A Chat With Laura Jean

With government grants trickling through the rafters to pave her way and song-writing accolades like an APRA Professional Development Award no stranger to her trophy cabinet, Laura Jean has begun to cement herself as an artist people have their ear out for. We caught up for a chat about such things and more at Sydney’s Hopetoun Hotel shortly after sound-check in a dimly lit abandoned corner. It may not have been a fitting locale for the lady behind the pen of the under-rated albums ‘Our Swan Song’ and ‘Eden Land’ which spawned Triple J favourites like ‘I’m a Rabbit, I’m a Fox,’ but it’s a locale that’ll do for a brief chat without photo’s.

Laura Jean’s upbringing across the breadth of NSW’s Central Coast has led her to Melbourne, where she’s been living for the past eight years. Only recently though, alongside partner Jen, she’s moved into more comfy accommodation about an hour and fifteen minutes out of the city. It’s helped.

“It’s been easier to practice, ‘cos we were living in a one bedroom flat [in Melbourne] and couldn’t afford to live anywhere else, so we thought; “we need a house, we can’t afford to rent a house in the city,” so thought we’d rent a house in the country and try to find work and make it work. It’s been okay so far and have had a few job offers, and getting grants, so we’re sort of etching by.”

With so much time devoted to making music and touring it, it’s bound to get in the way of other sources of income, but she seems to be managing the unpredictability of the business for the most.

 “It’d be nice to have something here and there casually when it’s a bit quiet, or when there’s a lot of outgoing stuff and not much coming in; that’s where I’m at at the moment ‘cos we’ve had an album out for a year and about to record another one...I’ve been doing this for about 10 years, and for me it’s just a slow and steady; keep making music, touring and making albums and the people who are meant to hear me will hear me, I can’t really afford to do it any other way.”

Laura Jean is one of endless amounts of Australian artists flying just under the radar, with a whisker above the pings. She’s known well enough to pack the Hopetoun to its limits, but not well enough to be supported financially off the back of her work. So what’s stopping artists like Laura Jean breaking through? We talked briefly about the music industry and touched on the high accessibility of international music as a result of the age of information and its effect on local artists.

“I don’t think people are aware enough of some of the amazing artists we have in Australia. The best thing would be if radio played...say, 25% Australian music, so people could hear and know the artists that Australia grows. But that doesn’t happen – so people might listen to a folk artist from America without noticing someone like Grand Salvo, who’s an amazing songwriter from Australia. And that’s cool, you’ve gotta listen to what you enjoy, but I think Australian music needs more support from radio and mainstream media, because what we’ve got here is world class, we need to start picking it up and start realising that we’re in a golden age of music right now. Even just indie music in Australia, there’s so much great stuff – real amazing bands popping up all the time.”

Maybe it’s harder to get noticed locally today, or maybe not. The internet is a two edged sword of course; for every Bon Iver that gets discovered and exposed to every functional radio in the country, there’s someone missing out...or, god forbid, a Short Stack in the making. Is it tough to get noticed then? And when that does come about, how can a name be so much more known that the music itself?

“I don’t really have a real promotion machine behind me, a lot of people have heard of me from my song ‘I’m a Rabbit, I’m a Fox’ which got played on Triple J a lot, so they would’ve heard my name, and they played a few songs from ‘Eden Land,’ so sometimes, without a lot of promotion, people don’t connect a song they hear on the radio to me, so it’s just a matter of time before people figure out which songs are mine, but it doesn’t bother me at all, I just fiddle away and do my own thing and I’ve got no idea what other people think.”

Which seems to free Jean up to work within her own state separate from media critique.

“It doesn’t exist [criticism.] What other people think isn’t real, it’s got more to do with them than me. I’m just here to do my thing and people can choose to listen or not, it doesn’t really affect me. The way I see it, I don’t like to think about how I’m perceived or anything, it doesn’t lead anywhere but to a...just this weird feeling. So I’d rather just work away and trust that it’ll work out somehow.”

The developmental process of music and indeed, any art form, is a strange and very personal one. Laura Jean’s influences have been varied and reached across forms from acquaintances to childhood films.

“A lot of people around me inspire me, my friends and favourite songwriters like Grand Salvo and Ned Collette, Jen Cloher and Tom Cooney – people who I think are insanely good songwriters and I’m so honoured to be around them. So I think they influence me a lot, but I also think my childhood has a bigger impact than I thought. I watched a film I used to watch a lot as a kid called ‘The Secret Garden,’ and realised that the film influenced my lyrics on ‘Eden Land’ and stuff so much, I watched it and went ‘oh my god, there’s so many moments that I’ve described in some lyric.’ I think it’s all a heady mix back there in your subconscious and I really don’t know how it works, but they just resonate when you write a song and I’ve got no idea how it happens. It just comes out.”

So from ‘The Secret Garden’ comes some of the bewildering, mysterious themes touched upon in her last release ‘Eden Land.’ Her song-writing process itself is one which she seems to have made work for her with the utmost efficiency and beautiful results. It’s part spontaneity and stream of consciousness with an equal part of reproducible, scientific method.

“The song comes along itself; I don’t sit down and write lyrics. Some idea niggles at me and plagues me and I can’t let it go, it’s just in my head going *quack* [laughs.] Then a phrase will pop into my head which sounds really good - so that will be the beginning - then I write that down and start brainstorming around it. I write words all over a page and find that that’s the way it comes to me, I don’t try to make it work, you gotta get all the crap out first and write two pages of crap to find two sentences that are really great. Even if I have three good things, it’s enough to write the rest of it. That’s how I do it at the moment; I’m open to other techniques and think I want to experiment with them. I like to keep things impulsive and spontaneous without over-thinking things too much, but maybe I’ll experiment with working like Leonard Cohen and giving so much thought to every line to get it that way, but I’m comfortable with what I’m doing at the moment.”

And why not be? With the live show that we saw at the Hopetoun, the process seems spot on, with a superbly solid foundation laid with her first two albums and another on the way. There’s no doubt in my mind that Laura Jean - with subsequent releases, tours and appearances – will be poking her head through the cracks with band-mates in tow. She’s found a genre and style that she fits to a tee and is comfortably producing new music with seeming ease. Regardless of where she ends up, Laura Jean has made a gorgeous and talent-filled dent on many a consciousness and there’s sure to be more of that to come.