INTERVIEW: Isabella Manfredi launches debut solo album 'Izzi': "It's a record where I found more of myself rather than let go or said goodbye to somebody that I loved."

Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Macleay Heriot

Isabella Manfredi has been a beloved fixture of the Australian music scene for ten years. First coming to prominence as the frontwoman of rock band The Preatures, in 2013 she won the prestigious Vanda & Young Global Songwriting Competition for the band’s hit single ‘Is This How You Feel?’ The Preatures released two acclaimed albums, 2014’s Blue Planet Eyes and 2017’s Girlhood and collected six ARIA Award nominations throughout their existence.

Last year, the band announced they had broken up and Manfredi was to launch a solo career. Manfredi has said there were two main reasons for the split - being locked into an outdated record contract that nullified their ability to make money from their music, and also due to the breakdown of her relationship with the band’s guitarist Jack Moffitt, saying it was an ‘unhealthy’ situation she was no longer able to tolerate.

Today Manfredi releases her debut solo album Izzi. It is a personal, intimate album that covers love, heartbreak and loss in the rawest of detail, but also encompasses hope, renewal, joy and an all-encompassing love of music. “This album has been unique in that it felt like an exploration and development of a new artist and also the culmination of a decade’s vision. It is like a beginning and an ending in that sense,” Manfredi says.

Sonically, the album embraces the sounds of pop in a way Manfredi could never do in The Preatures. While her past in a bluesy rock band is still in evidence, there is a broader soundscape, a funkier beat and a compulsion to dance in most of the tracks. “My directive to [producer] Jonathan Wilson was that I wanted it to sound like Bruce Springsteen was in an all-girl-group in the early 2000s. Atomic Kitten meets Tom Petty. TLC remixes [Carole King album] Tapestry. Prince producing Bonnie Raitt.”

The opening track ‘Seasons Change’, featuring Emma Louise, sets the scene from the very beginning. A glorious, uplifting funky pop song with a definite feel of the 1980s, perhaps helped by the random synths zinging about in the background, it is an acknowledgement of hurt but also an anthem of renewal. ‘Living In The Wind’ is a gentle, guitar pop track which celebrates both Manfredi’s time in The Preatures and the joy of live music. ‘That’s all we know, it’s the life we chose / Playing every other weekend / We always end up living in the wind.’ It is immediately followed by the downside of that decade long partnership with The Preatures with perhaps the most heartbreaking track on the album, the sparse piano ballad ‘Portrait’: ‘Look at you on your own again / In Hollywood, rented a room to write songs about him,’ she sings.

‘Birthday Wish’ is another track dipped in melancholy, but this time is surrounded by the type of synths, as well as saxophone, that graced some of the most iconic synthpop from the 1980s. Lyrically, it reflects on the quest for true love and the hopes we have of ‘the one’ when we are a child. ‘Only Child’ is another throwback to childhood but this time the dark side of love as she confronts the breakdown of her parent’s marriage. ‘You’re going to be a lonely, only child.’ Starting as an atmospheric acoustic track with just a metronomic beat, a persistent beat kicks in in the second verse which along with the gorgeous backing vocals give the song a all enveloping warmth. Despite its sad subject material, it is a song that wraps around your soul. The album ends on ‘Playing True’, a piano ballad that morphs into a gently buzzing pop track. It is the perfect closer that looks back on a relationship with new clarity now that is is over ‘When I was playing true baby / Love was such a game to you…I was such a game to you.’

Izzi is a remarkable album and it is a complete rebirth of an esteemed artist. There is an absolute beauty in every track, the expert production allows the songs to build in brilliant intensity and the twists and turns the music takes on first listen is an absolute joy that keeps you mesmerised to the very end. On top of the music and Manfredi’s entrancing vocals, the stories the songs tell are poignant and immersive, the lyrics are so well constructed you can read the lyric sheet in isolation and be engrossed in the story.

While the end of The Preatures was an occasion to be mourned, you can’t help feeling it was a worthy sacrifice for us to be blessed with music as good as Izzi. We recently caught up with Manfredi to chat more about the creation of the album.

Hi Isabella thank you taking the time to chat today. You have an absolutely delicious solo album with Izzi, it is so beautiful. You have described it as your emancipation album. Can you talk me through a little bit about that?
Well, I think that was just me trying to figure out another way of saying it’s a breakup record! Because it is, there's no sugarcoating that part of it. It does have a lot of me going through the lowest point in my creative life, but predominantly, my personal life. It's been so long since I made it and I'm in such a different place now. So in the sense of emancipation, I just felt like it was it's a record where I found more of myself rather than let go or said goodbye to somebody that I loved. It feels a very sprightly record in that sense.

