Jen Cloher

Jen Cloher: on being human

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

There is a well-known Māori proverb: Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au. Translated, it means “I am the river, the river is me”. For the Māori of Aotearoa, rivers are roads, supermarkets, home. The proverb can also be applied to fluidity and continuity; a recognition that change is part of being human.

I Am The River, The River Is Me is also the title the Melbourne/Naarm-based singer-songwriter Jen Cloher has given to their fifth album. It was an album born of intense upheaval: breaking up with former partner Courtney Barnett in 2018 led to the dissolution of their band, while the pandemic gave them time to think and reflect about who they were.

Cloher now officially identifies as non-binary, with the pronouns they/she. On their last album, Cloher wrote a song called Strong Woman, a homage to their matrilineal line: “Proud my mother wanted respect more than love / and her mother taught her that she could want for more,” the lyrics declare.

“I’m very happily ‘she’, and I’m ‘she’ as I acknowledge the incredible line of women that I come through,” Cloher says. “I will always keep ‘she’ in my identification because of the honour and the great responsibility that I carry coming through that bloodline of extraordinary people.”… Read more..

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Courtney Barnett: Taking her time

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

At the beginning of 2020, while her home country burned and the rest of the world was waking up to a global pandemic, Courtney Barnett was in Los Angeles. She’d just completed an American tour; her plan was to find herself an apartment and stick around a little longer to work on songs.

Then – after “it all got really wild” – she came home to Melbourne. For maybe the first time in six years – since her 2016 hit Avant Gardener turned her into the newest “New Dylan” – Barnett finally had time to sit and think. “There was a bit of a personal shift of some sort in my brain,” she says carefully over Zoom, from a Spartan-looking room that offers no clues. “I felt myself opening up in a different way.”

Barnett’s personal life had been riven with upheaval, even beyond the virus that wreaked havoc on her industry. Her relationship with Jen Cloher, with whom she founded her label Milk! Records in 2012, had ended in 2018 (the business partnership remains intact). There had also been “some deaths” – she doesn’t say whom. “I was just checking in with myself, on a different level than I maybe had done previously.”… Read more..

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Something To Believe In: A Playlist

Music / / 8 minutes of reading

I was driving alongside the Brisbane River not far from home, with a Ramones anthology playing at full volume, when it hit me. I was trying to piece myself back together after a difficult couple of years. My mother had been transferred into care with advanced Alzheimer’s disease and my marriage had broken up. Something To Believe In was the song that did it – an almost-forgotten single from the Ramones’ troubled mid-’80s era. It was about losing your grip on yourself, on life, then rediscovering your sense of purpose. I knew I wasn’t going to be the same person but, then again, I didn’t want to be.

It was March 2018. I’d written a few pieces that began to sketch out a story of a life on the margins of music but from the perspective of a fan, a wannabe, rather than a player. Over the next two months, a music memoir poured out: the first 30,000 words in three weeks. It was finished by Mother’s Day. Something To Believe In was the obvious title, music being that something that had kept me sane, kept me going and, at times, kept me alive.

What follows is a playlist of 10 songs – most sublime, at least one ridiculous – that signposted that journey.… Read more..

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Here are all the great Aussie protest songs

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

On Tuesday an Australian newspaper of repute published an earnest think-piece asking the question: where are all the great Aussie protest songs? Where oh where – in this, our Age of Unreason – are the new Midnight Oils, Goannas, Redgums and Chisels, the author, Jeff Apter, asks?

“Why do the musos of today … seem more concerned with navel-gazing and their fragile broken hearts than weightier, more universal issues?” he writes. “Why the resistance? It’s not like there’s a shortage of subjects to rail against.”

Indeed there isn’t: asylum seekers, Australia Day, violence against women, Aboriginal deaths in custody, marriage equality. And if you spare a moment to actually listen to the musos of today – particularly women, who don’t rate a mention in the piece, and people of colour – you’ll find each of those subjects feature in some of the best new Australian protest music around.

So, where are all the great Aussie protest songs? Well, a lot of them are on Spotify, where it took us about 10 minutes to make a playlist. Feel free to make your own!

AB Original: January 26 (2016)

A mic drop on the nation. If the mark of a good protest song is to start a conversation, this song applied a set of jumper leads to the question of when we should hold our national day of celebration – and got voted to #16 in Triple J’s Hottest 100, before Triple J decided to change that date too.… Read more..

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Cash Savage & The Last Drinks: Good Citizens

Music / / 3 minutes of reading

Everyone’s got a “fucked-up way” of being good citizens – or so Melbourne’s Cash Savage tells us on the title track of her fourth album. Some of the things that might help us feel good about ourselves are rooted in inequalities and injustice. Like, for example, voting in a voluntary postal survey on whether or not LGBTIQ people should be able to marry.

Good Citizens was written against the backdrop of that risible survey, the trauma it caused Savage’s community, and the aftermath: that even when you might have got the result a large majority of the population wanted, amid the celebrations and self-congratulations, the scars of being asked to justify and defend your own identity and humanity remain.

That trauma though has produced her most focused, cohesive record. Gone is any vestige of the faint Americana leanings of her earlier albums. The nine songs here are all brawling rock & roll and crushing ballads. It’s got more in common with Nick Cave and the Dirty Three, in Savage’s vocals and Kat Mear’s sawing violin, than Wilco – much less the Band.

But while the basic reference points are clear, Savage has never sounded more self-assured – or more Australian. Her voice is magnificent throughout, whether she’s gently chiding her country on Better Than That (“There’s a lot of people thinking I’m up for discussion”, she notes) or tearing through the pub-punk rock of Pack Animals.… Read more..

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When Kurt met Courtney

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

A few years before Courtney Barnett was known to the wider world, during a period of life where she was, by her own estimation, “kind of unemployed and a bit depressed”, she bought a record on a whim and a recommendation. It was Kurt Vile’s Smoke Ring For My Halo, his breakthrough fourth album from 2011. She took a particular shine to the track Peepin’ Tomboy, an odd folk song with dense clusters of fingerpicked guitar.

“I didn’t even know who he was,” she says. “And it was beautiful – it’s still one of the most beautiful-sounding records that I’ve ever heard. There’s something about that album in particular that has a real magic to it, and I’ve followed him ever since. Apart from the sonic level of that album, I really loved his phrasing and lyrics. I felt really akin to it.”

A couple of years later, when Vile was touring Australia pushing the follow-up album Wakin On A Pretty Daze, Barnett found herself supporting Vile at a show in Melbourne, at Abbotsford Convent. Later at a barbecue, the pair briefly connected, and Barnett slipped him a copy of A Sea Of Split Peas, which compiled her first two EPs, including her own breakthrough hit Avant Gardener.… Read more..

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