Lara Meyerratken

June ’08 – I’ve been a fan of El May since the days she was Lara Meyerratken, playing (everything) and singing in Sneeze in the late-90s. I got hold of a copy of about six Lara-solo demos some years ago, and listened to them endlessly, and now I have El May’s four-songer ‘Sound The Key Note’. DRAINING A LAKE has become my favourite track. Sometimes when I’m writing - either a song or a chapter - I’ll think, “Yes, but there’s more to be wrung from this idea – I haven’t fulfilled all its possibilities yet.” One thing that’s so appealing about El May is that all possibilities are explored…In DRAINING A LAKE, with its loose, toe-tapping feel, and rumbling, cascading piano track, and the many layers of ingenious (and not gratuitous) backing vocals, the chorus, “Wouldn’t I know, wouldn’t I know by now?”, is teased out, revealed, explained. I love the way its meaning (or one of its meanings) is made explicit only at the end of the second verse, in a satisfyingly neat inversion: “You’re not coming back to me, ‘cause I’d know by now - wouldn’t I?” She makes these words resigned, yet longing; she’s come to a conclusion, but she’s still asking a question; she’s let go of the past although she’s still singing a song about it.

Endeavour Jones

May ’08 – My most replayed song lately has been SAME HERE by Endeavour Jones. So many songs, especially the ones addressed to an anonymous ‘you’, are written simply to ease, in the moment of writing (and then of playing), the pain of being parted from the latest you-who-are-not-here. SAME HERE doesn’t go into particulars – the listener finds out neither why they are apart nor whether a happy reunion is shortly anticipated. In SAME HERE, the singer is going about his daily life as usual, yet for him everything is drastically changed, and only the voice he carries with him can understand: ‘I hear the silence of my room at night, I listen to its memories. I still pretend that you can hear my breath - it’s evidence of absence of one’s death. And you just whisper, “Same here, same here.”’

Of course, if you happened to have been Endeavour Jones’s correspondent since 1997, when you’d met him at the Oberhausen Kurzfilmtage, then you’d be able to ask him for the full story behind the song. Even though we’ve only spent a total of three weeks in each other’s company, his voice is one that I carry around with me – about once a day I hear him make a comment about something I’m doing or seeing or thinking about. He is an extremely prolific maker-of-things – he has written two novels, made several short films, written hundreds of songs, he paints, he draws, he did a PhD about plane crashes in movies, he is a design professor in Bern, Switzerland, and he even sews! - (at this point I hear the voice of another friend, who sings a rather good ‘Making Whoopee’). With so much capacity, at times Endeavour Jones has been too sophisticated – jazz chords! - for a simple faux-country girl like me. Slightly dazzled, I used to wonder, “But who is the real Endeavour Jones?” Songwise, I know him better now, and understand that his flights of fancy are as true an expression of him as his cries from the heart.

Tommy Maken and Liam Clancy...okay, okay, Eric Bogle

April ’08 – Here’s a song from this very moment: THE BAND PLAYED WALTZING MATILDA as sung by Tommy Makem and Liam Clancy (written by Eric Bogle). Just a moment ago, I was innocently listening to a batch of songs poached from my brothers’ playlist, while I was log-cabinning (any patch-worker will understand that verb) a cushion-cover I’m making for another brother, and thinking, “I should get ready to go out and meet Chris, just as soon as I’ve sewn on this strip…” (and so I reveal that my habitual lateness can be blamed on the allure of hobbies). Next thing I know, I’m sobbing away for the man whose legs have been blown off at Gallipoli, and who realises that there are worse things than dying, and, when he disembarks at Circular Quay, sings, “I looked at the place where me legs used to be, and thanked Christ there was no one waiting for me.” And now my eyes are red and if I leave my room, I might bump into a flatmate who’ll ask me what’s wrong. Unplanned bouts of weeping are also very occasionally a cause for lateness. And having two legs, and being able to walk, is regularly a cause for great happiness. If you happen to be in Sydney, visit the War Memorial in Hyde Park (go by yourself, and bring a handkerchief).

