Talk To Me

MELBOURNE EMERGING WRITERS FEST. TALK CONT.

Now of course sometimes singers are just singers, entertainers with amazing voices, and God bless ‘em.

But I think I came up and was exposed to my heroes in a time when the artists often were the writer, sharing a personal, heartfelt, sometimes bracingly honest account of their life, their love or their pain.
The PJ Harvey’s, Liz Phair’s, Veruca’s and Billy’s and Curt’s delivered words that were honest and unique to them. And I adored them for it.

I still do.

I remember being completely besotted with PJ Harvey’s Dry, the mix of her almost violent poetry, delivered with menacing authenticity, who WAS this woman? What had she Been through?  I was transported to a dark yet beautiful place with a warrior queen who howled and moaned and used old blues language and tones so perfectly and convincingly, though she was a young white woman. She created a completely authentic world that sucked me in and under effortlessly.

Paul Kelly was another huge inspiration and influence.

I’ve been marinating in his music from a young age. And now that I’m getting older and my style has changed and matured, somewhat, I can detect his influence a little more in my songs.

His scene setting is some of very the best in my opinion, and he achieves the rare, and obviously very my taste, feat of keeping it simple and honest, while being hugely emotionally affecting.

His writing and his ability to create these amazingly intimate, authentic scenes, even from the perspective of a child, like the child in the backseat of They Thought I was Asleep, is something that moved me then and now, and showed me how deeply moving even a very accessible popular song could be.

So the PJ’s and the Pauls were up there as my idols, as well as  too many more to name. Their gift for expression and way with words and songs lit lights in my eyes and stirred the ink in my heart.

I was determined to express my self in kind, to paint My world and as best I could tell the stories of my young life, full of school politics, heart wrenching crushes, crushing defeats by wenches, popularity contests, feelings of intense isolation, idealism and over-reaction, you know, the whole teenage experience.

And it seemed to work.

I hope if nothing more that I provided back then, an honest voice from a perspective that’s sometimes over-looked. That I conveyed convincingly and passionately the beauty and of course the Angst of the fleeting world between childhood and maturity.

It’s awkwardness and intensity were pretty fertile plundering grounds back then, and songs have always come quite easily to me since.

It’s making them mean something that’s the trick.

Life translates into verse quite rapidly for me, and as I said it’s long been my desire to express myself that way. I’m driven to do it and am lucky I can devote so much time to it.

Sometimes I feel I express myself more clearly and can be more honest in my songwriting than in everyday life.

I’ve heard other writers say this too. That there’s a cheeky freedom in the form that’s quite addictive.

Another appealing element of the process is often writing a song about something helps me understand it better. I sometimes even look at a more cryptic batch of lyrics as an emotional forecast, as they often hold the key to what is going on in my sub-concious, hinting at things that I haven’t yet expressed. Or even realized.

Cheap therapy as they say!

This is also probably a bit strange for people who know and love us, as our inner lives and loves are grist for the mill, and pop music being such a public over-share of an art form, out it all comes.

I’m sure lots of writers find this, walking that sensitive line of telling other peoples stories, exposing private lives that are intermingled with your own.

Dating a writer or singer is definitely not without it’s risks!

As what better material is there than the juicy and constant rumblings of the heart. The frictions we turn into fiction.

So beware…

But surely it’s worth it, getting a song written about you must be an okay pay off, but lets just hope it’s an Angie or Wild Horses as opposed to a You’re So Vain or an Idiot Wind. Ouch..

So,

To wrap up my own ramble of the heart, I think I can distill what I love so much about and find so fascinating in songwriting.

That Music as a means of story telling, is so accessible, yet so personal. So ancient, but also relevant.. and so incredibley diverse.

 It’s an all encompassing and inclusive art, it connects us and exposes us, in the best way possible. It is ultimate communication..

All that and you can also dance to it.

Thank You. And Happy writing!

Okay, that's all she wrote (and spoke) that night. It was such a pleasure to be asked to come and share my (rather enthusiastic) feelings towards and personal history of word-love. I just found out two more of my friends have started blogs, great blogs. Will link them next post. What an interesting time where we share in this way, so widely, so freely. With the honesty, candor and good intent I see in most of these e-offerings, the newest sons  and daughters in a long family lineage of story telling techniques, I think it will bring about great things. Xx Ella

Just keep on walking.. Uh, I mean talking..

Here, folks is the next installment.

 EMERGING WRITERS FEST. TALK CONT....

The mix that lives in song, of expression, relation, connection and sometimes voyeurism is obviously a potent one and of course has long had the whole world hooked!

Maybe the analogy of music as a drug is just as apt as the religious one, as we seem to be drawn to it just as powerfully.

Either way the common ground is we often have an intense relationship with our chosen music. We’re a bit fanatical about it. We celebrate and covet it.

