KATIE NOONAN’s new album Songbook is a collection of some of the artist’s pieces from a range of different projects, both old and new. LOUISA BULLEY spoke with Katie about her new tour, cross-artform collaboration and her newest challenge of playing solo.
So you’re just back from Folk Alliance in Canada as well as some performances in New York and LA, how are you feeling coming off some overseas performances and coming back to touring in Australia?
Oh, it was an amazing experience. Canada was pretty wild, I had 10 gigs in the first week and that was really intense, and it was minus 15 degrees and snowing. It’s cool actually, coz I’m getting all of these instagram pics from friends that are over at Canada Folk Week now, so that’s kind of like I’m reliving it all again. It was awesome. And then pretty much I landed in New York, which was incredible. That show was sold out and I had this amazing string quartet, and in Toronto I played with the quintet from the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, so I got to play with some wonderful, wonderful musicians. And I pretty much landed and went straight to Adelaide and had a bunch of gigs there at the Fringe Festival which was also sold out. So it was kind of a whirlwind trip and it feels great. It’s kind of interesting playing solo though. I’ve never really done that, it’s the one thing that I haven’t really done, so I’m enjoying that challenge and luckily I’ve been given these incredible grand pianos to play which is such a pleasure for me!
So, you have a lot of different things going on, like your Songbook tour and your Love. Song. Circus performances and you’re still performing with Elixir and other collaborations. You always seem to have a few irons in the fire. Is it important for you to be doing a range of different things musically at any one time?
I guess so, yeah. I love challenging myself in different environments and just making music with people I love. I guess my big thing moving forward for me that kind of rocks my boat is cross-artform collaboration which obviously I’m doing now in Melbourne with Circa and it’s just really inspiring to work with, well, first of all within the band we have four relatively strictly classical non-improvising musicians and then myself and our other musicians obviously more like me coming from a more rock/jazz improvising background, so that’s already an interesting combo. And then we have these three beautiful women from Circa who are incredible. So yeah, that’s kind of an exciting thing for me and I have a few more collaborations coming up throughout the year, so yeah that’s kind of the big thing for me moving forward is the challenge of working with different artists, not necessarily musicians.
A massive part of your work does seem to be in collaboration, so how was it working on this album where you’ve moved into a much more solo form of work?
Yeah, well I guess that was the new challenge, to just bring it back to me and a piano and really look at, well, kind of a bit of a take-stock moment of the last 15 years of my life, or maybe a little bit longer. I think the earliest song on there is ‘Spawn’ from George, which was kind of one of the first songs that we got some, I guess, traction with and got played on Triple J and stuff. And then all the way through to some new songs, like I’ve included one of the songs ‘Janet’ from Love. Song. Circus. So there are some interesting little bookends from different times in my life in the CD and then also I’m producing a sheet music book as well with some stories behind the songs and lots of photos from when I was little right through to today, as well as some beautiful shots of me in the 80s with a gorgeous mullet, and then through to more recent photos that are a bit nicer.
So it’s a bit of a trip down memory lane? Was the process you went through in planning and recording the album, was it just songs that you really loved from the past and things like that or was there more of a process to it?
Um, it was that obviously, but then also wanting to I guess reflect all of my different projects. So there’s something from George, something from my solo record, there’s something from the Captains, there’s stuff from my recent work. I also include five previously unreleased brand new songs that I have written but never really found a home for until this record. But it was also informed by, at the end of last year for example, and I do this quite regularly, I did a by-request show, where people can just tell me what they’d like me to play at cool little venues in Sydney and Melbourne, and that gives me an interesting idea of what songs resonate with different people. So I guess a lot of the songs that were regularly requested, like ‘Special Ones’ were included because, well I wanted them on there anyway, but yeah I wanted ones that had had multiple-requests. So I thought it would be good to do that in that new way of just me and the piano and an amazing string quartet! So it was a bit of a combo of different things.
An important part of your work seems to be in paying tribute to other musicians that you obviously admire, how do you feel using other artists’ work? Do you see it as a form of collaboration in itself?
Yeah I guess so. You know, I’d love to play with Joni Mitchell, but I don’t think it’s ever going to happen. The closest I can get is us doing a version of her. I mean, I don’t do that many, most of my work is my own, but particularly with Elixir I guess, because Elixir has a kind of jazz element to it and in jazz the principles of jazz can kind of take work from other people and then rework it, the way that John Coltrane would do ‘Greensleeves’ and turn it into a completely different song and the same with the jazz standards and stuff. So I guess it’s a little bit of that with Elixir, but rather than doing jazz standards we did a collection of things, like a Nick Drake song and Vince Jones, who is my hero, and then on the last record there was a Radiohead song and a Joni Mitchell tune, so yeah I guess it’s me paying tribute, or us paying tribute to people that we admire.
