Catherine Traicos's music is hard to define in terms of genre - she has had some country music influences, though, and that was enough of a connection for me to want to talk to her, because she is a quite extraordinary artist. Catherine's new album is the wonderful The Earth, The Sea, The Moon, The Sky and it's available now. I spoke to Catherine at the end of 2013, when she was just about to go on tour with her band.
I've read variously in
interviews with you and on your website that you're based in Sydney or you're
based in Melbourne, but I know that you are now in Perth. So I was
wondering what Perth is like for a working musician.
I've only just moved and
I've got heaps of friends who are musicians who have been doing incredibly well
there. It's a really good music scene and before I left Perth I hadn't –
I'm originally from there and I played a couple of gigs but I hadn't really
immersed myself on the music scene as a musician, but I was going out to gigs
every week and I was really familiar with all the bands and it's a really
really beautiful scene. I love it.
Is there a dominant genre
of music there or is it a mixture of things?
I think that the dominant
thing is that people are really good at what they do and that there is a lovely
community as well. I wouldn't say there's a dominant genre because it
quite varied, there's a lot of everything, so there's a lot going on there.
Which I would think for you
is fertile ground. Given that you have released a lot of albums and you are
immersed in the life of a working musician, one hopes that being in an
environment like that it spurs you on to more and more creativity and feeling
like there are more potential collaborators out there.
I hope so. My band,
who are in Sydney, most of them are actually from Perth so that's saying a lot
about [laughs] yeah, the contribution of Perth already to my music life.
Except now I'm wondering if
they're in Sydney and you're in Perth, are you feeling lonely without them?
Well, at the moment because
we're preparing for the tour, I'm actually in Sydney and we've been rehearsing
and it's been really good but I am feeling the sense of this is all ending
really soon, and I try not to dwell on that because I don't think it will, but
it does feel quite sad that I'm going to be leaving them, but at the same time
I have to look after myself. And I got quite ill living in Sydney and I
need to be near my family right now.
And I know that you're
originally from Zimbabwe and you moved to Perth a few years ago.
That's right.
And a lot of people from
Zimbabwe, South Africa do move to Perth, obviously because it's close, it's
closer than the east coast of Australia. I don't think I need to ask you
why you left Zimbabwe, it's probably obvious, but it must have been a huge
change.
Yeah, it was. It was
a big move. I think it was bigger for my parents because they were older
and I was leaving school so I was probably going to leave Zimbabwe anyway.
So it's a difficult move but I feel really at home in Perth and I think that's
important to know where your home is.
And it's important to have
community. When in exile it must feel like you are when you leave under those
circumstances, it's important to have that community, and it's not unlike
having a community of – it's a community of like minded people, the same way as
having a community and musicians is a community of like minded people.
Absolutely. Well,
when we left Zimbabwe we were very lucky because it was by choice. We
weren't forced out. So we weren't in a very terrible position, unlike a
lot of people who actually have been and it's been really, really difficult for
them. I've got a few friends around Australia who have struggled to get
citizenship but even then they're in a better position than, say, refugees
coming from Pakistan or somewhere so, you know. It's not extreme, but it's
still difficult.
In terms of where you grew
up – the African musical traditions are ancient and well defined. I was
wondering if you bring any of the musical traditions of your homeland into your
work now.
I haven't as yet, no.
I think I would feel a little bit too much like Paul Simon and I'm not ready
for that [laughs]. Just because I was raised on Elvis and The Beatles. I
wasn't raised on African music.
Right [laughs].
So it doesn't feel like
it's my cultural heritage. I would feel like I was appropriating someone
else's cultural heritage in order to make money, and I probably wouldn't make
money [laughs].
And it strikes me that what
you do comes from an authentic place. It doesn't sound like you're
writing songs to get on radio. You're writings songs to create something
unique and special. So I would imagine that authenticity is of importance.
I think it is. I
think it's of importance to everyone. It's just that some people
authentically want to be on the radio and –
[Laughs]
– for me – no, I'm being
serious. And for me authenticity is about being true to myself and what I
want to create music and do that with people who are as passionate about it as
I am. Whereas other people, to them their passion is being heard and being seen
and being the centre of attention and I respect that, that they know what they
want and that's their thing, but I've learnt that that's really not my thing,
and people want you to want to that, they want you to be this crazily ambitious
person. But if you're not, you don't have to be, and you shouldn't put
that pressure on yourself just because you're creative.
Everyone's motivations are different and I think it's always good for
creative people to know whether their motivation is fame or the work or money
or both.
It's so important. Or
else you just end up – you're not in control of your work and you need to
be. It's very important to be.