I love the gorgeous single 'One Hit Wonder' it's an absolute joy of a song, but stripping apart the lyrics, it's not all joy. Can you talk to me a little bit about that track?
It's funny you mentioned that song because it didn't actually make the record. I know, I know, I'm sorry! A couple of people have asked me about it and it was a bit of a curveball move for me to get rid of it. It was the only song that when I listened to it over and over, it just didn't fit anywhere in the tracklisting. I am one of those artists that albums are still important to me. I like things to feel like they're part of the same story, and they work as a body of work. When I listened to that song, I just couldn't place it anywhere that didn't feel wrong. It just doesn't belong on here. I think that is because it felt to me like it was more of an essence of something old than an essence of something new. The rest of the record feels very much like I'm looking forward in my life, I'm looking down a road, I'm not looking back.

You’ve got the gorgeous 'Living In The Wind', and I want to talk to you about that so song as there is that reflection there about your experiences and observations within the music industry. it comes from a place of moving forward, but at the same time giving a squeeze to where you've come from. Can you talk me through a little bit about that?
'Living In The Wind' I wrote at the old Vanguard pub in Sydney. I went to see some friends of mine all play in a local supergroup. The people in the song, some of them are real people, and some of them are made up people and I was just watching them all on stage, crammed on this really small stage. I just heard the first line in my head, so I went to the bathroom, put it down on my phone, and then I kept coming back to it because I love this idea of the local musician, the local hero. The more I started writing it, it became a bit more about The Preatures and about my love of the band even though I walked away. I actually put in a voice memo of the boys and I in The Preatures in rehearsal together, it's in the breakdown, you can't really hear it but the essence of what I loved about being in a group, and what I love about being a performing artist is all there in that song.

You've also got one of the greatest collaborations that could have happened with you and Pricie on 'Naive'. Oh, my God it's such a track. And you also have a Robert Palmer parody video to go with it, which I just love. How did that collaboration come together?
That was a real slow burn, for 'Naive' because I had that track written in August 2020. I'd written the chorus, when I was first falling in love with my now almost husband. We did the song and we demoed it all up and it was great, but I just felt like it needed another woman. I was on the lookout for somebody for ages, someone was interested and then they were like, ‘oh, it's not quite right’. Pricie’s name kept coming up, and I looked her up and I went, ‘oh, yes, she's perfect’. It got down to the 11th hour before the album was mixed. She's one of those artists that is really non committal and non responsive to everything else that's going on around her that's not what's happening right now in the present. So we were kind of going, is she going to do it? Is she not going to do it? Like what the fuck?! And then I finally got this text from her with the voice memo demo of what she wanted to put down. She was like, ‘What do you think about this?' And I listened to it, I was like, ‘It's fucking perfect!’

This is your first solo body piece of work, and your fans grew up with you with this gorgeous rock element from The Preatures, but now you are shifting you sound, which I think is a very healthy thing to do for anyone in their lives. Were you ever concerned about how the fans would find that shift?
It's funny because I really don't see much of a difference in the music itself. I can objectively say it's more pop, but the qualities about it that make it more pop, to me, are just a sense of clarity, the vocals are more upfront, and there's a sense of slickness that maybe The Preatures didn't have. I don't mean this in a pop apologist way at all, but I am always going to be a rock performer. That's who I am. I don't know if fans are concerned about that, just come to a show and everything will be fine. That's all I have to say about it. The rock and roll spirit to me is just a sense of imperfection and character, and a fearlessness to live in the moment. And the pop agenda is clarity, a sense of finesse, and a forthrightness that I embraced on this album. I wasn't hiding my voice behind or buried inside a wall of sound.

There's so much beautiful, strong femininity on this album that's so beautiful to hear. There's a real growth in it, and it's a kind of album where I just wanted to get all my girlfriends together and just remind them that they're wonderful people, without that sounding trite, you know what I mean?
With a lot of the songs on the record, there was this sense that I was cloaking myself in the music and in the songwriting as a healing psalm and I do think that's needed for a lot of women at the moment. And a return to storytelling as well, which I always wanted to do with The Preatures but I never quite could allow myself to be so personal in the group, whereas this record, I really could just speak truthfully, and conversationally as well.

Absolutely. You've spoken about your view before that it’s not just all the men suffocating the women, it's not about that. It's this collective notion of how we feel we're not heard, so we don't even bother raising our voices. And with this album, we can hear you.
It's nice to be heard. And it was great working with different producers. I love guitar, and I will probably on the next album want to do something that feels more guitar driven. Because now that I'm at that point where I want to start playing shows again, and I’m like ‘oh shit, I'm gonna miss the guitar, I'm gonna need that element on stage’. I want to leave myself lots of room to go in whatever direction I want musically. I don't see myself making a techno house record anytime soon! I'm always going to be in love with with guitar and guitar music.

You would probably do it really well, but I’m going to thank you for not doing a techno house album!
We will be having this conversation a few years down the track when I release that dance album!

Izzi is out now via Island Records Australia. You can buy and stream here.

To keep up with all things Isabella Manfredi you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.