INTERVIEW: Thndo on her reintroduction with single 'Fall': "The biggest thing I bring to my artistry is my honesty. I've never shied away from things that are difficult to talk about or confront."

Oct 18

Oct 18 INTERVIEW: Thndo on her reintroduction with single 'Fall': "The biggest thing I bring to my artistry is my honesty. I've never shied away from things that are difficult to talk about or confront."

Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Laura Du Vè

Zimbabwean-born, Melbourne based singer Thndo (formerly known as Thando) has been an acclaimed voice on the Australian music scene since 2013. Alongside appearance on two seasons of The Voice Australia, she has performed at almost every major festival including Bluesfest, WOMAdelaide, Adelaide Cabaret Festival, Groovin the Moo, BIGSOUND, Jungle Love and Woodford Folk Festival.

At the end of September she released her new single ‘Fall’, her first new music since her 2021 EP Life In Colour and also since she was a finalist in the 2022 series of The Voice. The song marks a new chapter in Thndo’s career and sees her baring her heart and soul in a emotive performance.

A lush R&B-gospel-pop song with occasional flashes of synths, it soars with Thndo’s powerful voice as well as the cinematic, orchestral soundscape, full of light and shade and divine melodies. Lyrically the song explores the problems that can seep into long term relationships and the need to sometimes let go completely. “Please give me a reason why I should stay and fight / Don’t want to waste away, stuck in our same old ways / I’ve given my all to you, what more else can I do?” she sings.

To celebrate the release of ‘Fall’ and Thndo’s return, she will be touring throughout October and November on the Reintroduction Tour. Under the musical direction of James Bowers with accompaniment by strings of The Penny Quartet, Thndo will play headline shows in Sydney, Brisbane and Canberra as well as performing at festivals in Wangaratta and Wynnum.

Always an artist with that special something, Thndo has grown into an even more accomplished artist and ‘Fall’ is an incredible comeback as well as undoubtedly a career highpoint. Her upcoming releases are going to be something to look forward to, and we recently caught up with Thndo to find out more.

Hi Thndo, it’s so lovely to meet you. How are things in your exceptionally musical world?
Chaotic, but learning to just enjoy every day and not think too much about the future! It's been really good, just being in the moment.

That's amazing. You’ve spoken in the past about your career, and the gravity of going into this industry, and not jumping the gun because you never know how certain things will work out. Is that where how feeling with it at the moment as well?
Definitely. Something that I've always struggled with in the past is being in the moment and celebrating the wins while they're happening. I always used to take any kind of progress or any sort of exciting thing happening in my career and be like, ‘okay, cool, what's next? How can we springboard off this opportunity here? Where can I see myself in 6, 12, 18 months time?’ Whereas now I'm just letting everything simmer and sit. I think the pandemic was definitely something that forced me to be able to take stock of where I am right now. Having obviously come off the back of The Voice, everything has been going at 100 kilometres an hour at the moment. So I'm just trying to enjoy the wins, because it doesn't really matter where I'll be in the future, I've got to actually enjoy it now, otherwise, it's for nothing, you know?

Absolutely. It's only really recently where you've allowed yourself to go, ‘this is what I do, this is my job, I'm a singer-songwriter and I'm performing’. How has that shift been?
For the last six or seven years, pre-pandemic, music was the primary source of my inspiration, my income, it's been my livelihood, so I've always sort of existed in this space. But since becoming a parent there's the anxieties of not being able to provide for your child if things did not allow you the opportunity to go out and make money and make music. And lo and behold, the pandemic happened and that was very much the reality of what my life was. Being able to readjust to things, I've got a more deliberate way of conducting myself in this industry now. I don't take an opportunity just because it's presented to me, it has to be something that I'm going to enjoy and will allow me the space to continue my primary role as a mother to my child. And if there's anything that takes me away from that, then I step back. It's been a big shift, because, not everything's about money anymore. It's not about survival, it’s more about establishing my legacy.

