Words by W.B.T.G. Slinger and Leah Senior. Banner photo by P. Duthie, body photos by W.B.T.G. Slinger.
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Leah Senior Interview
Wyatt:
So the full band is still relatively new, the sound has come together really well! How is the tour going?
Leah:
Yeah, it’s fun! It’s been good, I’ve got a good band and we’re all good friends.
Wyatt:
So from what I can gather, this is the most unified that the live band has been with the creative team behind the album?
Leah:
Yeah definitely.
Wyatt:
So that obviously works better for you live? There are some surprisingly big moments, was there even a bit of jamming? There are plenty of solos at least.
Leah:
Definitely, the songs are different every time, which is fun.
Wyatt:
Do you find performing outside of capital cities makes a difference? It suits the music here I think.
Leah:
Yeah it does, it can go either way though. Sometimes, when it works it’s like the best fun, cause you’re somewhere beautiful like this and there’s a community feel about it, it’s nice.
Wyatt:
Haha, I don’t think it gets more community than the Repentance Creek Public Hall established in 1936.
Leah:
Yeah, its idyllic.
Wyatt:
You’re about to go on your first headline tour in the US in October and you’ll be off the beaten path there too. Is that important to you? You’re playing in Idaho and Oklahoma and stuff?
Leah:
I’m actually not that good at that stuff, knowing where we’re going, Jesse’s good at that. I guess we’re going to a bunch of the places we went last year with King Gizzard, so we’ll just go back and probably have to fill in some spots on the route.
But it’ll be fun to see a lot more this time around.
Wyatt:
So the new album, The Music That I Make, it’s very Spring-like. It came out at the beginning of the season, and it has a few references through it. Is that part of the concept?
Leah:
It just happened that way, I feel like I’m always very affected by the different seasons. In the past I’ve always seemed to have written songs in Autumn, but more recently, yeah totally — I feel like Spring has been a magical time the last couple of years. I tend to get bursts of feeling inspired or whatever by that.
Though the Earth is now well worn
There’s a new seed sprouting to green
With every dawn
Wyatt:
I’m into birds, and I tend to associate them with spaces and creative projects, do you do the same? The making of this album sounds like it was embedded in a particular time and place.
Leah:
Hell yeah, I love birds. I used to have a Tarago and I painted it green and painted native birds all over it. Then it got stolen and used for drug trafficking.
Wyatt:
…I’m sure that would stand out.
Leah:
Yeah I know, bad getaway choice right?
In Anglesea we have lots of King Parrots coming to visit, just lots of Cockies and Galahs, and Currawongs.
Wyatt:
Since you’ve already mentioned Autumn, I was thinking about the connection with your first album Summers On The Ground…
Leah:
Yeah, that’s very Autumnal.
Wyatt:
Then I think even just in tone, with your other two albums you get Winter and Summer?
Leah:
Yeah, totally. *That’s funny!* Yeah, I think you could say that.
Wyatt:
I thought I found similar relationships with the cover artworks, I was wondering is the new one a reference to Pentangle – Solomon’s Seal?
Leah:
Mm, I love Pentangle. It’s not consciously a reference, my friend Ash who did the cover, I actually gave her a bunch of references that were illustrations for Russian fairy tales that were really beautiful.
But yeah, I guess it has that Folk-art kind of feel, both Ash and I like Pentangle so maybe that came into it somewhere haha I dunno.
Wyatt:
Much the same I thought maybe Summer’s On The Ground matches Songs Of Leonard Cohen? They’re both debut albums too.
Leah:
Ah! Yeah, I wasn’t really listening to Leonard Cohen then…
Wyatt:
Haha fair enough, how about yours and Nick Drake’s second albums: Pretty Faces and Bryter Layter?
Leah:
Yeah that’s probably, well…
Wyatt:
Just visually! I just happened to notice the covers seemed to correspond with some Folk classics.
Leah:
That’s not intentional, Ben Jones designed that one, I don’t remember if I gave him a reference. But it’s hard to not reference things these days!
Wyatt:
Well Folk as a genre and an aesthetic is obviously very old and established, I think you fit in with that very authentically.
Leah:
I’m aware of that, and I worry about that with my music. I worry that it’s pastiche and that I draw too heavily on references.
But I feel like with this album it’s the least like that. I was very genuinely writing the songs with only the songs in mind, not trying to do anything except say what I wanted to say. I hope even more so than the previous three records.
