INTERVIEW: Tori Forsyth releases new album 'All We Have Is Who We Are': "It feels like that next really authentic step towards the person that I want to be."
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Published: 3 May 2024
Australian alt-country artist Tori Forsyth today releases All We Have Is Who We Are, her first album in three years.
The album comes after a period of introspection, change and reevaluation which saw Forsyth question whether she would ever make music again. All We Have Is Who We Are tells the story of Forsyth’s struggles, and her emerging on the other side stronger than ever. Perhaps not surprisingly, it stands as arguably Forsyth’s greatest album to date.
“This album was written at a time of understanding life a little better and a little more. It feels like a step forward for me,” Forsyth says. “It symbolises that it isn't always easy to cast things as yes or no or beginning and end, that there is a grey zone in which most things exist. The water is murky, but we swim through it anyway. It's a reconciliation with myself and a goodbye to a version of me that needed to die. The healing is in the living of life; the songs come from that experience. Being truly part of life, and how without that, there are no stories or songs. This record reflects that entirely and is the benchmark from which I will eternally create from.”
The album kicks off with ‘All We Are’, a country-pop-rock track with an absolutely infectious beat that sets out the story both of the album and Forsyth’s journey of self discovery that led to the album. “I'll run away until the moon peeks through the stars / And I'll leave it all behind cause all we have is who we are.”
‘Didn’t Mean a Thing’ is a gentle, almost swaying ballad that amps up the country sound, while ‘Made Your Bed’ also leans heavily into the country sound but in the opposite direction - it is moody, broody and incredibly atmospheric and almost cinematic in its broad soundscape.
‘Alchemist’ is a gorgeous track, a highlight on the album, and has a more pop sound with its uplifting melodies and almost perky beat which you will be hard pressed to not move along to. Lyrically, Forsyth sings of the complexity of being an artist and needing to please multiple groups, and choosing to follow your own path: ‘I couldn't be what they wanted…choosing the light instead of simply existing / I am a poet, I am an alchemist’.
‘Aces and Eights’ brings in a rockier sound to the album with a steady beat and Forsyth’s unique, expressive voice never sounding better as she conveys the frustration of trying to find your way. “I’m still trying to catch up with who I know I can be / But my fear of failing is like a rain cloud.”
The album ends on the beautiful ‘Happy’, a country-pop song with a melancholy edge as Forsyth explores the conflict of achieving your dreams but realising the dream doesn’t match the reality: “The dream’s not the dream that I thought it would be / My only dream now is to be happy.”
Forsyth has always been a special artist who creates music that connects whole heartedly with the listener and All We Have Is Who We Are sees Forsyth at her most confident and realised as an artist. An album full of heart, emotion and earthily honest music, it is surely one of Australian music’s standout release of 2024. We recently sat down with Forsyth to chat all about the album’s creation.
Hi Tori! All We Have Is Who We Are - what a beautiful album! There are a couple of reminders on there of your previous releases but I was also like, ‘Whoa, this is something completely different!’ But it’s still very much you. Talk to me about the creation of this one and where it came from?
Thank you so much! So this one nearly didn't happen. I got to a point around 2020 and I didn't know if I had much else to say, because songwriting for me is very much ‘what have you got to say?’ And if you don't really have much to say, what are you offering? So in 2020, and the chaos that that was, I didn't know what I wanted to do, and I wasn't feeling inspired. In 2021, I released a record (Provlépseis) and then I took a really big step back from everything music, and I stopped. I stopped trying to do anything, and I just surrendered to ‘Okay, let's just see what happens and where life wants to take me’.
I preoccupied myself with a bunch of different projects and it was the best thing I could have done. When you're a songwriter, you really need to experience life, you need to be out doing other things. There's only so many songs you can write about being on the road! So I just lived life and at the end of 2021, into 2022 I was like, ‘I'm gonna set myself a bit of a task. I'm gonna sit down every day and just see what happens with no pressure.’ There was no intention behind it, and then I wrote the album! It felt like that next really authentic step towards the person that I wanted to be, so it's quite a pivotal album. It kind of sums up the last decade of my life whilst having a positive way forward as well.
I want to talk about your opening track 'All We Are', it feels like a montage in a Tarantino gunslinger! Like there's a real urgency there. You have said that you wrote this at a time when things were just feeling a little lighter, and you're feeling a little more settled, more like yourself. Where does 'All We Are' fit into that?
Before COVID, I was on the road full time, and having a home, like a real home not just a base but having the opportunity to actually make a home for myself, that was so new for me. So that song is really about the journey of feeling like you're constantly going and going and going, and then finally getting to a place where you're like, ‘Oh, hang on a minute, I don't have to operate like that anymore’. Like. I don't need to fulfil this version of what life looks like because everyone's told me I need to do it that way. You can actually just relax for a minute and collect yourself and bring yourself into it, rather than concentrating on what everybody else thinks that you should be doing.
That's interesting, because I feel this comes a lot in the Australian music industry, particularly with regards to women, in there's so very little space with regards to genre. If one person does one thing, and they get some successes, it’s like okay, you have to stay there and do that, because that's what space we’ve allocated to you. There's very little room to experiment, without running the risk of losing support all together. Your music is steeped in country, you had your previous album, Provlépseis, which had this beautiful thrashing of guitars and I feel like you're always moving through that, but again it feels like you're swimming against it, because you have to force your way through.
