Melody Pool returns with a new EP

Quorrobolong’s frogs and crickets are prominent guests on Melody Pool’s new EP. They chirp between the wind chimes for a full 40 seconds before their voice murmurs. “Stop starting tomorrow,” she sings to herself, “start today.”

How comebacks go, they lost in time EP is a muted affair. The only musical accompaniment to this first song is a low drone drone of B drums, which she confides with a grin, “is one of our kitchen chairs being dragged across the linoleum”. Other, Wigglewas written in the garden to the pitch of a noisy native miner bird, which conveniently returned for a cameo during recording.

Her favorite moment of the six new songs – the first she has since deemed worthy of release Deep dark wild heart album propelled her to a dizzying peak of acclaim, then six years ago to a high-profile personal tailspin – is the piebald butcher bird finished to whisper.

“When I used to drive up from Melbourne and come back to the Hunter Valley, I stayed with my parents on Acacia Street where they don’t live anymore, so it’s a special place for me. She says, “I would hear that in the morning. That’s my favorite call.”

The family are particularly fond now that their father suffered an acquired brain injury from a bout of encephalitis early last year. It was country singer Alby who first lured his eight-year-old daughter onto the stage. Fans also know her mother Annie after that Australian history Episode chronicling Melody’s depression and withdrawal from the limelight in 2017.

She has since been back on the road as much as COVID has allowed. But she’s traded her Mushroom Records-backed high-flying supports for the Eagles and Rodriguez in rammed arenas for a strictly independent agenda, on her own terms and at her own pace.

“You know, before this EP, I tried to do my third album about five times,” she says, zooming over the public library’s wifi in Gloucester, a tiny town in central NSW. “We had a rock record, a synthesizer record; we went to a studio; we did it at home, really slimmed down, and they just didn’t fit right. I tried to record these songs too many times and I just lost the feel for them.”

When her father fell ill, “life took a break.” He was in the hospital for three months. “We had no idea if he was going to die or if he would remember who he was or who we were.”

Now he’s doing it, she says, beaming with gratitude. His speech is severely impaired, but thanks to this strange miracle of neuroscience, he can still sing. “I felt I had to keep making music because it felt like it made sense,” she says. “I gave up [teaching] singing lessons. I gave up anything that didn’t feel meaningful to me and my connection to him.”

album shelved, tour dates interrupted and sporadic, lost in time took shape on impulse when Pool and her partner, musician Chris Dale, reluctantly packed up their four-year-old home last September. The rented “tractor shed” on 65 hectares of Hunter Region farmland in Quorrobolong had been a haven for pandemics.

“I said to Chris, ‘Let’s sit together for two days before we have to move out,'” she says. “I really wanted to capture the farm and our life there for the past four years. So he put the mic on, hit record and I sang every song I had. And then we picked the most compelling songs and they happened to be all the new songs. I guess we felt an emotional connection to these songs because they’re fresh.”

They added some percussion and acoustic lap slide from friend Jason Lowe. “But mostly I wanted to capture something of the nature around the farm,” says Pool. “We went outside and took a little recorder and tried everything… stop starting tomorrow I was writing outside, gardening at dusk, listening to the crickets and frogs… I wanted it to sound like an audience was there at the precise moment it was being written.”

The idea of ​​living in the moment is key to the project. The rain sounds in the dark middle piece, boatillustrate the low ground in a series of songs that, like all of us, weave up and down through cycles of hope and despair.

Loading

“I just wanted the truth to be told about me and my state of mind,” she says. She points up Yes good thanks And Wiggle: essentially blunt responses to the thousands of well-wishers who continue to monitor their progress.

“When I was writing Black Dog on the last album and does that Australian historyI was kind of thrown into this conversation about mental health [but] I didn’t really know what my stance was on that or what I really thought about it because I was in the middle of it. It’s not like those things are going away, but I know I need to feel them now and I need to sing about them and write about them.”

The new album will hopefully be released later this year. As an independent artist, she may not find herself back on the big stage with Don Henley and Rodriguez anytime soon, but fear and expectation aren’t likely to dictate the path ahead either.

Loading

“For many years I did music because people thought I was good at it and it would be a waste if I didn’t,” says Pool. “I needed this time away from music. I wanted to know who I am without music…so I can still appreciate myself without being this new thing, the songwriter, the singer or the musician.

“Now I make music because I have to and I love it. It’s a calling for me. And that somehow took away any perfectionism from me. My dad got sick too, which also ripped off that mask of perfection I was trying to achieve that I was never happy with. Now it doesn’t have to be perfect anymore. It just has to be real.”

lost in time will be released on February 17th. Melody Pool performs at the Chapel Off Chapel on April 1st and Camelot Lounge in Sydney on April 13th.

A cultural guide to going out and making love in the city. Sign up for our Culture Fix newsletter here.