On being happy with the career you have

Chin Up Buttercup is your clubbiest album yet. Some of your music—“Utopia,” albums like Future Politics—approach the club, but how did you learn to produce full-on club music?

I worked with a co-producer. I realized when I was making [Chin Up Buttercup]—because Future Politics was totally self-produced and it was my first time taking care of absolutely everything, making all of the beats—when I listen to [Future Politics] now, I’m like, “That was a work in progress.” It was a learning experience.

At this stage in my life, I can make beats, but I’m not the best beatmaker by any means. Working with my friend Kieran [Adams] who is first and foremost a percussionist, a beatmaker, was so freeing. I was like, “Finally. This sounds amazing.” It was just finding the right person to work with, ultimately.

When you say you’re not the best beatmaker, did you move from feeling frustrated about that at first to a place of acceptance?

Yeah, I think so. Around [the Future Politics] era as well, there was a lot of emphasis on people doing everything themselves, this idea of the auteur, self-produced, self-everything. I felt like it was important to be able to do that, and I don’t feel like that anymore.

It’s a missed opportunity to not collaborate with other people. When you find the right collaborators, they push you in directions you would never be able to go on your own. Understanding where my strengths and weaknesses are, and working with people who have the opposite abilities, can yield amazing results.

How do you know when it’s time to bring a collaborator in?

I had two main goals with [Chin Up Buttercup]. The first is that I didn’t want to make a depressing breakup record. The second is that I really wanted to make a record that translated well live, because my previous record HiRUDiN, because I never toured it, I just had missed playing live so much. Also, I recognized that having toured for so long—I put out my first record like 15 years ago—still, when I play shows, it’s the songs from my first record that are the bangers. I was like, “I need to make some more bangers. I don’t want to always be closing with this song that I wrote, like, 20 years ago.” I know that’s a plight that many musicians have, but I really wanted to try and make some stuff that had a lot of energy.

To what extent do you consider playing live part of the creative process?

I’m about to go on tour, and before I leave in January, it will have been almost eight years since I’ve actually toured. That’s because I put out [HiRUDiN] in May 2020 at the start of the pandemic, and that whole album cycle just didn’t happen. I skipped a touring cycle. Prior to that, I had done so much touring that I was really burnt out and actually not that excited about it. But now that it’s been so long and I feel like I have a more relaxed approach to making music, I’m really excited about it.

I used to have a lot of anxiety about enough people coming to the shows, or selling tickets, or, “Are we traveling in a bus or a van?” I was always so hyper-fixated on these little indicators of success. And now, I just don’t care, and I’m ready to pull up in a minivan and play to however many people.

Talking about touring and being a musician for 20 years makes me wonder, how have you learned to make a sustainable living off music?

I’m constantly astounded that I’ve been able to make a living off this for as long as I have, because I never have financial security longer than six months in the future. I think probably 100 times in the last 15 years, I’ve been like, “This is it. This is the last year. This is the last record.” And there just always keep being these little gifts or surprises that keep you going.

I remember hearing Beverly Glenn-Copeland talking about it at some point, and he said something along the lines of, “You have to have faith that the money will come.” But now that it’s been a while, and the climate of touring and music-making has changed so much, I will say that it has become more stressful and precarious than ever. But I’m still in this [mindset of], “I’ve got the next six months covered, and I’m going six months to six months, and then [we’ll] see what happens.” If at some point I have to open up a coffee shop, that’s where we’ll go.

Between albums, especially with the time that’s elapsed between HiRUDiN and Chin Up Buttercup, I’m wondering what else you’ve had to do to make money and sustain your creativity.

I was really lucky. When I talk about these gifts that you get, I got a cold email from a friend asking me to score a TV series and documentary film, which I had never done before. I had never scored anything, but it came right at the start of 2023, right when I was starting to stress and be like, “What am I doing next?” And then this opportunity fell in my lap and ended up taking up that entire year, and [it] led to a few other scoring projects.

Scoring felt like this huge relief, because I realized I was pretty good at it. [It] was nice to be like, “This is something that I’ve never done before, but I am feeling really comfortable in this space. This is something that will always be there. I can stress a little less about what’s happening with Austra, the touring, the pressures of album sales and getting older.” Scoring feels like something I could do until I’m 100 years old. It’s still an inconsistent art practice, but I think that, as long as you have a few going at once, then it’s more manageable.

What were some of the challenges that came with learning how to score?

For me, the main difference with scoring is the timelines. When you’re making a record, you’re on your own timeline. With scoring, they’re like, “You have to do an episode in a week.” You have to meet these deadlines no matter what.

I refer to it as bootcamp, because you have to not only produce all this music at such a fast rate, but you have to be the best producer you’ve ever been. When comparing [Chin Up Buttercup] to past records, part of the reason why this one sounds better is because I was in scoring bootcamp for a year and a half, where I was the only person working on the music from start to finish. There was no co-producer. There was no mixing engineer. I didn’t have any of these components. I had to make it sound good from beginning to end, and that was a real learning curve, because normally, when I make a record, [I hand] it off to a mixing engineer, and they even things out and make it sound more professional. But with scoring, I had to do everything. It was the best way to hone my craft as a producer.