I agree with you. With the last record, there was a case of me having to really get comfortable in being really uncomfortable with releasing an album. I was very uncomfortable. The perception of it was so far away from where people put me that I think a lot of people didn't understand it, and that caused them to go, 'oh, well, I don't get it. So I don't know about that'. Obviously, the core fan base can see the connection between it but if you're someone that kind of scrapes the surface of records, it didn't make a great deal of sense. If you're going to relentlessly pursue authenticity in your career, you have to be extremely uncomfortable with that friction and extremely uncomfortable with not being always fully understood fully. For me, this album felt the easiest I've ever done because I've done the hard part, I went through that friction to be able to get out on the other side and be like, ‘whatever I have to offer is it is what I have to offer’. And I'm okay with that now.
'Aces And Eights' is one of my favourite tracks, and again, that goes hard, and your voice on this is just really beautiful. Talk to me about this track, and also its placement on the album, because I feel like it comes at this great juncture.
Thank you As far as the tracklist for the record, it's very intentional. It definitely paints the picture of the journey, it's very much the chapters. 'Aces And Eights', this is a fun one, I just kind of I wanted to write a song that felt a bit more driven. I wanted to bring in a few different kind of metaphors and of where I was at at that time, because at the time I was renovating and doing songwriting workshops up in The Treehouse in Flaxton, in Malaney, and it was one of the best experiences I've ever had. II was terrified, because I can't do music and such a giant [renovation] project that took all of me to do. It got to the point where I had to really choose - okay, what do you want to do? This song is just about the fear of just leaving that chapter behind and moving into the next one and what that holds, because it's a big unknown. Coming back into the music industry was a big unknown for me too, because I didn't know what to expect. I don't think anyone did, post covid. It was just a big question mark and asking myself that question of what's the gamble?
I love that. The song 'Not In Control' - I can't wait to hear this live because I think when the crowd gets stomping their feet together on the sing along, that one's going to be amazing! Speaking of your voice, you talked to us before about when you first started singing you were told that you had a weird voice, but you leant into that and it's actually really been one of the things that's made your career. Can you talk to me a little bit about how you harnessed your vocals in this album compared to others?
I mean that's a great question. For a few of the tracks, particularly 'Not In Control', it's really the the top of what I can do vocally. I wanted to push myself to that next zone. I always like to do that on records, to try and see how far I can go vocally and that song definitely reflects that. I also wanted a lot of the ballads to feel calm, I wanted it to feel like there was this acceptance across all of the more deeper lyrical content. I do listen to a lot of music, and a lot of different genres, and to be a country musician that tries to squish all that in. I think this record did it really well, it was able to stay country without that big question mark, which is what I wanted. At the time I was listening to a lot of country but with these particular songs, I am kind of breaking out of that and having that more rock vocal. Recording the vocals, I was extremely present in what I was saying and I think that was really important, whether I was pushing those boundaries or pulling back a bit to just make the lyrics a little bit more prominent.
I wanted to chat about 'Good Enough' because it's like this campfire fantasy song and your voice is just exceptional. And the arrangement behind it is so subtle, but so powerful when it swells and pulls back, it's got such depth to it. Can you tell me more about what you wanted to achieve with this?
With this record, I haven't recorded like this ever. I had my band in with us, we got it all done over 10 days. Scott Horscroft produced it and he wanted me to be playing guitar on every track, and that was terrifying! I've never done anything like that. All my other records, I was there for the process but I didn't play on them. So Scott told me he wanted me to play ‘Good Enough’ acoustically, and I was just like, ‘do you want people to like the song? Or do you want me to be authentic?’ They set me up in a room with a microphone, and there was no click track, there's no nothing. It's just me playing this song and I think we did it three times. The whole record was done that way. It was very intuitive, when everything kind of pulled together. It just felt like a very easy process of let's follow this path and see where that takes us.
I'm extremely proud of playing on the record. I don't consider myself a guitar player, when it's the hierarchy of what I am in music, that's at the bottom! To have that contribution to me also was like, ‘Okay, you're not a terrible guitar player, you can you hold your own in there’. It was good.
Do you think you'll ever get over that kind of imposter syndrome?
I'd love to say yes, because I would love to be over it! But to be honest, it's like new level new devil, I feel like you kind of get there with one thing and then it's like, ‘okay, we've reached that new level now and there's something else that we need to move through’. We're always constantly getting to a new height of our capabilities and moving through that. Having not played on records and then being forced to do it, that for me was extremely eye opening and I feel like I can do it now. In turn, that's actually made me more confident in being able to play live. I've always played live, obviously, but just that confidence of knowing that, this is what the record sounds like, these people are getting exactly what I can do.
You’ve spoken before about how your songwriting started pretty much from school and this poetry competition your teacher had going with haikus. With this album in particular, did it come to you in a melody first, or were you just drip feeding yourself lyrics?
My process is pretty straightforward with songwriting, I have to do it all at once. I'm not the kind of person who does a verse and then goes away and thinks about it. If it ain't getting done now, it ain't getting done at all! It's like a bubble, I have to be completely in it, completely surrendering to what is actually happening. And if it's not happening, it's just not happening.
I sit down with a guitar, I might have a concept most of the time, what story do I want to write. For 'Past And Present', I had this quirky idea of comparing LA to the South of the US and then really wove a lot of my past into that. I'm really proud of the ability to do that. But for something like that to manifest, it is very much me being in a bubble, and if it doesn't happen between like 45 minutes to an hour and a half, it's probably not going to be finished, it's not going to happen and it's not going to see the light of day. So yes, it's very much a simultaneous thing all at once.
All We Have Is Who We Are is out now via Island Records. You can buy and stream here.
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ALL WE HAVE IS WHO WE ARE TOUR – ON SALE NOW
May 17 - The Vanguard, Sydney Tickets
May 18 - Stag And Hunter, Newcastle Tickets
May 23 - The Tote, Melbourne Tickets
May 26 - Sol Bar, Sunshine Coast Tickets
