Perth Music

Clare Bowditch has had an incredibly intense 12 months. An ARIA for Best Female Artist, marrying her producer and musical companion Marty Brown, giving birth to twins and writing and recording her new album, The Moon looked On. She also had time to catch up exclusively with Justin Middleton for this interview.

Click here to download the podcast of the entire interview. (21:38 - 5.0Mb)

“It was a real physical marathon we’ve had but we survived it” explained Clare. “I started playing electric guitar this year, I got my first Fender and we were mucking around a lot more with loop pedals. We really wanted to combine classical instruments…with really ancient, foreign, more exotic instruments, such as the Vietnamese instruments that we used. We went over to Vietnam, me and Marty, for 10 days last year and we spent most of that time hanging out in the music shop and came home with a really embarrassing amount of luggage, which was mainly instruments.”

Asked whether the songs from the new album were difficult to write as they were all short fictional stories compared to intimate, personal stories, Clare said “A lot of the stories came quite whole, but some of them, a song like Little Black Cave, was re-written 6 times over the past 6 years and This Bastard Disease and When The Lights Went Down, they’ve all been through other incarnations and become the songs that they are. I think they all ended up centering around the themes of freedom and temptation and lust and all the things that are dangerous and make us feel alive. The some of those songs are all written from the perspective from quite desperate protagonist. It was such a different character from the actual life I’ve been living over the past year. Some of those things that we go through when we come into young adulthood - they stick with you and you’re still working them out.”

When The Lights Went Down is the first single from The Moon Looked On and Clare explained “The vocal scale that I sing to open that song was really something stuck in my head after seeing a water puppet show in Hanoi. The orchestra was playing that style of scale repeatedly and it was mimicked by the vocalist. It stuck in my head and I walked out and recorded it on my mobile phone and then it kind of came into this song format.”

“The idea of a dog was a metaphor for the animalistic, exciting, unknowable part of a relationship that once it departs it’s so hard to work out where it has gone and how to get it back. It’s the notion of the exotic other.”

First single When The Lights Went Down and the album The Moon Looked On are out now. For more info visit www.clarebowditch.com or www.myspace.com/clarebowditch

Clare Bowditch - When The Lights Went Down

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 9:03 am and is filed under Videos, Album Releases, Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.