Laura Jean: ‘I Don’t Play Around’

Laura Jean is one of Australia’s best songwriters, as proven yet again on her self-titled fourth album. ANTHONY CAREW talks with her at length about lyrics, openness, grant writing, music as a commodity and TV singing competitions.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] If you want to get to know Laura Jean Englert, the 32-year-old Melburnian songwriter who performs and records under her given names, her songs aren’t the worst place to start.

On ‘Valenteen’, from her third album, 2011’s a fool who’ll, she sketched a musical memoir that detailed her a life spent in the “secret garden” of her poetry, a daydreamer’s impressionist portrait of a life spent writing poems and falling in love. On ‘A Mirror On the Earth,’ from her self-titled fourth LP, Laura Jean, she gets even more formative, tracing her beginnings to the meeting of her parents and her unexpected conception (“Despite the care I’ve had in my life/I felt more like an accident than a surprise”).

Each song is filled with rich imagery, and uncommonly good lyrics. They reveal not only specific, idiosyncratic details about Englert’s life, but her skill as a songwriter. Across four albums of hushed folk songs and thoughtful arrangements, she’s honed her voice, both literally and figuratively, leading to the excellent Laura Jean. Recorded in England with longtime PJ Harvey collaborator John Parish, and featuring vocals from Norwegian provocateur Jenny Hval, the LP is big on evocative space, allowing Englert’s voice and words to take centre stage.

Big question first: Is that your dog on the front cover [of Laura Jean]?
Yes it is. His name’s Dusty.

The Kelpie is a recurring figure throughout the record. Is it mostly him?
Not him specifically. The fact that he’s around, and is my dog, was an inspiration to make it not just a dog, but a Kelpie. The Kelpie symbol developed over time. I wrote a lot of songs for this album that didn’t make it. The songs that did happened to be ones where there were lots of dog references. When you’re making an album you look for the strongest songs – the ones that’re clearest, most effective – but also for common themes, common imagery.

When people talk about songwriters, there’s the notion that some are confessionalists, and some are fictionists. But you offer strong examples of both, and can’t be easily described as either.
I just get an idea for a story, in the same way that an author might: sometimes it might be about them, sometimes it’s not. Either way, it’s usually a metaphor for what you’re going through. Whether a song is ‘true’ or not is irrelevant; they’re all stories, and they’re all subjective. Even if a song is about something that happened in your life, that doesn’t necessarily make it true. Memory is very unreliable. I don’t write to confess, I write to express an idea. And sometimes I use things that I’ve seen in my life – or that I thought I’ve seen – to express that idea. To me, even when things are ‘personal’, they’re never really about me, personally; it’s using what I have in front of me to express ideas and feelings that, hopefully, anyone can relate to.

“I started making books of my poetry for my family, which was awkward for them.”

Are you a storyteller by nature? Were you the kind of kid who was making up stories from when they were a toddler? Are you the kind of person who holds court by the bar?
I started writing and reading really young; I was a reader from three. I was encouraged in English at school, my primary school recognised I needed a bit more work, so I would go off with other kids and do projects together, do these writing workshops. I started writing poetry when I was really little, and started making books of my poetry for my family when I was 11, which was a bit awkward for them. Even then, [the poems] were a mix of things I’d experienced and things I’d make up. It’s natural for me to express myself and my existence through telling stories. And stories that are quite confronting, I guess. Stories that are brutally honest, whether they’re about me or not. I don’t play around.

Do you ever write songs that are abstract or poetic? The typical rock ’n’ roll artful-nonsense song? Or do you always stay true to that desire for narrative, and concrete imagery?
When you think of a nonsense song, what do you mean?

Jesus, where do I start? Let’s start at the top: the entire careers of REM, the Pixies, Nirvana.
No! I think Kurt Cobain is a very concise lyricist, and someone who taps into his own life very deeply, if not directly. To me, drawing from the subconscious is almost as personal as it gets. When I think of rock ’n’ roll nonsense I think of T-Rex, or Bob Dylan. Even David Bowie cutting up magazines and making lyrics from them, even though it is nonsense, the subconscious is at work; they sat down and did that for a reason. Some people write for whimsy, and I love that. When I was younger I used to write more whimsical songs, but for some reason the last couple of albums have been very, very serious! [Laughs]

Sorry, that was my jadedness talking. It comes from reviewing records, where you’re tasked with making thematic sense of songs, but often when you actually listen to them closely – or read the lyrics in black-and-white – you start to suspect that there’s actually nothing there, and you’re being sent on a fool’s errand. It also comes from interviewing so, so many humans over the years and being met with that typical self-effacing indie-rock deflection, where people say that they don’t want to talk about their songs, or that they don’t even know what they’re about. Which, to me, is just another way of saying they’re not actually about anything.
That's something I totally can’t relate to. I write stories. I’m always aware of what I’m writing about, and I’m always aware of what I want to say. I write to communicate with other people, and I want to communicate specific ideas, often that I’ve refined over many years. There’s not a hint of “Oh, whoops, I wrote a song” with me. I work on my songs for years. Down to the very last word. I’ll work on one sentence for two years, because it’s not quite right, or it doesn’t fit right, or it’s not saying exactly what I want to say. Unconscious songwriting, or saying “Oh, I don’t really know what it’s about,” that’s something that I just cannot relate to.

