On abandoning a timeline

What feelings were coming up around the time you decided to step away from acting?

I must have been about 22 when I graduated from the Actors Center, over 10 years ago. I’m coming back to this place where I’m interested in potentially figuring out how I could step back into the world of acting and feeling a lot of excitement around that idea of diving into some character roles. I’ve been thinking back to that point a lot, about what it was that wasn’t sitting well for me. It was a whole myriad of things. I felt like after I had done three years of intensive training, I felt worse at acting than I did before I started. That’s quite a common thing, I’ve heard. There was this real frustration that I felt around being typecast. At that stage of my life, those [were] the roles I was more suited to. It’s like all the creativity is out of your hands, and at that point, I didn’t know myself well enough to be able to handle that kind of rejection or the whole method of playing a role, playing character.

It was a real godsend to have my relationship develop with my guitar at that time. I didn’t think anything would come from it; that wasn’t my intention. I had always consciously turned away from music because I had watched my mother do it, and I was like, “I’m not doing that.” My dad was always playing as well, and he gave me one of his old Fender electric guitars, and that’s pretty much what I taught myself to play on in my bedroom. I remember feeling empowered [by] the intimacy and the agency that I had with writing and being in my own energy. I didn’t need anybody else to do it. I wasn’t looking for anybody else’s permission or validation. Down the line, when I started having more of a commercial relationship with [music], all of that changed. My relationship to it changed. It was a special kind of temple place for me at the beginning.

Was your initial aversion to pursuing music as a career linked to seeing your parents struggle to do so?

I think so. It was layered for me because I remember my mom used to do choirs; she was a choir master when I was younger. She was a jazz singer as well. There were people like Baz Luhrmann at her choir and she did composing for Jane Campion. She had her peak in the Australian industry with her own career. She always wanted to get out of Australia, but she didn’t. I think that really crushed her spirit. I don’t feel like she went where she should have gone, in some ways. I watched her reconciling the grief around not getting to have these lived experiences that she wanted to have. And of course, struggling with the financial aspect of it all too. She worked her ass off to provide for us three kids and she’s always done her art. She’s always made a living from her art, which is phenomenal. But I was just like, man, I don’t want to struggle like that.

There was a period of time where I [thought] maybe I’ll go to university and I will study psychology or I’ll become a lawyer. I ended up applying for a Bachelor of Midwifery, which I got into at the same time that I got into acting school. I wanted to become a midwife and deliver babies, but at that time felt like, “I’m going to graduate in three to four years and that’s just so young. I don’t even have a child of my own, how can I deliver babies?”

Was there a moment that gave you confidence to pursue music more seriously?

I had been spending a lot of time in Bali and there was this crazy bohemian cafe filled with expats from all around the world. They would have these jam sessions—a typical kind of situation. There were lots of people singing covers, and I sang one day, and a few people came up to me and were like, “Maybe you should really focus on this.” So I started writing a bit more intentionally after that. I started doing a bit more exploring. I remember vaguely talking to my mom about song form and being like, how do I actually write a song so it’s not just a stream of consciousness? How do I structure this a bit more?

What was her advice?

I can’t totally remember, but I think she probably just explained the standard: verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, whatever. I remember singing some for her and her saying, which she’s always said to me, “Just enunciate. Why is everyone slurring their words? Can you just dictate what you’re singing about?”

How have your visual art skills impacted your experience of releasing music?

It’s all intertwined. Photography came in as another way for me to have agency in my own work. I’ve always wanted to be in films and to direct films. I’m a very visual person. I see things in a cinematic way inside my brain, so I think that was another avenue where I [decided] I can write a short film, I can write a script. I can dream about making my own film and directing it, exploring that and making Indigo’s iteration of The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick vibe. But I don’t have the capacity or the resources to do that, so I’ll just write this song that has a visual storytelling aspect to it and then add my own imagery to it that I have control over.

I’d imagine you enjoy your collaborations with visual artists a good deal.

I love it. Often I have the visual clarity around the world that I want to build before I have the clarity around the music to accompany it. I’ll have visual references in my mind, or a color, or an image, and that will help me orient to where I start expanding in the world of music. I’m not musically gifted, like technically gifted. I just made this album when I was 33 weeks pregnant with John Parish in the UK, and he asked me, if I could put what I wanted the feeling of the album to be into a visual representation, what would it be? Which was really helpful for me to explain the feeling and tone of what I was wanting.

