It's a fascinating thing really. Why, and how, in the same year that
Clare Bowditch married her producer and musical companion Marty Brown,
won the ARIA for Best Female Artist 2006, and gave birth to identical
twin boys, did she also write and record her third album 'The Moon
Looked On', a triumphant tale of lust, temptation, freedom, fear,
and good old-fashioned romping?
Bowditch has never been short on imagination, or originality. A songwriter
since the age of three, she still claims that there's no method to
her writing. "I have no real discipline at all actually. I think
the compulsion to write is really just a side-effect of being an emotionally-curious
person. We've spent the previous two years singing songs that mainly
centered around the theme of grief and death ('What Was Left' 2005).
Of course, what next, but an album about being completely and utterly
alive?"
After the success of 'What Was Left', and a year spent touring with
the likes of Paul Kelly and Bernard Fanning, Bowditch (who writes
both on the road and at home) found herself saddled with an entirely
new sort of song on her hands. Instead of the usual finger-picking
style, she started playing around with amplifiers and loop pedals,
and before long, the odd chord had even crept its way in. "I
don't know where the songs come from really. They kind of present
themselves in my imagination like letters in a post-box. A lot of
the time they're just bills or junk-mail, but every now and then you
get a series of songs that very clearly belong together. This is what
happened with 'What Was Left', and this is also what's happened with
'The Moon Looked On', which is like an aural collection of some of
the funniest, dirtiest, most tender and confused "letters"
I've ever received".
'The Moon Looked On' really began, however, in 2006 after Marty and
Clare spent most of their Vietnamese honeymoon jamming in a small
music shop in Hanoi. These ancient instruments and their discussions
with the young woman who ran the shop seemed to spark Bowditch and
Brown's imaginations, allowing them to begin broadening their ideas
about exactly which instrumentation/ scales they might use on the
next album. (The scale that Clare sings to open 'When the Lights Went
Down', for example, was inspired by a song she heard performed at
a water-puppet show. This same scale is common in many Indian songs
as well). After playing almost every instrument in the shop, the couple
left with a 17-sting Dan Tranh (the sound that begins 'You Show Up'),
a set of six tuned gongs (as featured in 'Doesn't matter how' ) a
haunting Dan Bau (the sound that blows open the chorus of 'Peccadilloes'),
and a hefty amount of over-sized baggage and bubble-wrap. The Indian
tamboura, the Ghanian bellafon, and other instruments featured on
the album were all borrowed from friends once back in Melbourne.
So, what do you get when you combine ancient instruments and scales
with Libby's French horn, Tim's wild electric-guitar rumblings, Warren
and Marty's newly unleashed rhythm-section, strings played by some
of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra's finest, and the songs of Clare
Bowditch? Add to that a male choir, and a series of other special
guests including Mick Turner (Dirty Three) on guitar and Paul Williamson
on baritone sax and you've got yourself 'The Moon Looked On'. Says
Bowditch, "We 'pretty much nearly lost our minds making this
album; we gave it everything we had, with no real idea of whether
we'd actually get there or not. The lyrics alone were rewritten four
or five times. Bridges, harmonies, even entire songs were switched
around or dropped or re-kindled; we really took our time working out
where we felt everything should fit. But yes, we've been so close
to it that it will still take a while before we can really properly
reflect on the experience or recording it".
Once again, this album was recorded in the shed out the back of Marty
and Clare's northern-suburbs home in Melbourne. Theirs is a challenging,
forthright, and sometimes brutally honest music-making partnership;
those who've seen them in action often comment on they way these two
musical forces push each other to all points of the compass and back
again in minutes. Marty's obsession with sound quality (he records
the old fashioned way, using a reel-to-reel) and Clare's complete
fascination with story-telling and harmony paves the way for what
might well be the album of their careers. It is recorded in the old
style, with desks and reel and tape. Explains Marty, "The thing
I really love about recording to analogue tape is not so much the
'warm sound' that everyone goes on about, but also the limitations
of the format (such as the difficulty in editing and limited number
of tracks). It forces the musicians to keep going until the take is
perfect - so what you end up capturing is someone who is so within
the part they can get every nuance just so."
