INTERVIEW: Lisa Mitchell returns with first album in six years 'A Place To Fall Apart'
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Tamara Dean
Australia’s Lisa Mitchell has been something of a national treasure since she first captured hearts on Australian Idol in 2006. Since her breakthrough, her three albums have all hit the top 10 on the Australian album charts and she has scored five ARIA Award nominations.
Today she returns with her first studio album in six years, A Place To Fall Apart. The album sees Mitchell move from young star into an assured, confident artist unafraid to explore the complexity of being human. Her soundscape has also changed from the electronic-tinged indie of her earlier years into warm, deep. emotive folk-pop interspersed with rich piano ballads.
Written at the height of the first stage of the pandemic, the album is the journey of Mitchell’s unravelling, a process which she wants people to understand is not something to be frightened of. Unravelling is a necessary part of life which leads to rebuilding, and becoming a better person.
“This album is a place to fall apart in,” she explains. “Take this patchwork blanket of melancholic love stories between the human and beyond-human and pitch it as a tent, either inside your lounge room or out in the bush. Lie down and look up at the stories.”
A Place To Fall Apart is a powerful album that does what all great music does - it makes you think, it makes you feel connected and most of all it makes you feel. The album may have been Mitchell’s own personal journey, but it is an album you can build your own journey of introspection with and it is arguably her finest work to date. We recently sat down with Mitchell to find out more about the creation of the album.
Lisa, hello it is such a joy to chat to you today. You have just released your delicious new album A Place To Fall Apart. How are things in your very musical world?
I'm super happy to have the new album out. It's my fourth album and it is always just such a special feeling knowing that these songs that have lived with me for so long are finding their way into other people's lives, and their homes and lounge rooms and their air pods. It's incredible.
There's a lot of heady laying in the bath songs on this album as well.
That's so true. Yes, there is song about taking a bath. So yeah!
We can go in the literal sense, but even in the sound there’s this ‘processing the month that I've just had in a bath’ vibe!
That's so cool. A lot of the songs are quite spacious in the production as well. Probably because the guitar patterns that I was really obsessed with at the time are quite repetitive and trancey. So I feel like that has created a bit of a structure that because of the repetition it becomes quite trancey in an acoustic sense of the word.
That's a really good way to put it. There's something very certain circumnavigating about it and this album was very much inspired by looking outwardly in a sort of global collapse, shall we say. Can you talk me through a little bit about how you approached this album and also your inspirations for going into it as a collective?
The album is a combination, and maybe it's all very connected, of matters of the heart, love songs, breakup, songs, melancholy around love. I got to a point with this one breakup, where I was so sick of writing these pathetic love songs and I just had this moment with my guitar and a song that didn't make it on the album but it was a really significant moment because mid song I changed the whole direction of the song back into what I wanted to write about rather than feeling victimised by this relationship. I've always written songs that are not just love songs, love songs are really fantastic I don't have anything against them, but I wanted to get to write about things that I cared about, that was outside of a relational sense. Things like climate change, my relationship with land, being a white woman living on Wurundjeri country. I wanted to hold space for myself to explore these topics in my writing, so it was really important for me to reclaim that space. On the album, it's a blend of love songs, they're quite inky and melancholic and quite indulgent. And then other songs that are more, like you say, outward looking and more concerned with issues that affect lands and people and society.
This is your first album since Warriors, which is just such a great album as well. There's a shift musically, as there should be as someone develops, but I wanted to know how you see you've developed as a creative, particularly with regards to how you approach your songwriting in this large chunk of time since we've last heard an album from you?
Awesome question. I'm definitely someone that is not getting up every day at 9am and writing. I’m very much living my life and writing is always a commentary of everything else that I do. A lot of people would think of me as a singer songwriter, that's the main thing I do, but I really don't think of myself as that. Not in a way that it's self deprecating, but just in a genuine way. I'm studying shiatsu massage at the moment, I study Qigong, which is a Chinese energy cultivation form.
I've always done music, it has been a huge part of my life, but I really recognise it's not a whole food for me, it's very much a commentary. It's like my diary, so for me to focus fully on music never feels appropriate for me as a writer. Between Warriors and this new album, A Place To Fall Apart, I was just spending a lot of time in London and Paris, and I chose to come back to Melbourne, and commit to being in Melbourne. That felt very significant in a way that no one else really noticed, but it really marked a moment in my life in 2017-2018 and the songs kind of start around there. I was also taking a deeper dive into my exploration of what it meant to live in Australia. This place that’s called Australia, but obviously it has a much, much deeper history with the indigenous First Nations peoples. I knew that as a storyteller, I needed to know more about the history, and it’s really badly taught in school. I ended up studying an arts degree at a uni in Melbourne and I really got so much out of the Indigenous Studies subjects. I did some ethnomusicology, which was just my favourite thing ever. Being a musician learning about history and culture through music, it was just the coolest thing ever. I had this beautiful experience of going a bit deeper into things.
