INTERVIEW: Bri Clark releases her debut album 'Waiting': "I wanted the album to be like chapters of an audio book - this is how you process a toxic relationship."
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Perth singer-songwriter Bri Clark has been releasing music since 2014 and the last year has seen something of a rebirth as she has entered a new era of creativity and productivity which today has culminated in the release of her remarkable debut album Waiting.
Across eleven tracks, Waiting is a raw, intense portrayal of falling in and out of love and the grieving process when a relationship collapses. Dark and moody, the soundscape covers electronic and alt-pop set off by Clark’s emotive vocal which is brilliantly flexible and capable of conveying every one of the feels you experience in and out of love.
Latest single and third track ‘Red Flag’ lyrically probably sums up better than any other track the trauma of a broken relationship: ‘How do I pay for a therapist’s time?’. It is a brilliantly constructed song which travels through different moods, from hard hitting discordant beats in the chorus symbolising Clark’s rage, through to gentler, acoustic verses and outro.
Album standout ‘Break’ is a lush, mellow pop ballad as Clark reflects on a relationship that started with so much promise but now leaves her needing to move forward after it falls apart. “I hope I stop loving you / I just want to let it go, let you go” she sings. It’s a gorgeous song that remains simple in its production yet portrays a palpable sense of drama, pain and rebirth.
‘Happy’ is an almost otherworldly, experimental track that projects anything but happiness. ‘Did breaking me break you?’ she sings in distorted vocals. The songs moves from glitchy beats to moments of silence and Clark sings the bulk of the song in a deeper register that brilliantly conveys the sense of grappling with a deep sense of sadness whilst trying to grab on to any sliver of positivity.
The album closes with the track ‘Compete’ which brings the journey full circle and sees Clark forever altered but now empowered and newly aware of her self worth. Against a background that switches from just piano through to a beat filled chorus that thunderously gains pace and drama Clark sings “So much better off now that you’re behind me…now you know what I’m worth”. Full of emotion, defiance and confidence, it is a moving and satisfying way to end the album.
Waiting is an album to savour and with its release Clark is proving she is one of the brightest new talents in Australia today. Impactful, insightful, heartbreaking and powerful it is music that moves your soul and remains present in your consciousness long after the final note. Women In Pop sat down with Clark to find out all about the creation of Waiting and her thoughts on the Australian music industry.
Bri congratulations on the release of Waiting it is an incredible album. How are things with you?
Things are good. It’s been like a three-year wait now so I’m really relieved to get it out there.
You felt like it's a long time coming, of course the whole world had to pause for a couple of years, but you've put this debut album out quite quickly. You've been writing for a long time, for other people as well, can you talk to me a little about your career trajectory?
I've been writing songs probably since I was 11 and in 2014 I started putting out my own music. That was just baby steps, how to do it all trial and error kind of thing. 2018 is when I released this song that got noticed by people ‘Giving Up’ and I got the inaugural APRA-AMCOS female mentorship through that song and worked with Diesel and Jenny Morris as my mentors. They were wonderful, so generous and kind with their time and their knowledge. Then I was in writing camps, writing rooms and did SongHubs, 50 songs in five days. I did an east coast mini tour and just kind of felt the industry wheels start to grease a little bit.
Songwriting has always been the best part of being creative for me. Being able to collaborate with people, there's just nothing like being in a room with two, three other incredible writers and artists and creatives, and just having those like goosebumps as you’re creating something that you're really excited about and it's really quite special. I definitely leant heavily into songwriting after ‘Giving Up’ came out. I had an EP, but it just didn't feel like where I wanted to go.
I moved to Sydney in 2019 and I was probably writing six, seven days a week. There was lots of sessions and I was doing it mostly on my own, which was very challenging and also off the back of a breakup. That's when we wrote the album. I didn't actually expect any of the songs that I'd written to see the light of day. It was just more to get rid of the weight and the heaviness that was clouding my ability to be impartial in sessions.
Two months [after recording the album], the whole world shut down when COVID hit. We were in a very different position in terms of what the release of my album would look like now nearly three is on. The whole industry landscape has changed. It's come to the place that after this album is out, I am needing to step away for a little while, just take a break. With the amount of pressure on artists to be everything and to create everything and have content on TikTok and social media… I am ready to take a break and do something more healthy for my mental health.
It’s beautiful the way you talk about being a collaborator and taking time to step back, because there is this, possibly ego induced, fear of letting it go. However you can recognise what you want your career to look like, and that stepping away from the front microphone doesn't mean you're stepping away from your career.
There is a lot of fear and an unwillingness to talk about the collaborators that I’ve found with a lot of bigger artists that I've worked with. On one hand it is quite disheartening to know how much you've contributed to something and that you're not being recognised and credited. But on the other hand it just makes me value the people that are so open. I've been very open with my album about the different writers that have been on every song and how that process is. It's important because it's very rare that an artist is the sole of writer and creator of their art, and to not credit the people that help you create art is to do a huge disservice to the industry and that's why we're not paid. It's why we're not valued as highly as we should be because people are so able to just discount the fact that we were involved in the first place. Producers do a lot of work for free, a co-writers whole catalog is free until they get royalties like 18 months after the song is released. And who knows how long that song has been written before its released?