I’ve been listening to some of your Love. Song. Circus demos, I love that ‘Esther song’, it’s a cracker…
‘Esther’’s fun! Yeah, the new challenge with this project, coz I really wanted to give the songs a bit of a folk flavour because that was the music of that era, that traditional kind of folk stuff, but then with my kinda thing mixed in as well. So yeah, there’s lots of banjo and resonated guitar and mandolin, yeah there’s actually no electric guitar on the album at all, it’s all just purely wooden instruments recorded as acoustically as possible.
Is that something that you would like to tour further than just Melbourne? Can we expect to see you performing Love. Song.Circus in Sydney and the rest of Australia?
Yeah, I’d love to, we’re in the process of working up an Arts Grant Application today to try and get it. I mean, the great thing and the challenge about big projects like this is obviously you’ve got a touring party of 10 and lots of, you know, costly logistics with rigging and staging and stuff. So we really need for the budget to get bigger. We premiered at Adelaide in June and then we’re doing a season in Melbourne at the moment, which is going amazingly. And then I’d really love to do it in all of the major cities and also in regional centres as well, so hopefully things will come together to tour it in the first half of next year.
So, you’re trying to capture the stories of Australia’s first convict women, did the music come out of that idea or was the music something that started and then you based it around that?
The idea for exploring these women came first. I read about this exhibition called ‘Love Tokens’, at the National Museum and I researched it and it was a collection of coins inscribed with messages that were written by convicts to their loved ones. It was just incredibly poetic and beautiful and I just thought ‘wow’, you know, something about it just captured my imagination and I thought I’d love to explore these lives more. Obviously as a woman and a mother I’d like to do it from the female perspective because that perspective has not really been explored that much. We know a lot from the male point of view, but not the female point of view and the female point of view was much tougher, you know, it was incredibly arduous.
So yeah, I did a lot of research, I got a grant from the Australia Council and did months of research actually, at the National Museum, The National Library, and went on lots of field trips. Most of the women were sent to either Hobart or Sydney, so I went and looked at the original factories and the prisons that they were sent to, and I read about these women and these women inspired me to write songs as if I was them. Because unfortunately most of them were illiterate, so I had to kind of read about them and research them and then imagine myself as them. In a perfect world I would’ve loved to have found their letters and found their diaries and whatnot and set that to music, but yeah, literacy was pretty much only granted to men in those days, so most women were illiterate unless they were seriously rich, which obviously most of the convicts weren’t. So yeah, it was the stories that inspired the music and then we went from there.
They’re really beautiful, what I’ve heard of them.
Thank you! I’m really proud of them, I only got the album on Monday, so it’s all very new and yeah, I think it’ll be up on iTunes very soon. Yeah, now being an indie artist I’m doing it all myself, also now we’re not only a record company, we’re a publishing house, because we’ve done the sheet music, so yeah!
You have this training in Opera, and you’ve done the more traditional opera CD with your mum. Can you ever see yourself moving into that more kind of classical opera setting and performing in that capacity?
Umm, probably not traditional, mostly just because I don’t have the voice for it, you know, I don’t have that big kind of sound. But what I am interested in most definitely is beautiful art songs. When I toured with the Australian Chamber Orchestra I did operatic pieces that suited me, like early Handel and Purcell, because that Baroque sound really suits my voice, and then we did some more avant-garde kind of stuff like Tavener and Holst and whatnot. So yeah, I do love the early stuff and I love the more modern stuff. In fact I’m doing some excerpts from Benjamin Britten later in the year with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and the Queensland Symphony Orchestra. So yeah, not traditional opera so much. I love modern composers as well, like Elena Kats-Chernin, I did her Wild Swans Suite last year. So it’s music that suits my voice, I’m never going to be turning around and signing Puccini or Wagner or anything like that, because I simply don’t have the voice. And I love the music but it’s really not my music, so I’ll leave that to the experts.
Katie Noonan will be touring her Songbook album over the next couple of months, playing at Lizotte’s, Kincumber, on Saturday May 4, and Lizotte’s, Lambton, on Sunday May 5, with special guest Brian Campeau.