I wrote a song called ‘I Believe In Kindness’, which is the second single on the album the day before the 2019 climate strike, just because you could feel everyone coming together. There's just something so powerful about that feeling of people coming together, especially, in the age of social media, where we're kind of connected, but we're kind of not. So the album has just been a commentary through all of that time.
It's such a melodically uplifting song as well, which is a really lovely approach considering the subject matter You've got this beautiful track on the album called ‘Support Your Unravelling’ and it's complex and it's layered and there's this beautiful line in it ‘there's no word in nature in the Nyoongar language / Another Western madness / Welcome to rehab.’ I just love it. Can you please talk me through that track?
I was reading heaps of stuff at uni and I came across this article about the water catchment area in the area that's now known as Perth. The author was talking about that literally in their language they don't need a word to refer to nature because in their worldview, they are part of nature so they would never need to separate that concept. I just thought that was such a fantastic contrast to the West and what I've grown up thinking that that's nature and this is me.The West has so much to learn from different cultures all over the world, especially from the ancient cultures from this land. At the start of the song I talk about ‘it wasn't always this colour, it used to be lighter’, and I'm talking about my bathers and when you swim in the river they go a bit brown. That awakened me to the deeper history of the ancient names of these places, for example, the Murray River that I grew up on, it’s name in Yorta Yorta is Tongala. For me to have gone down to that river every day and to have not known its real name, there's just these dissonances that aren't surprising when we sit with the reality that Australia is a colonial project. So this song is grappling with identity and the feeling of once you know, you can't unknow and so you're left to continue this lifelong understanding and unlearning and accepting and making peace with and questioning and unravelling. That's why I talk about supporting your unravelling because as much as it’s nourishing in one way to understand about one's own ignorance, it's also painful. I have noticed the more I support myself in that, the more I'm able to transform and continue to expand and question.
I think this is a really beautiful place to put it, by promoting change, ever so gently, in your art. No one's listening when they're being shouted at, so this is absolutely perfect. You seem to be staying curious constantly in your career and I think that's something to be very proud of. You are also going to be touring this incredible piece of art. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Yes, so we start in May and we'll be going around Australia. It's going to be so beautiful. This album was recorded mainly live and one of my intentions with this album, right from the beginning, was to have an album that we could easily recreate live. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it's so easy to create music that is very difficult to replicate live, and you end up relying on tech rather than musicianship. I really relate more to being a musician than I do to being a producer or a tech person, so I really wanted to work with musicians and the people that I'm working with are artists. We've ended up with an album that would never sound like [it does] if it was just me and a producer in a room. It really came to life very slowly, every Wednesday we would rehearse through up until the lockdowns in Melbourne. I’ve written the songs and I bring them to [the band] and I am very open to what they want to bring, what they hear, and we workshop it all together. This way of working is very much a band format, which for solo artists, you've got to really choose to do that. It's so easy to macro manage an entire project with a producer, which again, can be a really fun and creative thing and I've definitely done a lot of that in the past. But for me, I really wanted limitation,I want to be the centre of the project to be me in the band, rather than me and the producer. The reality is the producer is never going to tour with you. I've always really struggled with that sense of having invested so much time and energy and soul into this project, and then I have to go and recreate it with people that haven't been through the whole journey. That's what the tour is going to be, it's going to be the fruition of of that intention, and all of our hard work and all of our friendships.
A Place To Fall Apart is out now. You can buy and stream here.
To keep up with all things Lisa Mitchell, you can follow her on Instagram and Facebook.
A Place To Fall Apart Album Launch Tour Dates
20 May - Music On The Hill, Red Hill
21 May - Volta, Ballarat
03 June - Westernport Hotel, San Remo
04 June - Canberra Theatre, Canberra
18 June - The Factory, Sydney
30 June - Theatre Royal, Castlemaine
01 July - Corner Hotel, Melbourne
02 July - Meeniyan Town Hall, Meeniyan
07 July - The Northern, Byron Bay
08 July - The Brightside, Brisbane
09 July - Solbar, Maroochydore
16 July - Jive, Adelaide
23 July - Tanks Arts Centre, Cairns