It's very difficult to have a sustainable career, especially in Australia, because we don't have the density that somewhere like America or Europe does. Yes, my part in creating songs is incredibly vital. Yes, there are hundreds of other people wanting to do what I'm doing so that you can't really charge a fee because labels aren't willing to pay that and they'll just get the next person in line who says they will do it for free. So we're all undercutting our own art. The only people that will lose out are the songwriters, they'll turn to something else to do, and the artists, because why would you not want the best song to release? The best songs come from the best creativity and the best collaboration and producers have incredible ability to create something out of nothing and so do songwriters with lyrics and melody.
When talking about the music industry in Australia with regards to air play, how do you find the support is in this country for artists?
I have champions, people like Declan Byrne from Triple J [but] it’s difficult. It’s difficult to be indie, to be somebody with a chronic illness who can't really do tours cheaply.
Unearthed is a great platform for up and coming artists, and the support that you may find yourself with [there] can be career defining .But it's just so saturated, a lot of people will fall through the cracks. Writing grants is a skill that some people aren't able to access, they're not able to pay for grant writers who can help.
The industry now is probably looking the most diverse it's ever been in Australia, which is fantastic, [but] I still don't see that many chronically ill and disabled people in the scene and I'm hoping that will change at some point like Alter boy from WA who is doing amazing things and Martha Marlow is incredible but we do need to see more of those people.
There's room to grow. Speaking on your illness, you have lupus, an auto immune disease. How has that affected how how you create music? You said you were writing songs seven days straight, that's a lot for anyone physically, as well as mentally let alone someone that has an immune disease.
I'm quite lucky that I get to work with producers who make chord progressions and those decisions and my job is to come up with lyric and melody and often I don't have to be behind the piano for that. We've completely removed the keyboard in my live setup as well. Lupus is a connective tissue disorder and it is rapidly and constantly evolving. My joint pain used to be just in my shoulders and my knees, and now it's in my wrists and my fingers so I've had to completely step away from playing live. The last gig I did supporting Graace in Fremantle we just did an acoustic set up, my guitarist, Trev played guitar and I sat and sang and I still had a week of joint pain following that gig. It's quite confronting [to be] in my twenties to have all of that be a factor. It's definitely been an interesting ride with lupus and how it's affected what I can do.
But you're still doing it! We need to see more people with chronic illness, with disabilities and if you don't see them out there and talking about what they're going through, then any little kid watching that wants to create music is going to think there isn’t a window for them. It’s beautiful to hear you talk so openly about it. Talk to me about your incredible singles, ‘Waiting’ was just off the charts and then along came ‘Red Flag’, which everyone listened to and went ‘Oh, yeah I know that feeling’!
I wanted the album to be like chapters of an audio book - this is how you process a toxic relationship. Those relationships that you're in for like three to four months, and yet take so long to get away from and move past.
I worked with an amazing producer Sam Sakr, we basically sat in his studio for a month and a half and just did it. It was just the two of us. The soundscape and the creativity that Sam gave the album is incredible. ‘Red Flag’ was probably the hardest one to produce, it was the one that took maybe three or four goes. It's a difficult song, it's a dark song, it's an abuse song. It talks about the physical side of a relationship being the strongest connection, because you have nothing else to connect over. The chorus is ‘I love till I'm blind’, and if you put a mirror up you've just as much contributed to the situation that you're in because you've been blindly navigating somebody who is so clearly just bent on destruction. ‘How do I pay for a therapist’s time?’, like what kind of hope do we have if there are people out there who are hurting others, just because they haven't got the help that they need to help themselves?
It was a really difficult song to write, I wrote that one with Ilan Kidron and Andrew Burford. Ilan and I wrote four songs on that record, he's probably my favorite writer to work with. He pushed me and challenged me in every direction you can imagine, and he's just so generous and kind and just incredibly talented. I’m so grateful to him for his contribution to the writing of the record, he wrote ‘Waiting’, ‘Red Flag’, ‘Porcelain’ and ‘Break With Me’.
How was the response to ‘Waiting’, I'm sure you must've had people contact you going ‘Oh my goodness!’ Yeah, it's been really lovely to have people connecting with the record and to be really appreciative of the sound and the production choices. Because it doesn’t have a traditional pop structure of a song, there was quite a lot of confusion as to why it was one of the singles. When we were choosing the singles, we wanted to give a little bit of a look into the kind of music that's on the album, and it's not a traditional pop record. It's more alternative, but it has pop sensibilities. To just to give a bit of an insight as to how I write and that it's very dynamic depending on what is needed.
Waiting is out now. You can download and stream here.
To keep up with all things Bri Clark you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