That's a really nice way to put it, establishing a legacy. You recently was released ‘Fall’, and that's been circulating in our speakers and headspace for a couple of weeks and we are all the better for it. It's a really good one to belt along to even if no one can get the notes that you do. Talk me through the creation of this track, it's a personal song for you and you can really hear it.
The producer that I worked with, Hamley, we've collaborated before and we've got really great chemistry. He just has a way of being able to put together these musical ideas that have always just tapped into something in my subconscious that I didn't know I needed to say. ‘Fall’ was no exception to that, but in my mind when I went in for that session, I was going in to write a big pop summer anthem, something to come off the back of my appearance on The Voice. I went in a more pop direction when I was on the show, and I really loved the challenge of being in the pop realm, vocally it was some of the hardest work that I've ever had to do so I thought it would be really great to see how that translates to my original music. I don't even know what happened. Hamley was just putting together some loops and he came across this organ sound and there was just something about the organ that took me to a really real place in my lyrics. I do a stream of consciousness when I'm songwriting, I'll have music going and whatever emotions I'm feeling as I'm listening to whatever this music is, I'm just writing and I free write for 10 minutes. All the little random thoughts that are in my head and just sort of get down to the core of what it is I'm really trying to say. For about three years, I've been struggling to articulate my dissatisfaction in the relationship that I was in, and I don't know what it was about the chords of this organ sample that Hamley had found that just started this process of unloading three years of repressed emotions.

I actually have made no edits to the lyrics of ‘Fall’ from when it was first written. I sat with the song for a few months before making the decision to release it, because I wanted to see if emotionally I was still in the same place and if it was something that I wanted to share with people because of how vulnerable and personal it is. The biggest thing that I've been able to bring to my artistry is my honesty in my music and I've never shied away from things that are quite difficult to talk about or confront. I think that's what people tend to resonate with when they hear my music because they can see that I'm not sorry for saying what I'm saying in the music, and that gives them a sense of bravery to be able to have that introspection for themselves. ‘Fall’ was no exception to that. It took about 45 minutes to write, it literally just started with a stream of consciousness and then the song basically wrote itself. It's never happened that easily for me before ever.

I just love that lyric ‘I know you're not at the bottom waiting to catch me’. That's the one people go, ‘Oh, shit. Been there but never said it!’
Yeah, you know, it's so hard. To give you some background this was a decade long relationship. And if after 10 years, you still don't feel that you have the security to fully allow yourself to be vulnerable, let your walls down and actually have and nurture a genuine relationship with this other person, then obviously there's something that's very wrong. People fall in love, people talk about falling in love, the whole idea of falling is that there's someone at the bottom to protect you from the risk that you're taking, that soft pillow, that safety net. No one's gonna freefall if they think they're just gonna land on the ground and get hurt. You don't allow yourself that, and you wouldn't take that risk. That metaphor was really, really powerful, because I've been free falling for 10 years [and] this is where I found myself.

You’re so right. The way you perform and the way you write, it always comes with such integrity. Has songwriting always been a part of your voice? Was it songwriting first? When did you start?
I started writing songs literally as early as I started singing. I was singing in the church when I grew up - it so funny, because I think of myself as the biggest cliché, an R&B singer that started singing in church! But there's just something about my music and the way that approach my artistry, I do it in service of my audience, it's for them. As much as the story is from my perspective and the experiences that I've had, I always think about how the stories are going to be received and what they'll do for the person who's consuming them. I sort of recognised that from a really young age because my mum bought me this karaoke machine, you could put cassette tapes in it and record yourself so I used to make these little mixtapes for my family all the time, and just have my little keyboard and come up with some really easy chords. At 9 or 10 years old, thinking I knew what love was, or what heartbreak is, or if I had a fight with one of my friends at school, I’d go home and write a really angry song about it and record it. It was me learning that music was my outlet for processing my emotions, because I never really learned how to have confrontations with people in a productive way. My way of doing it was to write a song. Journaling has always been a really big part of that as well because if you see your emotions and your thought process in writing, you can read them from a different perspective and you can make sense of things a bit more. So, you know, it's, it's been a really big part of my artistry, because I feel the way that I deliver. The way that I serve to my audience is really coming from a place of, ‘I understand the gravity of the words that I'm presenting to you right now and I want you to have an opportunity to reflect on what they mean to you, and what you can take away from what you're about to hear’.