Ian and Sylvia

January ’08 – I have years where I love Ian & Sylvia, interspersed with years where I find them simply too twee and tame. The past couple of years have been Ian & Sylvia years. Maybe when my life is wearing aprons, knitting blankets, cooking from recipe books and having five-hour-long cups of tea with mature-aged neighbours, then listening to Ian & Sylvia (on top of all that) would be pushing myself dangerously close to an overdose. But in years where my Vacola Preserving Outfit is shoved to the back of the cupboard and piled up with plastic bags of plastic bags, Ian’s dignified, school-teacher appearance and Sylvia’s demure poses, and their polite, proper voices no longer (quite the contrary!) make me want to puke. I once had a tape of American sixties folk songs; Mississippi John Hurt’s ‘Candyman’ was on it (I used to think that song was creepy) and so was the Tyson/Fricke classic ‘YOU WERE ON MY MIND’. Last Saturday, I played all four sides of an Ian & Sylvia Best Of (I hope that doesn’t reveal too much about my Saturday), and the very last song ended up being ‘Y.W.O.M.M.’. I thought, “I should learn that.” I already knew the words, and it sounded simple, like a standard 3-chorder plus a little optional extra something (e.g. an F#m thrown in among the Es, As and B7s). But I learnt it mainly because it is one of those handy songs that perfectly captures a thought-cycle that most people will experience at some point in their lives, and it’s better to sing and play it aloud, and possibly even pair up with someone who can add an Ian or Sylvia harmony, than to have it trapped, voiceless, in your brain, where it circulates tiresomely. And it’s somehow morale-boosting to apply a light and pretty melody to lines like “Woke [well, it’s “got”, but I prefer “woke”] up this morning/ You were on my mind/ Got some aches and got some pains and/ Got some wounds to bind.” Or, “Went to the corner/ Just to ease my pain/ I got drunk and I got sick and/ I came home again.” There! Only one more verse to learn and you’ve got the whole song.

Vamping Rose

December ’07 – A friend was talking about when his granddaughters had gone through their Spice Girls phase, and he assumed that in my pre-pubescence, I’d had an equivalent late-70s-early-80s, destined-to-be-embarrassing fancy for a pop band. I couldn’t think of one. I can remember going to a friend’s house in Year 2, and being played a Chipmunk Punk record, followed by an Abba record…I recognised it as the culture that I should have been absorbing (or at least pretending to absorb – I pretended to have seen Grease for years, finally genuinely watching it at the very mature age of fourteen) but for the time being, I was satisfied enough with my parents’ records.

On my father’s side, there was his clanging metal filing-cupboard full of Tom Waits, The Supremes, Chuck Berry, Frank Zappa, The Beatles, Daddy Cool, John Lee Hooker; my mother liked Linda Ronstadt, Nina Simone, Elvis, country compilations; my stepfather’s record collection included Blondie, Ry Cooder, Orchestral Manouevres In The Dark, Brian Eno, The Persuasions, Rick Nelson, Sarah Vaughan, Sam Cooke, Keith Jarrett. I didn’t bother about the music of my generation until I was fifteen and going out to pubs and hearing it (seeing it!) live. I told my sister recently about how in Year 8, our gym class had been given the assignment of pairing off and working out a dance sequence; so I subsequently brought in a bluegrass banjo instrumental taped from a warped LP of my father’s called ‘Blue Ridge Mountain Music’ and forced my partner into doing a square-dance-esque routine, complete with full, twirling skirts (supplied by me). My sister said, “When I was in Year 9, we had to review a song for our English class, so I taped VAMPING ROSE off the gramophone and reviewed that.”

My father also had a lot of 78s and a great, big wind-up gramophone that had been his father’s (our grandfather had been a haunter of auctions and a lover of bargains, even useless ones). I claimed a song called ‘Lu-Lu Belle’, my older brother John claimed a song called ‘Oh, Johnny, Oh’ and my sister Julia (middle name Rose) had ‘VAMPING ROSE’. I can only remember the chorus of my song, but almost all of ‘VAMPING ROSE’, a 1920s, bitchy, lilting, conversational dance-song, is fixed in my mind: “Vamping Rose, there she goes in her fancy clothes. Goodness me! – can it be? My, what class she shows! She don’t care for a heart, she just tears it apart – that’s why they call her Vamping Rose. She wears a gem from the Pilot’s End [no idea what she is really singing there, probably the name of a famous jewellery shop, but I pictured a perilous diamond mine in Africa], with her flash and her dash, she gets all the men. She’s got rouge on her cheeks, it’s been on there for weeks – that’s why they call her Vamping Rose.” Having been obsessed with boys from a very early age, Vamping Rose was exactly the sort of role model I sought (I am sorry to report that, in that respect, adult-Lucy has let down child-Lucy – I never wear rouge).