Saints and Sinners all, we dig it hard.

I first became interested in writing when I was quite young, in fact I don’t think I can remember a time when it was not number one or at least top five on the list of things I wanted to be.

I’ve always held writers in such high esteem, it could have something to do with my parents vocations as well,

growing up Dad taught English Lit and Mum, Drama – but not at my school (thank god)

Dad was also a bit of a crime, pulp fiction and film noir obsessive and wrote screen plays for kicks on the week end.

So there was always scripts around as well as novels and poetry and I took like a worm to a book, reading this, that and everything..

A curious mix of  Shakespear, Chandler, Tarantino, Tolkein, Isabelle Allende and Graeme Greene, as well as teenage staples like John Marsden and Isobell Carmody, kept me hungrily page turning as a youngin’.

I loved it from the start, the worlds that were there to run off into, the witty language, the myriad characters, the adult and emotional landscapes miles from my own experience.

I loved trying on challenging stuff, aware that my little mind was being opened further every time I opened a book. And there were so many to choose from, I really was spoilt for choice.

But just as early as I loved them, I wanted to have a go myself.

Telling these stories and creating these characters just sounded  like too much fun.

Apparently I was always a teller of tall tales, no problem with embellishing a re-telling of daily events to feature some dragons, hidden tunnels, secret stones, a betrayal or two.. and that was during class time. Recess and lunch, forget about it.

Maybe I had a hyperactive imagination or a small case of something that would now be diagnosed and medicated, but didn’t we all?

I suspect, seeing as this room is full of writers, you could all relate to how real and easy these other worlds were and are to slip into..?

The imagination I had back then is still something I try and re-visit and tap into. Not so much for the dragons but the open mindedness and the inexhaustibility.

As a proud wanna-be writer I reveled in and romanticized writing down these fantastical plots and pre-pubescent poems that I was sure were my future. But it was around 12 or 13 that I had a bit of a ‘Sonic’ revelation.

My other rabid love, music, was coming on strong and becoming increasingly the louder of the callings.. the inevitable result being that I started experimenting with merging the two fascinations, and so a big, big, and rather loud, penny dropped.

Never being the most thorough person in the world, finishing my grandly planned stories always was the up hill bit. Much more of a short stories type a gal, I had trouble maintaining enthusiasm for the long form. To this day short stories are some of my favorite literature, and the song is possibly the shortest short story of all.

Well, not in Every case, Arlo Guthrie, Frank Zappa, Nick Cave- I’m looking at you.. ;)

But I’ve come to realize that My strength as a writer lies more in the three minute thirty seconds kinda camp. My favorite thing is when I’ve said all that I want to say in a verses, chorus, verse, maybe a middle section and a last verse.. possibly same as the first.

It may sound formulaic, but the pop song ideal, when perfected is pretty magic.

In country, folk, blues, and so many of the great songwriting traditions this repetition and quite simple structure really lets the story shine and it sometimes shocks me with it’s ability to make concepts come to life so quickly.

And so humbly.

You almost don’t expect it, the force of emotion that can be prompted from such a common and kind of an unassuming formula. But, as with most creative endevours, to do it brilliantly but simply, without using every colour in the box so to speak, is probably the harder and less achieved of the tasks.

I liken it to haiku, this pop song writing process.

Another form that probably comes across as simple and maybe a little one dimensional, boxed in by it’s constraints, but when it’s good, it’s SO good, and it’s undeniable.

When it sets a scene, evokes an emotion and has spun a beautiful tiny moment for you, in just 17 syllables.. That takes some mastery.

My first steps spinning songs, were far from masterful.

I’ve tried to cast my mind back to my very first complete song, and I recall it was subtle as a mallet.

Biting off so much more than I could chew it wasn’t funny, I believe it was something about the war in Veitnam, War was bad, Peace was good, People should get along..

Sung with the emotional authority and outstanding naivety of a 12 year old Joni Mitchell fan.

Yes, my emerging writer had begun to emerge, and she was tackling the ‘Big Issues’.. ;)

But sage advice in the form of that old chestnut, ‘Write What You Know’ was thankfully bestowed on me somewhere down the line -probably another a gift from my wisend and song soaked parentals - and soon after that I moved into my ‘Teen Angst as the One True Muse’ phase, which I’m glad to say, as much as it still had generous lashings of naivety, was received with far less wincing and felt more authentic to me.

This positive response set me on a course I didn’t quite expect to be so dramatic. Soon my books and diaries that were always covered in lyrics and poems were being distilled into a much grander work than I had intended them for.

I had hardly mastered my craft, in love with it though I was, I was just trying to keep up.

.....Okay, that's enough for now. There's still more.. No steak knives though, sorry.

Xx Ella