Hey, super nice to have the chance to chat with you. What have you been up to over the past year in this big old mess?
Actually, I’m fairly new to the craft of writing and releasing original music so i spent the best part of the last couple of years during the pandemic learning how to do just that. In between supervising remote learning with my 3 children as well as falling in complete love with the Zoe Kravitz series High Fidelity.
For those that haven’t heard of you yet, how would you best describe your sound, and who have been your biggest influences so far?
I would describe my sound as being quite dramatic and theatrical, very wall of sound vocal heavy with a bit of a rock edge to it. A huge influence has been Freddie Mercury, but also Dolly Parton and Tori Amos. All of these artists have this flair about them which is reflected in their art that has this don’t give a monkeys uncle what anyone else thinks kind of attitude which i find totally inspiring. Pink Floyd has played quite a significant role and I also loved Music Theatre growing up and i think this shows within my music as well.
I’m very interested in how you started your adventure with music, and did you know from the beginning that this is what you wanted to do?
My very first memory of actually realising that i wanted to be an artist was when i was 5 and watching the movie Xanadu. I have always loved to sing and dance and perform in front of people. And i was always fascinated with the piano when i saw my grade 1 teacher play ‘Fur Elise’. It was always something i wanted to learn and every xmas morning i would rush out to the loungeroom to see if Santa had brought me one.It never came because unbeknownst to me at the time, my parents couldn’t afford such a huge instrument as well as lessons for me to potentially turn around and get bored with it as kids sometimes can do.Thankfully after years and years of badgering, they caved when i was 14. But I was your typical show off nightmare as a child. From then on with the help of my mum and my maternal grandmother, i seized every single opportunity i could to sing and perform, whether it was at school, in talent quests and in cover bands. I wrote a few songs in high school but i always had a huge problem with anxiety in playing and performing them and so i just stopped. I came from a small coastal town and at the time, the music scene was non-existent and so i had to move to Sydney to try and fullfil my dream of being a pro singer. After about a year i auditioned for a party band called Jellybean Jam and was lucky enough to get the gig which meant learning the ropes of being a pro on stage for 4-5 nights a week for about 8 and a half years. I also studied classical and music theatre voice with a private voice teacher for about 10 years. So having the live band experience singing pop and rock covers and combining that with classical and music theatre, i feel like i was given a huge opportunity to grow as a vocalist and a performer. A 10 year stint in London doing the same kind of thing was massive as well. It was when i turned 40 and i had 3 young boys, i realised that i didn’t want to be that person anymore. I’d taken it as far as i could and i knew that i would have to spend some time figuring out what i really had always wanted to do. So i went back to the dream that i’d had when i was 5. Admittedly there were alot of psychological hurdles that i had to get through, but with being in my 40’s, i knew that it was the right time to start taking songwriting seriously and put as much energy into the adventure as i could. And this is where i am right now. I’m also teaching myself how to produce music as well.
Your latest track is ‘Ghost’. Can you share with us the background of its creation and did any unusual things happen during its creation?
‘Ghost’ all started out as a bit of fun and a giant experiment really. I’d been listening to Ed Sheeran’s song “Shape Of You” and was really starting to pay attention to the craft of writing music as it was something i hadn’t really done before because i paid the most attention the lyrics and melody. I noticed he was just using the same chord progression on a loop throughout the entire song as happens in alot of music. But this song particularly stood out to me because every section sounded different and i thought the use of all the elements was so calculated and clever that it kept me as listener interested for the duration of the song. So i decided that i wanted to try and craft a song doing the same sort of thing. In this day and age, people’s attention spans are so short that i challenged myself to write something that i hoped would keep a listener engaged throughout the whole journey of the song. But then the song just took on a life of it’s own and i just ran with it. It’s one of those songs that wrote itself. I guess because i wasn’t pressuring myself, i was just having a huge amount of fun experimenting with it all. I’ve got a home studio set up so i just played a chord progression into it that i’d been mucking around with, and then started to play around with a melody. Starting low and then pitching things a little higher for each section. The lyrics were nonsense to begin with but then the idea of Ghost popped into my head. It originally started out with a theme of the Ghost being a metaphor for a dream that you wonder if it were to come true, would it be as amazing as you imagined it to be. But then the tone changed somehow and i figured out that it was so autobiographical because the dream which i’d been so scared to work towards for so long and had allowed to die for while, was still haunting me and that in the end, i just had to go for it. I wanted this tension and release aspect to weave through the verses and the little melodic chorus that i wanted to sound ghost like, but essentially i wanted it to still build until you get to the outro which i just wanted to go nuts with the vocals and the melodies and rhythms all weaving around each other and creating this total release that would make the hairs on the back of your neck stick up. The kind of sound that you would hear at the end of a live show that would make you just scream for more. Or the final song of an album like Pendulum’s “The Tempest” or Muse’s “Knights of Cydonia”, The most unusual thing that occured was i wanted to write a low monotone but rhythmic section at the end, like at the end of the UK band The Ting Tings first single “That’s Not My Name” and so i looked in my copy of Roget’s Theasuraus and looked up the word Ghost. I wrote down all the synonyms that i thought would work within the song and crafted very quickly a word salad from all of the words that i wrote down and was very excited with how easily it happened.
You are also based in Werribee, Australia. Can you tell us how the music scene there has inspired your sound at all?