Absolutely. Now, in terms of your work I read that you started
listening to music as inspiration for your painting, and on the latest album
you seem to be painting musical portraits. So I was wondering if you
still think of yourself as a painter.
Oh [laughs]. Yes, I
do. I do often think of things in terms of specific cues of oil
paints. I do love to paint and I'm looking forward to having some time to
do that now, yeah, after this album, after this tour.
Because I think that the parts of the brain that see things visually are
not the parts of the brain that actually can play music. The musical part
of the brain is more a mathematical – I think they even found that
scientifically that it's more the mathematical part of the brain. And so
I often think from people who can deal in images and words, sometimes it's hard
to know which one to follow and sometimes I think it gets a bit difficult to
follow both.
I think so, yes. I
think they are quite different but there's definitely a point where they meet,
and I say that point is probably rhythm.
Oh yeah.
Because you've got the
mathematics rhythm and you've got the rhythm of the action of painting.
So for me painting is always about the action, not the end result, if that
makes sense. But it's all defined by my environment really. I paint
a lot more when I'm in Perth and I don't find the time to paint when I'm in
Sydney and therefore I have more time to write songs.
It's always good for storytellers, regardless of how the story is being
told, to tell their stories in context. So obviously for you in Perth
it's painted stories and that's the context there.
Well, I – we'll see what
happens now [laughs]. Who knows? Who knows [laughs]?
Now, the songs on this album, according to your press release, are about
desire – that's the top level theme. Was that was a consciously chosen theme or
did it emerge through the process of – because I know you all individually
wrote songs, is that right?
We pretty much wrote them
together. We would jam them out mostly and then I was the one who always
put the words in and who kind of went, "This is how it's going to
go," but then everyone was incredibly instrumental in saying, the chorus
should come in here or we should do this now, or this is too long or this is
too short ... we agreed on everything and that was – we would all argue our way
to [laughs] an end agreement that we were all happy with. So, yes, desire –
well, desire, I think, is incredibly important. It's very closely linked
to passion and to need. I'm very interested in the difference between
your needs and your desires and if you can get them to coincide then you're
winning [laughs].
How often do you think that happens?
Oh gosh, I don't know
[laughs]. Yeah, because you're driven by your desires but you're also –
you're more driven by your needs. So when it does happen it's
serendipitous [laughs].
Obviously for musicians in
particular, I think it's sort of – actually, I guess it's true of painters or
writers and other creative people as well but I tend to see with musicians that
the desire and the need to play music or create music are very much the same, and
it's – you can't really extrapolate the desire to do it from what seems to be a
very fundamental need within the musician to create music.
Yeah, I think that there's
– you can definitely see when someone actually needs to play, almost like their
life depends on it, you can see that when Jimi Hendrix is playing and, I don't
know, heaps of amazing musicians [laughs]. But, yeah, it's an interesting
one, isn't it?
Well, yeah, because I think for some musicians it becomes so dominant
that that's all they can see and that upsets the balance of their lives to a
great extent.
Yeah. Yeah.
Mmm.
[Laughs]
Sorry, I'm just thinking
about that, this is great. Lovely food for thought, yeah. Complete
passion and you can let it consume you; can't you?
And the thing with music is that it does consume a lot of musicians, in
a very positive way, in that they're constantly engaged in it but I do see –
with some, it's – maybe it's also getting to the point of wondering
whether it's performance that consumes them. So whether it's the need to
perform as much as the need of – for music itself.
Yeah, that's interesting,
because I've noticed with myself recently that practising on my own is not as
much fun as practising with the band, engaging with other people, and then
performing is a whole other level of engaging with people. And it's kind
of like you create the music and then when you're sharing it with people that
can – that just takes it to a different level and it becomes more real I
suppose. It's interesting. And that you get people with – I used to have
major performance anxiety and, yeah – now I don't, which is good [laughs].
On the subject of performance: listening to your album, I was thinking
about how you perform it. It sounds like it's not necessarily going to be easy
to recreate the sound just because they – the songs don't sound polished in
that polished can mean overproduced. But they sound like they're very
perfected, in a way. So how do you take that recorded sound into a live
environment?
That's an awesome
question. Because we very specifically went into the studio this time
with the aim of being able to, as accurately as possible, recreate what we've
put down. So what's really interesting is that we didn't do too much
happening at the same time, and a couple of songs we couldn't help ourselves
because we just had all these amazing instruments and we were just like,
"No, we've got to put auto harp on everything", and stuff like
that. But a lot of the interesting sounds that you hear are actually my
guitarist, Darren, he's a bit of a genius and, yeah, you won't realise it but
it's actually an electric guitar with amazing effect. So he's
brilliant. So I think there's only a couple of songs where we wouldn't be
able to really get what we did on the album, but other than that we're pretty
close and we aimed for that because there's a – with the last album, it was –
after we recorded it we were like, "Okay, how are we going to do this
now? We can't play the way we used to play it," because now it
sounds – it's so much more interesting.
