Thursday 20 November 2008

The Reminder Open Letter

The Reminder Open Letter

It is two weeks exactly until we return home to Melbourne after our first season in Berlin.

I think this is one of those rare times in life where an experience is very much as you hoped it would be.

I came here to write an album, and to remember how to love music in a less complicated way. And to just be somewhere unfamiliar and strange and inspiring. And this is what I got.

I went back to my first instrument here, the piano, which I played from ages 8 to 12. It is the only instrument I ever received lessons in (actually, I did try three times to have lessons in guitar, and once in drums, but they never really took off). I gave it up because I was turning thirteen and I fell out of love with classical music (which my Mum, god bless her, used to pay me and my siblings to listen to. something like 50 cents a song. She is a brilliant woman my mum). I didn’t know there were alternatives back then. I mean, I didn’t know you could like old-time music and classical and punk and folk and rock and spoken word and noise and so on. I thought you have to be “exclusive”. I thought being “exclusive” was how you worked out where you belonged.

It was a temporary phase. When I was a teenager, I heard Jeff Buckley talking on either RRR radio in Melbourne or Triple J about the Russian composer Gorecki, so I went out and bought his third symphony and from then on, I was back in. It just gave me a bit more room to live with the ambiguity of loving all styles of music. When I turned 21, I started listening to the songs that my mother and father and grandfather and grandmother loved, the hawaian bands and Vera Lyn and Bizet, and then later when I went back to uni, there was Debussy and Bartok and Keith Jarret and Thelonious MOnk and Patti Smith and Nick Cave and at a certain stage you just realise that good music is good music and that’s that. I am not a “lister”, a reviewer, a “best of” arguer – I just love what I love when I hear it. Music is magic.

Here in Berlin, I have ended up renting an apartment with an old piano in it, and writing a whole lot of what will no doubt end up being my new album using keys. The house is coincidentally owned by a dude called Mocky who co-produced Feist’s “The Reminder” album. The house is empty, but I don’t live here, I just work here, so most of the time there is no-one in this house except me and Feist’s double platinum album on the wall, which serves as a “Reminder” to try and write songs that people can sing. Who knows if it worked – regardless, I will keep at it. The “platinum” is also a “reminder” of our own Sally Seltman, of New Buffalo fame, who wrote Feist’s “1,2,3,4” song. I have thought about Sally’s writing process a lot whilst I’m over here. I am a great fan of hers and I seem to remember her telling me that she usually writes out the back of her house in a little shed that her engineering-husband had set up for her.

This has been the first time I remember having been able to eek out the time to write during the day, during normal working hours – just to sit down and “write”. It is extraordinary.

Is it strange that I am enjoying this solitude so much? I am. I am loving it. I have missed it, and I love it. Perhaps I am an introvert after all.

Or perhaps solitude is just a basic human need that we’ve somehow tried to talk ourselves out of in recent years ever since the “communication superhighway” opened up in the 90’s.

Or perhaps it’s just that six years ago, I was single and childless, and now most hours of the day I am just this moving tree that my little monkeys live in. I love it. Sometimes though, it still shocks me how quickly these things come to be. The biggest, most common miracle in the world, and we’re all in on it. Wild. Full on.

I am currently obsessed with music by: Paul Simon, the Ting Tings, Nina Simone, Marlene Dietrich, Fleet Foxes, Regina Spektor, The Do, PJ Harvey, Nick Cave, Bon Iver, Jamie Lidell, Bartok.

Everywhere I walk, every cab and every corner store, I hear Gabriella Cilmi’s ‘Sweet About Me’. Is it the same for you there in Australia?

I have also been listening a lot to Kitty, Daisy and Lewis, three young kids from the UK who are making old style music which some describe as “rockabilly” although they say “no, it’s not!”. I loved recently finding this Youtube promo video of theirs where they come across as precocious and talented little shizers who know exactly what they love and exactly what sound they want to copy. Appropriation ain’t what it used to be. There’s no shame anymore, it seems, in openly copying good stuff. Everything, from their sound to their styling, is so clear and familiar. Their Mum and Dad play in their band too, which I love. Maybe they hate it – I don’t know. Actually, when I was 17, I would have hated this (and I remember asking Asha if she wanted to be in my band once, to which she replied “Mum, I am not going to be a musician. I am going to be an artist. I’ve already told you that!” She was five at the time. Sheesh) but now, I love it. I have no idea of their heritage but Kitty Daisy and Lewis reminded me of my Nauruan cousins, who are just the most incredible singers and could easily start their own band called Bren, Clint and Em (not forgetting Luke, our other cousin, who is a very talented DJ). Were you at the Winter Secrets Corner show? You would have seen them there singing “Little Things” with me.

Sometimes when I see or hear musicians who appear crystal clear about how they want to come across, I get a little confused. Or confronted perhaps. I have certainly never known where I fit in to musical life, or how it is I want to come across. I have never know how I want to come across because somewhere in me, I suspect such a “sureness” would to be akin to creative death, or to my death as a “creative”. I don’t know why this is. Perhaps the opposite is true. Either way, I am not sure this album is going to show me where it is I fit. Although it might. It is entirely possible that I will never know. It is entirely possible that most people never know. It is entirely possible that most people, like me, choose to live randomly.

See what I mean about being confused?

What would it be like to live life as a “decider”, or a “condfidanto”? You know what I mean.

Regardless, my nature is what it is. Musically, how can I want to play a Les Paul with a loop pedal, a grand piano, a gong, to speak sing, to scream, to imagine string sections, to harmonise and sing rounds, to spit, to bash drums, and slap a big double bass, and be so in love with cheesy casio beats, and want to tell stories, any story at all, to love music from all times and countries and styles, and expect to know where my own music “fits in”? I don’t think it does. I don’t think it has to. It would be nice to have something to frame it all with, but humans are bigger than that. We can’t ever really and truly be contained this way, can we?

Maybe what we can do though, is allow our art to reflect little pockets in time that somehow connect us with the bigger string of time upon which we’re travelling. What do you think?

One thing I do feel a little more familiar with is this thing called feelings. Only a little. But I trust them and I let them show me things. They’re not always right. That shows me things too. So maybe I am not so much a musician as a “feeler”.

That makes me sound like I should be locked up. “Hello, I am Clare, and I’m a Feeler.” It is perhaps better than being called, as my friend Rachel Sands called me the other day, a “Liver”, meaning someone who lives a lot of life. A Liver.

Marty and I and our tribe are living across the road from an incredible church called Zions Kirche. This was Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s church; far out. In the highest spire (the only spire, actually) hang two incredibly huge bells that ring several times a day (who rings them? I must find out and see if they will give me a go!), and there is every chance they will end up on the next album. Or not. Who knows. I am going to find out more about them, and tell you what I find.

Marty and I have been playing together and doing a lot of experimenting. It is exciting, and we really don’t know what will happen next, but that is exciting too. Right now he is sitting next to me singing Yo La Tengo songs very loudly, and he doesn’t know I’m watching him.

Speak soon.

CB x