An interview with Clare Bowditch is really a chat with a talented performer who is not just passionate about her own music but someone who is passionate about music and life in general.
The first part of our chat revolves around a great number of subjects such as; the lack of music festivals in Gippsland, Aussie Hip-Hop, how great The Herd’s cover of ‘I Was Only 19’ is and what a great musician Paul Kelly is.
Clare is excited about all these topics but her excitement rises to another level when talk turns to her magnificent new album ‘The Moon Looked On’ and The Chill Island Festival (to be held at Churchill Island on November 4th) of which she is the curator of. ‘Chill Island is going to be great,’ she says. ‘We’ve already got Gotye and Ben Kweller and worked so hard to get Paul Kelly as well.’ She fails to mention that she will also be performing.
Aside from organizing Chill Island, Clare has been busy promoting her latest album, ‘The Moon Looked On’, an album that many believe would have been a difficult album to produce after Clare’s ARIA win last year, however Clare dismisses it with a laugh. ‘It actually didn’t affect the album at all because it was virtually finished, but it did actually re-inspire is.’
I notice when talk turns to her ARIA win she still describes it is a ‘surprise’ but also says that ‘it’s one of my proudest moments…it was voted for by my peers.’ I ask her if she feels the same way about a number of her tracks including the terrific ‘Divorcee By 23’ making it into Triple J Hottest 100 last year and she replies, ‘Yeah but it’s different, it’s great, that means the punters have the music in their lounge room’.
But it hasn’t only just been becoming an ARIA-award winner that has been a major change for Clare in her life recently. She has also recently married her partner and long time music collaborator, Marty Brown as well as given birth to twins. But of all those things it has been her honeymoon to Vietnam that has most inspired ‘The Moon Looked On.’ There is a definite Asian feel to the album and it is something that Clare is proud of ‘We brought back a lot of different instruments from overseas… from different cultures, although we wasn’t trying to make it (the album) sound like a different culture. But we did have a lot of fun and we’ve used an electric guitar this time.’
In fact ‘The Moon Looked On’ sounds very different to her last album (‘What Was Left’), it uses blue grass, some brass even a bit of country, I ask Clare what she love about making this album and she quickly says, ‘Working with Mick Turner was fantastic…I’m a massive Dirty Three fan…and he was pure professionalism…it was so exciting.’ So working with Mick Turner was fun but what’s it like recording and songwriting with her now husband, Marty? ‘It can be intense and have hardcore moments but he is one of the few people who is completely honest with… if it’s shit he says it’s shit.’
One thing is for sure nothing that could be described that way has made it onto ‘The Moon Looked On’, an album with such an intriguing title I just had to ask what it was about, ‘Well the album is all about intimate stories, there is a naughtiness in the songs… and even we people think they are isolated. And the moon is a witness to all of that…us stuck in our own world, but mostly the album is about lust and temptation.’
It’s not surprising that the album tells stories; it has become very apparent that Clare Bowditch is one of the greatest story-telling songwriters around. She is embarrassed when I tell her this but she happily tells me where she gets her ‘stories’ from, ‘Some of the songs are from my life…this album is definitely a step into fiction. Other stories I get from watching people and asking personal questions from people I don’t know all that well.’
As our talk goes back to songwriters we both respect we talk about artists that Clare has covered in the past, Crowded House and Leonard Cohen are two stand-outs so I ask her if she could cover any song what would it be. She laughs, ‘It’s funny we were talking about Paul Kelly before because I’d cover Paul Kelly’s ‘Look So Fine, Feel So Low’.’ She then breaks into song and sings part of the song to me. Even down a phone line a performance from Clare Bowditch sounds so intimate and I end the interview by asking how she manages to capture such an intimate sound on her albums, ‘It’s the way we record. We use reels and decks because we love he format. Marty talks about the warmth of the recording on analogue.’