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You might remember a major event in Australian pop called Frente. They were from Melbourne; the singer Angie Hart was only seventeen when they began and only a couple of years older when they started having enormous hits. It all went crackers for Frente. Totally off the scale in terms of stardom and recognition and all that. Angie was just a girl. But boy, the girl could always sing.
That was then. This is now. Angie’s got her own thing going on, finally. And this is the thing: back then with Frente, it was like she was trying to be the singer and trying hard with her singing. Now it’s all totally effortless, the most natural thing in the world. It seems ridiculous that she never did a solo album before. It seems unthinkable. How could it be that Angie Hart is only now ready to be out on her own?
Well – she is. The debut solo album is called Grounded Bird and it’s lovely and strange. “I don’t really know what the songs mean at the time of writing them,’’ she says. “I can figure them out later, but at the time they’re a mystery. They’re like weird little messages to myself.’’
The facts of it are that Angie lives in Melbourne again after nine years in Los Angeles but she started the record over there, about five years ago. It’s taken ages to finish, mainly because she didn’t really know exactly what she was doing in the first place. She was just writing songs. She was in a band called Splendid at the time, with her now ex-husband. That in itself should offer a few clues about some of the themes of Grounded Bird.
Then, suddenly, she found herself alone. The writing continued. Sad songs, angry songs, dreamy songs, hopeful songs and hopeless songs. Songs about wondering. Songs about transformation; the act of moving away from who you are.
A little later she started writing with her friend Ben Lee in LA; he, like her, had just gone through a break-up. Angie calls him the ‘’catalyst for so many changes in my life.’’ The pair talked things through and wrote songs; he gave her confidence. “We threw things back and forth,’’ she says. ‘’We spent a lot of time laughing at our own tragedies.’’
The first songs on the album to come were Sand, a dreamscape about the fragility of the human soul, a place where sometimes even though you do your best you have to start again. It’s a shimmering, aquatic, slo-motion guitar symphony. Then there was Asleep, a re-make of an older Splendid song. There’s a bit in it that sounds just like Bronski Beat, which can only be good.
A batch of songs came from another canny collaboration – with Craig Ross, the Texan producer behind Patti Griffin, Lisa Germano, Spoon, Red House Painters and Daniel Johnston. He and Angie were writing what she calls ‘’devotional’’ songs: spontaneous mantras, really; chants and ideas and songs that were written without much in the way of forethought or afterthought. ‘’Song-writing in its purest form,’’ she says. ‘’Kind of like modern day hymnals.’’ These include Don’t Be Shy, Start My Day and First Time.
The song Kiwi was inspired by a New Zealand short film about, funnily enough, a kiwi, a flightless bird, who transforms himself through great achievement and ends up strapping on some aviator goggles and taking to the skies. “I transposed that idea onto myself,’’ Angie says: ‘’…I’m not asking for the world/I’m just staring at the sky/I don’t think I’m more than just a girl/but I would like no more than to fly.’’ It’s a beautiful song, probably the thematic and sonic centrepiece of the album. The way it builds to a symphonic, Icelandic Sigur-Ros style crescendo gives new meaning to the old rock quiet/loud formula.
This is in no small part due to producer Justyn Pilbrow, the guitarist in New Zealand band Elemeno P. The pair bonded over a shared love of My Bloody Valentine after meeting at a songwriter’s retreat in New Zealand. Angie had what she thought was her album when she met him. But he turned her head around about the way things could be, the way things could sound. They wrote a song called My Thief together, then Justyn came to Melbourne at the end of 2006 and they set about recording Grounded Bird in a warehouse in Brunswick with a band comprising some of Melbourne’s finest and most seasoned musicians.
In the end Angie just wanted to get out what was in her head. But no-one could have guessed that her head would contain such dreamy, strange and beautiful things. No-one could have guessed that, all these years after Frente it could have come to this.
“When you boil it right down,’’ she says, ‘’all my songs are about relationships in some way whether they’re dark and sad or uplifting.†She’s interested in the human condition ,in limitation and transformation. She’s interested in spiritual matters, in the way the mind works individually and collectively. “It’s pretty raw and simplistic, this record,’’ she says. ‘’It’s small and intimate. But the images in it are the things that fell straight out of my subconscious.’’
Management: Will Larnach-Jones [email protected]
Bookings: Evan Davis at The Harbour Agency [email protected]
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