INTERVIEW: Annie Bass on the release of her new EP 'Me and My Ego': "The only thing I could do was write music and it made me pull apart the relationship I have with myself."
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Sharmonie
Sydney based singer, songwriter and producer Annie Bass recently released her second EP, Me and My Ego. Intimate, introspective and emotive it openly tackles topics close to Bass’ heart including self-acceptance, mental health and heartbreak.
Containing her most recent singles ‘Owe You’, ‘Crazy’, and ‘Step Aside’, the EP was conceived during the 2020 Covid lockdowns when Bass moved back into her childhood home. While Bass says the EP is not “another Covid story” the enforced stillness and extra time lockdown provided gave her the time to think and ruminate which in turn produced Me and My Ego.
The EP is a collection of moody, lush immersive electronica with each track introducing a subtle shift in sound to produce a remarkably cohesive, yet utterly unique, soundscape.
EP opener ‘I Adore You’ is a pared back number with a hypnotic, relaxed keyboard mixed in with gradually swelling beats and brings to mind the best of 1990s trip-hop and electronica. Lyrically, it is an attempt to tell someone just how much you love them.
First single ‘Step Aside’ with its shuffling beat and ever expanding instrumentation is lyrically the opposite of ‘I Adore You’ and is a heartbreaking story of leaving a relationship where the other person is still invested. “Baby don’t you cry / I don’t love you anymore / The tears in your eyes / Do not let them fall,” she sings.
‘Over My Head’ with its multi-layered vocals, dance beat and warped sounds is perhaps the most dance floor ready track on the album and deals with mental health and insecurities.
Second single ‘Crazy’ follows a more dense beat with keyboard breaks, while most recent single ‘Owe You’ closes the EP with touches of jazz and soul as it builds from a downbeat beginning into a full bodied, powerful soundscape. Lyrically is again covers insecurity, love and anxiety with Bass pleading ‘why don’t you let me go?’
Me and My Ego is perhaps Bass’ finest work to date. Exceptionally produced, it stands toe to toe with the type of top end electronica superstars of the genre produce. Moving, enthralling, immersive and just first class music you can find joy - and pain - in, it is an EP you will want to return to over and over. Bass has always created music that makes you feel and this EP is her at her finest. We recently caught up with Bass to find out more about the EP’s creation.
Hello Annie! You're one hell of a one woman music machine, singer, songwriter, DJ producer. And now after a string of very delicious, very individual singles we have your EP Me and My Ego. How does it feel to have it out?
It feels good. It feels strange, because I'm sure you hear this a lot, it takes such a long time to go from an idea to a release. You see so many different inceptions of this idea that you had, this little seed and people see this lovely, but very small, tip of the iceberg. It's funny when you've been working on something privately for so long to hear what people think about it, because it's been just an introspective thing for so long. It's an interesting feeling.
And of course, the place you were emotionally I imagine where you wrote most of those songs, you would have processed a lot of those grievances and emotions. ‘Great song, but I'm done with that now.’
Yeah, particularly with these songs. It was sort of like they had me figured out before I did. Listening back to them now I’m noticing little nuances and reflecting on lyrics and even melodies, and I’m like ‘I wonder what that meant at the time and what does it mean to me now?’ There's always fun to be had listening back to something that you wrote, even from over two years ago, and seeing something new.
Absolutely. And your music has this beautiful quality of being reflective of your interest in sound, and music but there's not this genre band that's blocking it in. And I guess that comes with having so many tools to hand, you can write a song, and put a little jazz bar into it, or a little piano lead up and it then becomes another language entirely.
A lot of that came from just collaborating with different people. In quite a number of the tracks, they were built from these demos that I did with an incredible piano player in Adelaide. We did these recordings that were meant to be demos, a way to get the songs into a different space. But then a producer that I worked with Barney Williams he wanted to keep the piano in. In ‘Crazy’ he used the creak of the piano as a really beautiful texture and you can hear the birds chirping. I wanted to keep these in because it's so reflective of the space that we were physically in when making the songs. And also working with someone like [‘Owe You’ producer] Moutaiz Al-Obaidi who was going through a period where he was very heavily into 1980s synth work and he jumped right into that and wanted to use those sounds and those textures. Each song kind of reflects the physical space that I was in with the people that I was working with.
You wrote this EP during lockdown. A lot of us learned how to make bread or dislocated hips trying to do home yoga, but you've written this beautiful collection of songs. Has music always been both something that fires you up, but also something you turn to for comfort, even when making it?
Yes, before I even knew what that meant, it was, I started singing when I was probably four, my mum put me in a choir and I didn't stop being in the choir until I was in my 20s, because I had to do it for university. Singing, particularly in a group or with others has always been this full body release and finding that flow state. I have these really early childhood memories of, before voice memos or anything like, when I was home alone I would call our home phone and sing into the answering machine, just so that I could hear myself back. That was the way that I would record myself! That's the first time I was writing music and hearing my voice and it was such a soothing way to express myself. I was very lucky that I had access to things like singing lessons and choirs and a whole heap of stuff. [Music’s] always been the best way for me to feel comfortable in myself.
