of ‘It only hurts when I breathe, I only cry when I’m awake’, and
everyone in the room said, ‘Okay, we’ve got to write this song.’ So that was a
personal experience from her but it was just one of those songs that when I
heard it, it touched me because I think a lot of people – unless you’re very
lucky – go through a break-up or two in their lives. It was just one of those
real emotional big things, which is what I love about country music, the big
power ballads. They’re what got me into country music, your Martina McBrides
and Carrie Underwoods, people like that. So as soon as I heard that song it
really resonated with me and I wanted to record it, and I got their approval to
record that song.
The reason why I
would have thought you wrote that song is because of the way you sing it – it does
sound so personal, and I guess that goes to your long experience as a singer
and a performer, taking on someone else’s story. Obviously you have to connect
with the song, but is it a process of also feeling that song when you’re
recording it?
Yes, it’s a very different experience. There’s certain
artists who prefer recording to performing live, and others who prefer
performing, because it’s completely different. Recording is really intimate –
that mic can pick up every little detail of your voice. Whereas performing live
you’ve got the natural energy of a crowd, particularly for those up-tempo
tracks, they really help you punch those out on stage. I remember recording ‘Judgement
Day’, in particular, and just trying to interpret it myself and thinking, This song’s got so much range to it, I need
to bring all that to it. I need to have the light, tender moments, those big
moments of pain. So there were times when my lips were literally touching
the microphone and basically just whispering those words of pain, and then
there’s times when I had to let rip and back off the microphone. You have to
get a really intimate relationship with that microphone.
That’s technique and
also knowing your voice, and voices are so susceptible to a whole lot of
things, like the weather and what you’ve been eating. Do you do particular things
to take care of your voice when you’re going into recording and gearing up for
a performance?
I used to be very particular about it. I guess the older I
get and the longer I’ve been singing, I feel more comfortable with my own voice
and know it a lot better than I used to. I used to be really strict and not
have anything dairy for a week so I didn’t get blocked up. But now I’m not as
strict. As everyone does with diets, you have your little cheat moments, and I’ve
done those over the years and then gone, Oh,
I can actually still sing through that if I have a milkshake or something.
And if you’re singing correctly you should be able to sing through anything. Of
course, I don’t try to abuse my voice too much, going out screaming and
partying. I try to look after it in that way. But food wise I just like to
enjoy what I’m eating [laughs] and as long as I sing correctly I’ll be able to
get through it.
I suppose there’s also
that difficulty when you’re a working performer that occasionally you’ll have a
cold or something like that, and you have to sing through it. Has there ever
been a performance where you’ve thought, I
simply cannot sing today?
There’s been a couple of times when I have been very sick. I’ve
never – touch wood – completely lost my voice. So it’s just a matter of really
warming it up and singing forward and not on my throat. There was one instance
in particular that was probably the worst, which was actually recording my
debut album. I went up to record in Brisbane, landed off the plane and spoke to
my producer: ‘Hi’ [whispery voice]. It was just there. I think I’d done six
gigs that week, plus it was winter and I’d got a cold. It was just feeling a
bit tired. So I landed at night and had my medication from my producer at his
house – he gave me a glass of port and said, ‘Take it to bed’, and I woke up the
next morning and he said, ‘How’re you going?’ and I said, ‘It’s a bit better.’
I had another bit of port that morning and kind of cleared the cobwebs away. So
we had to work around that and warm my voice up into certain songs. I started
out with the ballads, where I needed to be more emotional and have more colours
in my voice, and more of those croaks and emotion. And by the time I’d recorded
that my voice was more warmed up and more forward and had more projection in
it, so I could do more up-tempo tracks. It’s just finding your own way around
it and taking a proper warm-up into songs.
I’ve digressed from
the subject of ‘Judgement Day’ but I will bring us back to it and ask about the
video – you did it with The Filmery, a very experienced music video house. As a
performer, is it a bit weird to do a music video? I would imagine the song gets
chopped up and you have to go over and over those fragments. By the end of the
day do you think that it was an extremely strange thing to do?
Yes, it is, and I guess particularly at the start of my career
and my first couple of videos, that was a very weird thing, to basically have
my eyes drilling into the camera and not getting any reaction from the camera,
whereas when you’re looking into someone else’s face you get reactions. You
feel like everyone else is watching you and you’re thinking, How is this coming across on camera? And
you have all these doubts: Am I looking
all right on camera? Is it enough? Is it too much? What am I doing? But The
Filmery did my very first clip when I was going through that stage and Duncan
[Toombs] in particular was great with all that, really encouraging, and I keep
going back to them because of that reason. We’ve just got this really
comfortable relationship because I know, after doing so many videos with them,
that they’re going to tell me the honest truth, and whatever they’re saying,
just run with that. And we’ve done so many videos together now it’s pretty comfortable
and you get used to the idea that the camera is meant to be your friend, so
just treat it as your friend and don’t be scared of it. ‘Judgement Day’ in
particular, Josh, who was directing it on his own – I’ve worked with Josh with Duncan
before, but never just Josh without Duncan. Josh knew that that was a pretty
big thing for me, not having Duncan there, because Duncan was always my comfort
blanket [laughs]. But he knew
I wanted to do something really special with ‘Judgement Day’ because it is such
a big, powerful song, such an emotional song, and I really wanted the story to
come across with that. And, of course, I wanted to play the piano, because I’ve
never done that in a video clip before, and it’s the instrument I’ve been playing
the longest. Before I even sang I was playing piano, but I don’t get to show
that side very often because pianos are pretty hard to take around to gigs. I
really wanted to put that across, and locations and everything, it all ended up
working out beautifully, and I was so proud of what Josh did. He was very easy
to work with. Takes any of my input on board. Sat through the edit and there
weren’t many changes I wanted but he was so quick doing those little edits. It
was beautiful, I was really happy with it.
You’ve had a lot
happen this year: the album’s come out, you’ve done some tours, you’ve just
been in Nashville. Has there been one highlight?
That’s a tough question [laughs]. Of course, the hype of the
album and the album launch night in particular is a really special one. I had a
six-piece band for the launch, which is pretty extravagant, but it was great,
because I really wanted to put the album across in the best way. We had a
sellout show and special guests come along: Jasmine Rae, Amber Lawrence, Aleyce
Simmonds, Melanie Dyer – there was just a whole bunch of artists that were
there and supportive, so it was a really great night, seeing all that support
from artists as well as the fans who showed up. Of course, touring with Lee
[Kernaghan] is always a pleasure and that’s been a lot of fun. But I’d say one
of them would be playing at the Bluebird Café when I was over in Nashville,
because that wasn’t a planned thing, it just ended up happening. And being a
country music fan, we all know about the Bluebird Café and it is so popular now
because of the TV show Nashville - it’s so hard to even get
into the room. So I’d never actually been inside it and I got asked to be a
special guest on one of the shows on a Sunday night while I was over there. Generally
I don’t get too nervous but that was pretty nerve wracking. I was enjoying listening
to everybody and then I thought, Okay, I’ll
just go over my song in my head, go over the lyrics, and I totally blanked
out and got struck by panic. I had to reach into my bag to find my album and
look through the lyric sheet to remind me what it was. As soon as I got up on
stage it was fine, but it was just that moment of, I’m about to perform at the Bluebird – do I know what I’m doing? Should
I be here? Okay, yep, cool. It’s such a prestigious place to sing and so
hard to get into, I just slightly panicked but it was all fine when I got up
there.
Loaded is out through ABC Music/Universal.
or Google Play.
www.christielamb.com
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