Nina Simone

November ’07 – Nearly two weeks ago, I played a show in Brisbane, supporting Pikelet and Darren Hanlon. I felt a bit like the one who had won a competition – “Be a muso for a week! Go on tour with a real band!” After the Brisbane show, the other members of the tour drove on to Tweed Heads, and I was billeted out to the hospitable Sue Ray (or Suray, as I called her until the next morning). Not only did she give me - a complete stranger - a comfy bed (next to her blue-tongue lizard enclosure), a cup of tea, a burn of a Pete Molinari CD, but she even gave me a lift to the airport in the morning. On the way, a Nina Simone tape [note: tape] was playing in Suray’s car…I recognised it as an album I’d had and loved then somehow lost about twelve years ago. When ‘PLAIN GOLD RING’ came on I realised that I had been subconsciously anticipating (for twelve years!) hearing it again – I almost shuddered, and asked Suray to rewind it and play it again. We sang along (two sing-alongers shamelessly outing themselves). Hearing ‘PLAIN GOLD RING’ wasn’t like being reunited with an old friend; it was like coming face-to-face with a truth that I thought I had successfully avoided. As soon as I was home again, I picked it out on the guitar – what I could remember of it - looping Nina’s ominous piano riff and singing over the top of it, disregarding (or relishing) the discordance of any ill-suited notes that clashed together. It is a reminder of a time when a whole life (and usually more than one life) could be ruined when someone married the wrong person - of course, I interpret this song to suit my anti-marriage agenda. But agendas aside, it is one of the darkest songs in existence: “In my heart, it will never be Spring/ Long as he wears that plain gold ring.”

The Roches

October ’07 – I am going through a phase of having to ration my intake of The Roches. I don’t usually ration music, because I (sadly) know myself well enough to realise that I go through passionate fads that come to their end simply by being usurped the next month by the next passion. So I reason, “Why hold back? Devour it while I have the appetite for it!” But The Roches are different…not because I am fooling myself that I have found a passion that might last forever, but, rather, because The Roches could be justifiable grounds for my flatmates to stage a walk-out. My sympathy would be with Janet and Stella if they marched in with their hands over their ears, crying, “As if it wasn’t enough that you practise your songs ad nauseum (FYI, even when you close your bedroom door, we can still hear everything – EVERYTHING), but now this? It’s too much!” The fact is, three-part harmonies are simply in a different solar-system to two-part harmonies. In the two-part harmony solar-system, couples skip hand-in-hand through beflowered meadows. In the three-part harmony solar-system, conjunctions exist that beggar belief (stop! Don’t even try to imagine it! You might see something that you don’t want to see – and that you’ll never get out of your mind).

The first song that piqued my interest was ‘Runs In The Family’. “I’ve never heard of The Roach Sisters,” I said. “Oh! Well, you have a treat in store.” I was a treat-hoarder in my early youth, but no longer, so I tracked down their first album and loved it. When I saw another album, ‘Nurds’, in a two-dollar milk-crate at the Glebe Record Fair, I bought that one, too. Their harmonies might be their distinguishing feature, but their song ideas and lyrics come from another solar-system, too. At first, I feared that the sisters were just too silly (for example, the song sung by the woman who runs the laundromat where Suzzy Roche washes her stinky, crusty socks; or the one where the singer is a chocolate bar and her addressee is a bag of soybeans), but it didn’t take long to learn their language. Now my current favourite is ‘ONE SEASON’, where the harmonies go so dreadfully awry in the third verse that even Steve Reich might be envious. I like the line, “I am the only tree, and everybody leaves.” I imagine that it would be hard to bring heartfelt, diary-esque material to your two sisters…wouldn’t they (at best) be stifling sniggers as you unveiled your earnest, new song to them? It makes sense that the songs’ painful hearts are disguised as witticisms, similes and wordplays; decoys that would distract the other sisters long enough for the wound to heal…a year or so later, they might say, “I just realised! This song’s about that bloke you were seeing - the one who didn’t leave his wife after all.” By then, the songwriter would be capable of asking breezily, “Which one was that?”