STACK #145 Nov 2016

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MUSIC NEWS

O n the title track to Lisa Mitchell’s new album Warriors , there’s a line that says “Daniel Johns walked in a very straight line.” You can’t have grown up in Australia and not recognise the Silverchair reference. “That was literally me being on a school bus on the way home and hearing Straight Lines for the first time coming INTERVIEW LISA MITCHELL

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you’re just starting to find your independence and starting to have different opinions to your parents; obviously hitting puberty, and your sexuality is awakening. You’re still incredibly naïve and your dreams are so huge. I feel it’s so interesting for everyone to think back about what they cared about. What was on your bedroom wall at that age, before you experienced the real world?” These ideas come out as sparse but extremely warm vignettes, with delicate, subtle accents of electric piano and gentle syncopated beats with small

rimshots. What Is Love sounds the most full (paradoxically, because it’s only Mitchell and her acoustic guitar) but I Remember Love is even more beautiful: the synths and congas have a very romantic, dynamic mood. “That one was actually the only song I wrote when [Eric J, producer] and I were recording,” Mitchell says. “Eric and I were sharing our influences and gradually realising where our brains

through these sh-tty bus speakers, and me having to yell out to the bus driver to turn it up,” Mitchell laughs. Teenage recollections soak all the way through this record; it’s quite a different tack to the

Warriors by Lisa Mitchell is out now via Warner.

musician’s previous release, Bless This Mess , in which the present was so important (the album’s opener Providence includes the repeated phrase “I’m here, I’m here”). “It is very retrospective,” Mitchell agrees, “and I, myself, have been trying to work out why. One theory I have is that I’m 26 now, and the time I’m quite obsessed with at the moment is when I was 14, 15. I was still at school, very much under the umbrella of my family and very safe. At that age

crossed over, which tended to come back to jangly pop, and a slightly ‘90s feeling. I guess I’d been listening to The Lemonheads. I was enjoying so many of these iconic songs that were based around little guitar lines, often acoustic guitar lines. I had this vision of the line, ‘Our bodies are like cases, I remember love, hold us up like masks.’ Eric and I finished writing it together.”

FACTOID: In 2013, Archie Roach's song Took The Children Away – about his experiences as a member of the Stolen Generations – was added to the National Film and Sound Archive.

Q1/ The choir in your title track Let Love Rule is Dhungala Children’s Choir (conducted by Deborah Cheetham, the fantastic soprano). How did you choose this group of kids? [It] was my manager, Jill Shelton’s idea. I got to hear the choir for the first time when they were practicing in the Salon at the Melbourne Recital Centre before we recorded it, and they were truly amazing. They absolutely took the song to another level. Q2/ What did you find you had to specifically change about your singing style, after going through lung cancer? ARCHIE ROACH

Is it about pitch, or the duration of notes, or the ease of moving between notes…? My pitch was not a problem. But singing in lower register had to change because it’s not the same as it used to be… I’m not sure if that has to do with the cancer and the lung operation or whether that’s just the way my voice has become. Q3/ The story of Mighty Clarence River is absolutely astonishing. My understanding was that your grandmothers swam away from the island because they’d been isolated there. Were there also white men on the island? There were white overseers on the island. I was told that to relieve boredom they chased the Aboriginal people around on horseback. My grandmothers had had enough of those conditions and wanted to get off the island and find a better life.

Let Love Rule by Archie Roach is out November 11 via Liberation.

Q4/ You present the land as an unconditionally loving force in the world (in Get Back To The Land ). Do you think that a lot of people forget about its rejuvenating qualities, or maybe they just don’t even know about them, because they’ve never experienced the feeling?

Yes to both. Some people don’t even know about the rejuvenating qualities of the land or some have forgotten what the land can give you…it’s given me peace, strength and has healing qualities. It’s always good to get back to country to recharge.

NOVEMBER 2016

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