Like, I wanna break free of that, but it is really hard and I’m definitely someone who will get really excited by listening to a thing, I’m very impressionable you know? But I definitely don’t want to just mimic all of my favourite artists.
Wyatt:
It sounds like you were in a pretty deep kind of self-analysis, or just pure creative process for this record.
Leah:
Well I feel like I’m always kind of like that, I’m just that kind of person. Again, I’m a bit self-conscious of it. I remember going for a walk with a friend and them saying: ‘only bad writers write about writing’; and I thought I’ve kind of written about writing in this album.
But I think you just have to say what’s there, you know, you can’t help but write what you’re thinking about.
Wyatt:
I think all writing is about writing.
Leah:
Yeah! It’s a silly thing, I don’t know why it’s stuck with me, I think I’m just aware of it.
I was just writing how I was feeling. I was listening to heaps of Joni, and wanting to push myself to be more vulnerable, and pushing myself to not be cool.
So much music feels like people are afraid to put too much of themselves into the music, especially in a post-modern world that is so referential, and a lot of things are sarcastically self-referential almost, and you cant tell who’s sincere — I just wanted to be really fucking sincere.
Wyatt:
Did that elevate the process to the spiritual? It seemed to produce a bit of a theme through the album with: paths, impermanence, the contradiction in a sense of self, subsequent detachment.
Leah:
Totally, I love Buddhism. I love reading Pema Chödrön in particular, the Tibetan Buddhist. I definitely feel like those ideas have come into what I’m writing about in the last two records.
While you’re going places I’m going to the shops
But I’m following a path that never stops
Wyatt:
You’ve just played an unreleased song, Mother Song, that has a note in it that I thought almost sounded Hindu?
Leah:
*Ha*, I was at the Port Campbell Crayfish Festival with my Dad, and they have all these local bands on and I was just thinking: ‘imagine if just for once there was a really good, just *rocking* Folk-rock band on right now’, and so I was like: ‘I wanna do that, that’s my destiny, I want to play the Crayfish Festival down in Port Campbell and I want to be that local band that’s actually really good at what they do’.
So afterwards, I had to write just a really rollicking Folk song, and that was that.
Wyatt:
Speaking of down South, you moved out of Melbourne through the pandemic right? I thought it was funny that you got back into the country and then had your first release on Poison City Records.
Leah:
Yeah, *true!*. You’re good at finding connections, it’s like, Patti Smith does that all the time.
Wyatt:
Since we keep talking about older artists, I wonder about this: Virginia Woolf said that classic poetry inspires familiar feelings so you know what to expect, and the trouble with contemporary poetry is that reading it requires a visceral, instantaneous comparison to the old.
Does that hold true? Or apply to music?
Leah:
I love Virginia Woolf.
Definitely the music that I listen to, the art that I love, is generally a thing that brings me comfort.
I remember reading Helen Garner, in one of her diaries she talks about the idea of how ‘good art provides comfort – great art challenges’, but I don’t know if that’s always true. I tend to listen to music because I like to escape, so I like old music because that generally puts me into a world that feels the most real to me. It’s just what I relate to.
I do listen to new music, there are artists that I really love and admire, like Joanna Sternberg, you know, just real stuff.
With music that is overly referential, it’s only good if the lyrics are really good.
Wyatt:
You’ve mentioned previously that you find the initial writing process to be the most fulfilling aspect above recording music and industry stuff. Is it a consideration for you to just publish writing or poetry?
Leah:
Writing as in song writing. I think about it a lot, what the point is in doing the other steps and how much it’s just ego validation. But then again, getting to go out and have adventures with my friends, playing shows and connecting with people, I really do enjoy that as well.
I just think the writing has the least baggage attached to it, you just have to be so in what you’re doing, in flow or whatever, so it’s the most pleasant experience of the whole process.
Wyatt:
Now for a dumb question: I’m having trouble hearing where the harp is on the album. Am I going deaf, or was that hard to record?
Leah:
*haha* yeah there’s a couple of *br-r-rings*, one near the start, and in Pony. We had more but it wasn’t working…
You’d have to ask Jesse about that, *I don’t worry about that shit*.
Leah Senior is wrapping up an Australian tour, and starting a month-long interstate US tour in California on October 4th, details can be found on her website.
Her fourth album “The Music That I Make” is out now on Poison City Records, and merch available on Bandcamp.
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