And also you’re probably the first artist I've ever spoken to that started their career on their answering machine!
That’s the thing, it sounds quite narcissistic when I say now, but I was fascinated with the sound of my own voice. At that age I had these vocal idols, like Katie Noonan, and I was thinking how do I do that? How do I teach myself to do that? I would do it by singing along with them incessantly, for hours and hours and hours. I was like a sponge, I remember just singing the whole George album, headed by Katie Noonan, over and over and over until as best as I possibly could replicate all her vocal melismas and textures and tones. That's why I love jazz so much, and why I study jazz, because so much of that music is about replicating textures and sounds. Obviously, you have to sound unique, and you have to make your own in a lot of ways, but a lot of it is about that reproduction and recreation.
Gorgeous. You mentioned ‘Crazy’ earlier, if there's any track on the EP that deserves to be song in a smoky jazz bar it's that one! Can you talk to me a little bit about the title of the EP, Me and My Ego?
I was listening to a podcast, and the whole podcast was about the ego. My perception of ego at that time was, if someone is egotistical, they are confident, they are self aware and self assured, there may be a bit arrogant. Listening to that podcast, they described the ego is the part of the mind that meditates between the conscious and the unconscious. I started thinking about that, and how particularly in the world that we live in now, we're not ever really encouraged to think of ourselves as an unconscious body. The decisions that we make, the way we treat ourselves, or we talk to ourselves, the way we perceive ourselves, the way we want to be perceived. These are all things that are sort of driven by our ego, but we don't really nurture the relationship with that. There's a healthy way to have a relationship with ourselves and with our ego, and learning that the ego is something that sort of protects us from truth and helps us be more risk taking. Yes, it might prevent us from being as vulnerable and as open as we like, but again, that's coming back to that idea that you can nurture that relationship for the longest time.
When I think back to what my ego represented then, it was this defence mechanism in order to protect myself from getting hurt, or to manipulate the way I was being perceived by others. At the end of the day, we're all our own main character and we all are mostly thinking about ourselves. This idea that others were perceiving me a certain way was all really in my head and it was preventing me from doing so many things because I was so consumed by how I might be perceived. My ego was really driving that narrative that I had to be a certain way, even though no one had ever actually told me that it was just something that created in my own head. With this EP, I didn't have a label at the time, I wasn't writing because I had to, there was no goal or parameter, I just wanted to see what came out. Particularly when it was Covid, I didn't have a job, I was living at home with my parents, because I was in between moving interstate, the only thing I could do was write music and it made me pull apart the relationship I have with myself.
I love that so much. You've got ‘Owe You’ on the EP, which is another huge highlight, and it breaks down those experiences within the music industry and your own gut feeling and learning who you actually were in that. Can you talk to me a little bit about that track?
Yeah, again it all comes back to this idea of my relationship to myself, because I had an experience where things perhaps didn't turn out the way that I wanted them to, or the way that I'd expected, and my instincts was to blame other people. To feel like I'd been hard done by, not necessarily a victim but I thought this isn't fair, why is this happening to me, people warned me and I didn't listen. I became sort of defeated, and I didn't want to write music, and I was just feeling very unhappy. I came to a point where I really had to change the story into I chose to release this music. I chose to work with those people. I made decisions, not them. That was me and they're my experiences. If I point the finger at other people, that takes away my own power, really. It's not their fault. We're all just human beings doing the best that we can. It's nobody's fault. Is the music industry flawed? Yes. Was there power at play? Absolutely. But did I agree to everything? Yes. That song was about I don't owe anyone, there’s no gun to my head, no one's forcing me to do this. I'm privileged enough to be autonomous in my decision. I just wanted a track that made me feel like I'm doing this because I want to not because someone's being suggestive.
I think that's wonderful. One thing that gets forgotten, particularly for consumers of music, is that when we take the song, we think it’s been created for us. But the fact that you're creating music to remind yourself, to give yourself a mantra that's then shared with the world, that's an absolutely beautiful thing. Annie, we have the EP, we have all this music, we have your answering machine at your parent’s house, which I love by the way, and I really hope to hear it featuring in the next single! What else is on the horizon for you?
I just celebrated my EP launch with a little live show in Sydney. Previously, when I've been playing live shows, which has not been for a while, we all know why, I was just getting up there myself, and mostly playing to track maybe playing some counterparts but mostly it was just me and my vocals. Something that I really reinforced to myself over the break was I really wanted to play with other people. I would get together with old friends who went through jazz school and musicians I knew in Adelaide, and we would just get together and play music. It's something that I hadn't done for such a long time. I love being in rooms with producers and writing but the best part for me is singing, playing live, that emotional connection to music is something I've really lost along the way. So a big, big priority for me for the rest of the year and into next year is playing more live shows, I will hopefully announce some fun things soon. I'm just working on putting that all together with the band and it's such a different experience. I'm really excited about that. And of course, writing new music, hopefully to put out my debut album.
Me and My Ego is out now via Sweat It Out. You can download and stream here.
To keep up with all things Annie Bass you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