So you have these lovely jewels of recordedness and then try to make
them live.
That's a lovely way of
describing it, yeah.
Part of the mystery of
performance, I guess, is who turns up on the night and how that can affect how
you play, but have you and the band been together long enough now that you have
your own way of working together but it's quite elastic, that you can respond
to what happens on the night?
Yes, absolutely.
We've played a lot of shows together and we're all familiar with each other's
touring needs and the way we are and that just makes it fun, because everyone
is relaxed and – that's good [laughs]. And you kind of look out for each
other. It's like you're like a team [laughs].
And how did you all originally come together?
Well, I knew Darren, my
guitarist from Perth. He was in the Tucker B's and they were – they still
are – one of my favourite bands ever, and I used to go and watch them play –
just a little band girl every week – and I just made friends with Darren, and
he's a very quiet, intelligent, brilliant guitarist, and we just got on really,
really well. And he moved to Sydney about a year after I did and we
didn't start playing music together until a couple of years ago though.
So when he wanted to play with me, that was awesome. But he was insistent
that we get a full band together. And I'd met Casper – I was playing in a
band for a charity night a few years ago, and Casper was the bass player.
And he's awesome. He plays bass in so many bands and he's just
enthusiastic and incredibly good at what he does. And he was really keen
to play as well. And then Darren got another Tucker B's member, their old
drummer Tim, which made me so happy [laughs] to come and drum for us. And
I was like, "Yeah," I've got like half of my favourite band playing
for me, awesome [laughs]. So that was really good. And Tim hadn't played
drums in a while, so I think it was good for him to get back into it, and
I've had so many of his old friends being just like completely ecstatic that
he's playing drums again because he's a really good drummer, so rhat's how we
came together [laughs].
So you said you went from being a band girl to playing with half your
favourite band. At what point in your life did you decide to go
from being a band girl to being the band girl, if you know what I
mean?
[Laughs] Well, it was never
really a conscious choice at all. Just came together years later.
It sounds like awesome instant gratification but it really wasn't. The
way it came together it was just like, oh wow, that's kind of cool. The
Tucker B's hadn't played in years because half of them were living in Sydney
anyway – so they don't play many gigs any more. But I think that I was so
in awe of live music and bands that I didn't – like, I started learning guitar
but I found it a very personal and private thing and I wouldn't play for many
people. But I did play for one of my friends and he said, "You
should do a gig", and I did and it was disastrous and I didn't want to
play ever again. So it was a really long and slow journey to get to the
point.
Except I notice you play quite a few instruments, not just guitar, so
obviously along the way you've picked up quite a bit.
Yes, well my first
instrument was piano but I'm not very good at playing pop piano. I can
play classical and I can fill in stuff on an album to give it a fuller sound
but I think writing songs is a lot easier for me on a guitar. nd the
other instruments I play, you just hit them and make noise [laughs] basically.
So in terms of your creative process and you've got an album out now,
are you constantly writing or do you write on a project by project basis?
Do you think, "Okay, it's time for a new album. I'm going to sit
down now and get some songs done?"
I've never really worked
that way because I've tried to and it doesn't work. The songs just
appear). With the band we did, I suppose, say we're going to work towards
a new album, but we didn't give ourselves a timeline and we just wrote very slowly
over two years. And I don't like to create a pressure on myself because I
just think that's disrespectful to my creative drive [laughs]. It's not
like doing your homework and handing it in. It's an art form and you have
to work with it. You can't – it's like a wild horse [laughs]. And, yeah,
every now and then it might calm down a little bit and let you ride it but …
The Earth, The Sea, The Moon, The Sky is out now through AOA Records.
www.catherinetraicos.com
One of the best shows I have ever been to - and I've been to many - was part of the very first tour undertaken by Adam Harvey and Troy Cassar-Daley, performing a whole bunch of songs they loved written by a whole bunch of people who weren't them. It was an opportunity for them as friends and colleagues to have a ball, and they really did - consequently the audience did too. The breadth of their musical knowledge was impressive, as was the fact that, stepping away from their own material, it became clear that they were very accomplished performers and interpreters of other people's work. We put a lot of store on singers who are also songwriters but it's also quite a trick to be a great interpreter of someone else's songs. To be able to do both - as Adam and Troy showed they could - is the measure of a truly great artist (at least, in my opinion).