The other thing about it is that it’s such a relief to be servicing someone else’s vision. When I make music as Austra, I’m the one who has to make all the decisions in the end. I’m the one who is burdened with all these critical decisions about what things should or shouldn’t sound like. With scoring, that burden is on somebody else. I’ll produce something and they decide if it’s right or not, and based on that feedback, I’ll change it or adapt to what they want. It’s such a relief to not have to make those decisions, and after spending so long making music as Austra, it was exactly what I needed.

Did you write Chin Up Buttercup while you were going through the grief of the breakup or afterward? Was ityour way of moving through the grief process and all of the anger, or was it something that you wrote in retrospect to put a bow on this chapter?

In 2020, when this all happened, when I put out a record and it was canceled because of the pandemic, there was so much that went wrong that year. I found myself unable to make music for over a year, at least. There’s a lot of reasons for that. I think it was because I was in this grieving process, but I also think it’s because, when you put out a record, you’re supposed to tour it after. There’s this process you’re supposed to go through, and I didn’t have that process, so I didn’t really know what to do with myself.

I didn’t make music. I instead found myself, almost as a survival mechanism, journaling and writing all the time. I’m not usually much of a journaler. I wish I was, but it’s not something that I really have ever had the discipline to maintainexcept while going through some sort of crisis. In that moment, I was writing every day, all the time, every time I had a big feeling or thought.

When I came to make this record, I went back to that period of writing to source the material. In that sense, the record is super raw, because I’m using a lot of the material I was writing when I was in the thick of feeling this grief and anger. But on the other hand, when I came to actually finish the record, that was after I had done these scoring projects. I was somewhat removed from it when I actually came to finish the record.

Since you’ve been making music for 20 years now and your music today sounds pretty different, what would you tell your earliest creative self that you couldn’t have known then that you know now?

Honestly, I would do this in the reverse. I wish that early Katie Stelmanis or Austra could tell me what to do, because I often think about how naïve I was in that period of my life and how I miss being that naïve. Before I released my first record, I had no idea what Pitchfork was. I had never heard of all these metrics, blogs, and marks of success. I was completely oblivious to all of it. I just lived in my own world and made my own music. When I became aware of all the stuff around it in the music industry, I started to get more insecure and cautious about what I was doing. [Thinking about] those early days, I’m like, “That is exactly where you want to be.” You’re just living in your own little creative bubble. I always strive to get back to that place.

I just turned 41 this year, and by music industry standards, I’m dead. A woman over 35, unless she has an established career, is not going to break. There’s so much pressure in your 30s of, like, “I have to reach this level of success before it’s too late,” and I’m like, “Well, it’s too late now.” By all metrics, it’s too late, but there’s this enormous relief in that. Now that I’ve accepted that I have the career that I have, I’m able to relax into it a lot more and just enjoy what it is. I feel relieved to feel like I’m no longer in this rat race of feeling like [I] have a ticking time bomb.

In your “Some Things,” you said that you always felt your singing voice was equally the biggest draw and deterrent to your music. How has that feeling changed your approach to your creativity over the years?

Going back to thinking about where I was when I made [my debut album Feel It Break], I’ve always known that my singing voice has been this special power. Ever since I was a kid, I was always known as having a good voice, and that was part of my identity. It was never anything I questioned or felt insecure about. I felt with a degree of certainty that I was a good singer. So when I put out my first record, I was really surprised that some [listeners were] deterred by my singing voice.

I remember one specific piece of feedback that really stuck with me for so long. My label was trying to shop my record to radio, and the response was that my voice was too divisive for radio. Being the girl who had never heard of Pitchfork, hearing this feedback, I was totally shocked. I just couldn’t believe that that would be the case, because, to me, my voice—there was nothing divisive about it. It was a pretty easy voice to listen to. But then, I became aware that women’s voices struggle to attain the same level of [respect].

Reading The Gender of Sound, which I read really recently, was so validating. When I started reading it, I realized that the entire thesis was, essentially, about how women’s voices have been the disdain of culture since Aristotle and Greek mythology with the sirens, and since the Victorian patriarchy, and since—it’s not in The Gender of Sound, but if you watch the Lilith Fair documentary, women’s voices are seen or perceived as something that’s painful to listen to.

With my music, that is something I have received. This is feedback I’ve received. At the same time, I know that a lot of people love my music for my voice, but I do think the general population has a limit to how much they can handle women singing. I think this has been something that’s been pretty difficult to understand throughout my career. Even when I think of other women artists who I adore and admire, and who never have the same level of credibility as many of their male counterparts—Tori Amos, for example—I don’t think women’s voices are taken quite as seriously.

Is there anything more you want to say about creativity in general, or in response to the questions I asked that,when I was asking them, you didn’t quite get to say?

[I’ve thought] about how to survive emotionally as a creative person [a lot] in the past five years. In the beginning, it was such a challenging time for me to go through a big breakup, and then, to have an album cycle canceled and question if I would be able to continue making music, if that was even a viable possibility for me. I became really fixated on this idea of what you actually needed to be happy, or to be satisfied in your life or career. I realized that success doesn’t actually make anybody happy. For me, it was about figuring out what I needed to do in the day-to-day, hour-to-hour in order to keep some level of sanity. Once you realize that all these accolades, negative or positive, are external to that, and that all that really matters is what you’re doing hour-to-hour, day-to-day, then it makes the whole creative practice a lot easier to live in.