Werribee is a suburb in the outer west of Melbourne and the music scene in Melbourne is massive and so eclectic!!! Because it’s not where i’m originally from and i’ve moved around quite abit over the course of my life, I wouldn’t say that being here has influenced my sound as such, but it’s definitely been an inspiration as i have managed to connect with so many other emerging songwriters here who are all so supportive and encouraging of each others journeys. I honestly don’t think i would be this far into my career as a songwriter so soon if it wasn’t for connecting with these amazing songwriting communities. They have changed my life.
Does your family share your passion for music? What do they think about your work?
My mum loved dancing and both my parents love music, my dad in particular every weekend without fail would put albums on a turntable and there would always be Midnight Oil, Kiss, Supertramp, Donna Summer, Barbra Striesand, Rainbow, The Beatles, such a twisted mix of influences blaring out of the speakers. My paternal grandmother was always singing to herself but as far as i’m far as i’m aware, no-one in my immediate family actually did anything like this for a living. I have a cousin who is a pro singer and was in the country and western music scene here in Australia for about 10 years. My family have always been so supportive of me and my career. I mean, what parent in their right mind really would let their 17 year old daughter to move 4 hours drive away to the biggest city in Australia, to pursue her dream. I think i’ve actually really surprised them though with branching out into original music as i think they have always thought that this sort of thing only happens to other people. But the gatekeepers no longer play as much of a part now and being an independent songwriter is now, albeit hard work, but so incredibly accessible and they’re really proud that i have found a way and never given up. My husband has been incredibly supportive as well. In fact, i’ve been so lucky that i’ve been financially supported by him so i can concentrate on music whilst the kids are at school. I have 3 boys-a 12 year old and 2 10 year olds and it’s taken them awhile to get used to me doing all of this. But now that i’ve released a song, i think they’re starting to really appreciate it. I mean, one of the reasons why i’m going for it now, is to hopefully one day inspire them to not accept limitations, that you can learn to do anything even as an adult and that you should never give up on the things that make you feel realy joy.
Can you write what was your best performance in your career? How do you remember it?
Because i’m still so new at the original music side of things, i’ve only done a handful of performances with it. I was completely chuffed to be asked to do a couple of gigs organised by other songwriting friends and so i’m extremely grateful for those opportunities because it was a real trip to be performing my music to room full of people. The best performance was getting to sing in front of a crowd of about 40,000 people at the Sydney Cricket Ground as the lunchtime entertainment. It was of the time when the Macarena was still kicking around and so we’d been asked by the entertainment organisers to end our set with the dance to encourage the crowd to do it too. We saw 2 police women on the sidelines join in and so because we were all quite playful, we started dancing with them. The crowd absolutely loved it!! The next day the papers and talkback radio in Sydney had lost their minds over our little stunt because it was seen as unprofessional and the women were suspended. The general public thought what we had done was an amazing PR exercise to show that the people in blue were human. They were reinstated a couple of days later when our band leader apologised to the officers and their superiors thankfully.
Do you have any other passions apart from music? If yes, can you introduce them to us?
I’ve got a 17 month old puppy and i’ve never owned a dog before so i’m incredibly obsessed with him. I also really love cooking and i’m incredibly passionate about trying to feed my kids a huge variety of homemade food and also teaching them how to cook. I love meditation and getting out into nature and going walking or running. Exercise and renergising is of huge importance to me.
Who’s your ideal musician to collaborate with and why?
I would love to collaborate with Lady Gaga and Sia. I just think both of them have the most incredible voices and their writing is insane. Regina Spektor is also another one. All of these empowered females have such a lovely quirk about them and i’m a sucker for quirkiness.
What are your plans for next months? Do you have any music ready to be released?
Writing and releasing music and then all the admin side of it with PR and marketing which i’ve done myself with the help of some beautiful mentors has been such a huge learning curve. It’s been so much fun and i’ve enjoyed every minute of it. But i haven’t been able to write very much lately because when i haven’t been focusing on releasing, the rest of the mental load has been keeping a household running as well. And so i’m looking forward to doing more writing and increasing my back catalogue of music as well as honing my production skills alot more to the point where i can self-release. The next goal will be to self-produce and release an EP in the next 12 months. But i do have other songs that i want to release as well in the next few months so you never know.
And finally, what do you hope to have achieved as an artist in the next five years?
I see myself in the next 5 years writing, recording, collaborating,producing and releasing music as a fulltime career. I’ve started to become interested in the dark art of mastering and so i’m hoping to study that alot more intensely to generate an income stream as other artists always need to find someone to mix and master their tracks. I’ve also got this vision that one day i would love to provide support for other mature women/wxmen who are new to the music industry just like i am. The reason it’s so niche, is because i really feel that there are other women out there like me, who have either had a change of career later in life, or have decided to chuck in the day job to try and make a music career realised but feel that the resources for them are few and far between. Because it’s such a youth dominated industry, the glass ceiling is yet to be broken for Gen x-ers and older who feel that it’s too late to try and break into it. I would love to help and teach them how to write, record and release their music and educate them about this NEW music industry that is all about collaboration, not competition. As i’ve said, everything is so accesible these days, but to the more mature part of the population, it can be quite intimidating asking for support from someone in their 20’s and 30’s. But first, i need to keep going with my education first.