Writing music has always been at the core of my artistry. I love singing covers, I love seeing other people's music, because it offers me an opportunity to find myself in their stories. I'll never sing a song that I can't relate to in any way, and that ended up being a challenge when I went on The Voice because I was getting assigned songs that I'd never heard of. I really had to do some deep diving, for example, ‘Chandelier’ by Sia, she's addressing having a drinking problem. So I had to think of a time in my life where maybe I've struggled with substance abuse, and it took me back to whenever I was on tour in the early days prior to having my daughter, I couldn't get on stage without a drink in my hand. Why was I relying on alcohol to be able to give myself courage to get on stage? What was that compensating for? Why is alcohol such a normalised part of the music industry? I had this whole process before I got on stage, and I sang that song for the show and no one would have known that, but I feel like that was probably one of my most impactful performances because I had related that to something real to do with me, even though it was through the lens of someone else's similar experience.

And how brilliant that you were able to do that. You've also got a background in theatre, with your role in The Colour Purple and also Dreamgirls. Performing a character on stage, how do you see that in your live performances now? Because every review I see of your show is that it was the most personal show and you just deliver something different every time. It is always described as this spectacular, and very theatrical.
In the early stages of my career, I definitely had to have a character, an alter ego, in order to be able to deliver what I did. It's really strange, because being here in Australia, audiences have a very, very low tolerance for superiority complex or a god complex or holier than now. The second anyone thinks you're getting too big for your boots, they do what they can to knock you down a peg because they're just trying to humble you. You've got to have a really thick skin if you're wanting to do something outside of the box, or try something that is out of the ordinary, because the second you step out of that, you've got to be really aware of how it's going to be perceived, and what you're going to do with the feedback that you get. I knew the way to protect myself anytime I took a risk on stage was to come up with a character who was invincible and quite literally repelled any criticism about the sort of performance I was putting on. I think about drag performance, they paint their makeup the way that they do, because they're exaggerating features, the way that they dress, it's just an exaggeration. As a performer, you're out there representing yourself as a heightened version of yourself. So I had to just come up with this really larger than life, boisterous personality that didn't care. Over the years, and obviously through my lived experience, and just spending as much time on stages as I have that alter ego just kind of became who I am. Somewhere along the line, that line got blurred, and people started to experience who I am off stage through my stage performances. I felt comfortable enough to be able to allow myself to go through the emotions of the songs that I'd written while I'm on stage and it was no longer a character, it was very much who I am as a person. I feel like maybe that's why my performances resonate with people, because people can tell it's no longer a character, it's very much who I am as a person. That alter ego gave me the bravery to step into the truth of who I actually am as a person. The audience is the most important part of my live show because if they're enjoying themselves, we know that we're doing a good job, and that fuels our performance. So it's really important for me to have that.

Absolutely. I'm loving everything you're saying here. You released the most wonderful EP last year with Life In Colour, and that whole EP, I'm getting TLC, I'm getting theatrical rock, I'm getting old-school hip hop. There’s so many elements of it musically, but inside it there is such an important discussion to be had in Australia that Australia is still very scared to have. Can you talk to me a little bit about how you approached going into that EP and what it meant for you?
Life In Colour was the first time that I felt brave enough to talk about my experiences growing up black in Australia, in my music. It's actually funny because a lot of my audience, a lot of my fan base, tend to be typical Australian people, people from the country. I grew up in Canberra, so I've got a lot of fans that haven't necessarily spent a lot of time around people of diverse backgrounds. They're not very aware or not very conscious of how certain behaviours and things could be considered intolerant. It's not until I started surrounding myself with more people of colour that I felt empowered enough to be able to speak on some of the experiences that I've had, not in a way to complain about the way things are, but in a way to be an accessible way of learning that that type of mindset isn't actually helpful for us as a society. For us to be able to move forward and actually be able to facilitate real inclusion is being able to acknowledge our differences, and how they can work together to create a safe cultural space for cultural exchange, and for us to grow as a nation together and to move forward. All the things that Australia thinks it already is, but really isn't, because there's a lot of things that continue to show us to this day that's just not the case. Progress is still way too slow. So we have to find better ways to sort of accelerate these conversations.