'The Moon Looked On' explores the highs and lows of desire, the humour
in having a cheeky imagination, the confusion of watching life pan
out in strange ways, the joy and triumph of choice. The result is
nothing short of wonderful.
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But where did it all begin? Let's go back, way back.
Like most three year olds, Clare enjoyed writing songs about everyday
objects, such as her mother's oft-mentioned vacuum-cleaner (the title
of Bowditch's first ever recorded song). For Clare, childhood songs
grew into young adults' songs, ones that began mapping an increasingly
complicated set of interior preoccupations; all those big unanswerable
questions that only make sense when you sing them (in your bedroom).
It was a very private affair, and she kept her songs to herself, until
one day, when they numbered in the hundreds, it occurred to her that
she didn't know what to do with them.
In stepped future band mate John Hedigan, the loudest drunk in the
Chai tent at an Easter festival in 1998. He'd brought along a guitar,
she took a risk and sang him a song, he said "Let's start a band",
and one week later there they were recording demo's in the cluttered
bedroom of Hedigans's housemate, Marty Brown. Squashed in to a corner
behind a large mixing desk, an ancient reel-to-reel recorder, and
a borrowed mic, Clare asked Marty why he had squandered his parent's
inheritance to purchase ancient analogue recording equipment when
the rest of the world had recently discovered Pro tools. "Sounds
better", he said assuringly. (Clare fortunately believed him,
and he's produced every one of her records since). They called their
first band Red Raku, recorded two albums in two years, and then went
on hiatus when John decided to become a music-therapist and Clare
got an exchange scholarship to study Writing/Ethnomusicology in Canada.
In 2004, the same week that Marty and Clare discovered they were
expecting their first daughter, Asha, Clare also received her first
recording grant from Art's Victoria's Music for the Future program.
Clare's first solo album was recorded in the front room of their house
in the northern suburbs of Melbourne that year. They asked the legendary
J. Walker (Machine Translations) to come and play on the record. He
liked what he heard and offered himself as a band-member. Clare and
Marty promptly gathered other players - Clare's old school friend
Libby Chow (Vocals/French Horn), and fellow Red Raku bass-player Warren
Bloomer. The Feeding Set was a name coined by Libby as a joke referring
to the meals Clare would cook for them every Wednesday night after
rehearsal. The name stuck, and what followed was one of the most respected
and widely loved independent albums to emerge from Australia that
year, Autumn Bone. The album was a mysterious yet occasionally light-hearted
acoustic recording that received rave critical praise, constant RRR,
PBS, FBI, JJJ and other community radio airplay and a national audience,
prompting a relentless touring schedule including support slots with
Cat Power, Elvis Costello and numerous festivals. The record went
on to sell 12,000 copies independently and word of mouth quickly spread
that Australia had a new pied pipette
In October 2005, Clare Bowditch and the Feeding Set licensed their
second album, 'What Was Left' to EMI. It followed on so naturally
from where Autumn Bone left off. There were still some breezy singer/songwriter
moments; there was the same not-quite-fathomable instrumentation with
an unassuming originality, an incredible narrative sensibility and
an uncanny ability to tell stories as achingly personal as they are
beautiful and joyous. And somehow the whole game had been lifted up
a notch, and the media and public reaction to this showed. Some of
the highlights post-release were two songs included in JJJ's Hottest
100, 'What Was Left' being nominated for Best Album of the Year in
the inaugural J Award, a European tour with Art of Fighting, supporting
Bernard Fanning for his first album launch tour, fantastic A Day on
the Green shows with Paul Kelly and Missy Higgins, an amazing experience
of playing at the Perry Sand Hills for the Mildura Arts Festival,
the Broad Shows way back in December and stack of other great festivals
like St Jeromes, Splendour in the Grass, The Great Escape and Womadelaide.
During that Time J Walker moved to the country and was replaced by
the wonderful Tim Harvey (Hot Little Hands), an old school mate of
Clare's.
'The Moon Looked On' is out now.
