STACK November 2016 Issue 145

64 / 128

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?
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?
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.
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.
On 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
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
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
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
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.”
visit
64 NOVEMBER 2016
MUSIC NEWS
continued
INTERVIEW
LISA
MITCHELL
ARCHIE
ROACH
Warriors
by Lisa Mitchell
is out now via
Warner.
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.
Let Love Rule
by Archie Roach is
out November 11
via Liberation.