Life In Colour was really great for me, because a lot of my community and a lot of my friends who are white, who wouldn't necessarily have had the perspective of what it was like for me growing up as the only black person in majority white spaces and the kind of discomfort that can come from that, and how they can then moving forward facilitate a more inclusive and welcoming space for other people of colour that might actually enter those spaces. The biggest thing for me is I have a beautiful three year old daughter, and she's biracial, so obviously, she's growing up with a black identity and a white identity. I knew that there were going to be times in her life in her coming up, where she's going to struggle with questions about where she comes from, what she knows about her heritage, why is her hair type like that, why is her skin this colour. It's going to be a totally different experience to what I experienced, because I'm not mixed race, I'm black, I'm African so my experience will be very different to hers. There might be the struggle of figuring out which world she fits into. My intention with this record was to create a space where she doesn't have to choose, it was just a matter of just embracing her identity and all the capacities of that. [I didn’t want] this record to be ‘woe is me, being black as hard, things are hard for us because this is happening’. I really wanted it to be a positive outlook and a hopeful outlook for what society could be moving forward if we make the changes now. Having hard conversations is inevitable. We have to talk about the disparities between white Australia and the rest of the country and what multiculturalism actually brings into our society and how we can respect people's cultures, and the way that filters out into our media and representation. Having those conversations, as hard as they may be, creates a better space for the future generations. I don't want my children's children to still be having these conversations. It starts with us. I'm but a drop in the ocean, because there's so many incredible artists and activists that have been doing the work long before me, but as an artist, I feel I have a responsibility because I have a platform to be able to continue those conversations. I never want to be viewed as a palatable black person, because I don't talk about race or make white people feel uncomfortable. This record was to make people feel uncomfortable so I can have these conversations in a hopeful and optimistic way. I feel like I achieved that, because it's been received really well by all sides of my community.

I'm loving this so much. It's so beautiful. You have an amazing tour coming up, this is exciting. Tell me all about it.
The Reintroduction Tour is my first foray back into the music industry with my new artistic identity. I spoke before about no longer being apologetic for taking up space and being the personality that I am and I really just want to invite people fully into who that is. I'm diving into my back catalogue, and I've got some changed perspectives. These songs have stood the test of time and evolved into different pieces of art, because I now have different experiences to sing from. So when I'm singing about loss, or I'm singing about my mental health - I have a song called ‘Happy’ which I wrote about anxiety, it's been five years since I've written that song. My battle with that, and how that changed me as a person now that I have an understanding of what anxiety and depression is and how it manifests in me, has been able to give me a much better perspective on how to manage it. So listening to the songs and watching them in the development, we just did our first show in Melbourne with this new show, it was just such a powerful moment. I'm just really looking forward to being able to share that with the country because no one's seen me in this capacity before. It's all original music, and it's also music from my new record Lessons In Love, and all my learnings from the last decade coming out of this relationship and finding love for myself again, finding new love and how to navigate that, processing the loss of my whole 20s through this record. It's gonna be a really special opportunity to connect as an artist. I've got bells and whistles, beautiful backing singers, a string quartet and a piano. Storytelling is really important to me for this one, so I really wanted to create a beautiful intimate experience.

‘Fall’ is out now via Ditto. You can buy and stream here.

To keep up with all things Thndo you can follow her on Instagram and Facebook.