Do you think of specific instruments in relation to acting? Like a guitar or certain sound being the protagonist of a song?

I actually don’t, but that’s really cool. I think it’s because I’m not instrumentally advanced, so I don’t feel like it’s my strength. That’s where my limitation is, honestly. I feel my limitation in that I don’t have enough of an understanding of the guitar or any other instrument to be able to explore and play in that way. It’s much more about tone for me, which is probably why I find myself listening to a lot of ambient music.

Are there specific characters or scenes from films you hold in your mind while working?

I got obsessed with Nastassja Kinski’s character in Paris, Texas for a while. The whole tone of that movie and this restlessness and longing—this yearning, searching, love story spanning the desert. I had her in my mind for many, many years. I almost felt like I became her and explored her in different ways. In my first record Echo, there’s that song “Colourblind.” A friend and I shot the music video at this eerie hotel in a small town in Australia. I kind of played both of the characters in [Paris, Texas] in some capacity; I was playing her and him, you know? Flipping between the two… For the Hysteria record, I literally hacked all my hair off and dyed it really blonde and was just in that world, exploring.

How do you capture an idea quickly when it comes to you?

Usually a line of poetry or a phrase comes to me and I just have my phone and I’ll sing the melody, or say the lyrics or write the lyrics into my phone. Otherwise, if I’m at home, I’ll grab the guitar and record it with my voice. That’s how that song “Blue” came about. It was literally a stream of consciousness: one go, one recording. That was a one-off situation where, struck by some sort of lightning bolt genius moment, it felt like that in the moment. Not to be a self-proclaimed genius, but it was one of those moments where something mystical was coming through.

What helps when you’re feeling stuck or uninspired?

I’m learning so much through motherhood. I’m understanding myself my unique cycles more, and learning to compare myself to other people a lot less. I’m trying to take the pressure off this idea of being productive, [to not worry about] creating content, and to understand that nothing good comes from me pushing anything. Riding the full wave of whatever it is that I’m in at the moment and allowing myself to be fully present. Allowing myself to let go of the timelines that I have in my mind frees me up to be available to listen when I do have inspiration come in.

The amount of times I’ve sat down and I’ve tried to write a song because I’m like, “I need to write a song. I haven’t written anything in a few months or in a year because I have a child.” And if I sit down and try to write something, it’s like, this is just fucking terrible. I am in a huge recalibration and I’ve just gone through this major threshold. I am forming; I’m becoming someone new. I’m trying to give myself spaciousness in that, too—in the way of, you don’t really know what your new voice is yet. You don’t know who you are yet totally. It hasn’t landed.

That sounds exciting, confusing, and scary all at once.

Totally. It could be interesting to try to write from that voice of confusion or the unknown, and document the process of not knowing, then see what happens when I feel like I’ve arrived at a place of a little bit more solidity in myself. I think it’s more of a whole overhaul. I’m not just identifying as being a musician and a songwriter anymore. There are other avenues that I want to explore for my creative outlet.

I was recently talking to Sharon Van Etten about exactly this.

You know what’s so interesting? I saw Sharon play at the Bearsville Theater with the Attachment Theory configuration of her performance, and I was like, “She’s so fucking badass, she carries all the gravitas of being a mother with her in her live performance and her singing.” I think it was the first concert that I went to after having my daughter. I went home and was telling my partner that it was an inspiring show for me because she is still doing this thing even though she’s a mother, where I felt like there’s no room for mothers to exist in the music industry.

I mean, there are a few and they are all very inspiring. There’s Patti Smith, Sharon, Lykke Li, Cat Power… There are some cool artists who have children, but not many. It made me think about all the women who have children who are musicians who aren’t doing it at that level of success, and just how hard it is to be both and one at the same time because there is no separation—at least if you’re parenting and mothering in a way where you want to create a secure attachment to your child, there can’t be any separation. It reminded me of how much I love it, and that you can still do this and be a mother. You can do this at 40, it’s not like it’s too late, it’s done. You can do it at 40, you can do it at 50, you can do it at 60. You can do it.

What’s bringing you joy and hope right now?

That’s a nice question. The most simple things—like this morning just before we got on the call, I was standing outside and delighting in the coolness of the breeze, these whispers of fall that are coming through. It gave me a sense of spaciousness inside of myself. That felt joyful to me. Obviously, my daughter. It’s just so full of joy watching her experience the world for the first time. I’m learning to find joy in music again. Having a new relationship with it, a curious exploration in my relationship with writing at the moment.