If the purpose is to communicate very specific ideas to people, what’s it like, then, to perform your songs, either for individuals or for the collective ‘crowd’, with that expectation?
It’s a powerful experience. It’s not particularly positive or negative. It’s just powerful. It’s a powerful thing to play a song and to have someone cry, or come up to you and start crying. You have to learn to separate yourself from whatever it is that they’re going through. Because sometimes when you write songs that make people cry, they want you to help them with that. And as a nurturing person, as a maternal person, my instinct is to give them a hug, to try and help them. But I’ve learnt over the years that I can’t. I just have to sing. To do what I do. And whatever experience they have of it is theirs, and I can’t help them with that.

“Once I’ve finished performing, I really need to close back up.”

I did a residency [at the Yarra Hotel] recently, and I had a lot of intense reactions from those shows. And it really messed around with me. I had to do a lot of work on how I was feeling about it. I came to the conclusion that I need to protect myself, to be more careful after I’ve played a show. Because when I perform, I go to a different space, and open up. And once I’ve finished performing, I really need to close back up.

Are you an open person when walking around in the world, too?
Very! Very, very, very, very, very. I’m so open to people. I’m a humanist. I love individual human beings, even if I’m disappointed and terrified and sad with humanity. I have a lot of time for people, and I love listening to people; hearing about what they do, what drives them. Most writers, most storytellers are like that: naturally inquisitive about other people. Because you learn so much, and get so much material, just by listening. I’m very open, and quite sensitive. I always have to learn to put boundaries up. I have to monitor what it is that I’m saying, because not everyone is as innocent as me in their communication. I’ve had to learn be a little bit careful, and draw boundaries between what’s mine and what’s to be shared.

How does that relate to things you put in songs, specifically? Do you have to draw lines around what you feel you can and can’t articulate in songs?
You mean, if I hear a story and want to use it in a song, do I have to weigh up the morals of using someone else’s story for my own purposes?

I was speaking more generally. An obvious, universal example is a songwriter writing about their relationship, which is all too common and natural, but involves airing out not just your own private life, but the private life of someone else.
If you’re in a relationship with a songwriter, you definitely need to have a certain attitude to get through it. To handle it you will have to be a secure, confident, and relaxed person; you have to not care what other people think. If you care what other people think, then you’re going to struggle, and some people really do struggle.

Relationships are an intense way of getting to know someone else, and navigating life, so of course you use relationships when writing songs. It’s the place where you feel things so deeply, yet that are so out of your control. A lot of writers draw on those experiences, too. To be able to sketch a character deeply, to make them feel true and human, they have to draw on what they’ve seen, what they’ve experienced in their lives. And that can cause problems with their loved ones. I’ve never been in a relationship with someone who writes songs, so I don’t know what it’s like on that side of the coin. But everyone I’ve ever been in a relationship with is okay with it. They don’t see my songs as being a reflection on them, they see it as feelings I’m expressing.

But it’s rare for me to write about something as I’m actually going through it. When I’m emotional about it in that moment, I can’t write about it; I have no perspective, no objectivity, I’m just living it. And then months later, years later, I might write something about it, but it’ll be about the past and the future at the same time, never about the present. I guess for people who have that more confessional style, that’s exactly when they do write about it, in the moment; where it’s just so urgent, so emotional. If I try and write about something as I’m living it, as a form of therapy, it’s never any good, and just comes out sounding silly. I never go: ‘I really need to write about this thing that I’m caught up in, so I can clear my head!’ That’s so far away from what I do.

You knew Jenny Hval from her secret Melburnian past. As well as her own involvement on your record, was she integral in getting you to work with John Parish?
The funny thing is, I inspired Jenny to record with John. Years ago, I just emailed him cold from his production website. I didn’t have any connection to him at all, I just sent him a message saying “Hey, I’m a songwriter from Melbourne,” and sent him my demos for a fool who’ll. And it just so happened that he actually listened to them and liked them. But then he got busy touring with PJ Harvey, and we couldn’t work out a time. Me and Jenny being good mates, I just mentioned to her that I was talking to John Parish, and she was like, “That’s a great idea!” And she ended up making her last album, [2013’s] Innocence Is Kinky, with him.

This time around, I wrote to John again, and he was able to find some time, and I was able to get a grant. And with Jenny already being familiar with working with John and [engineer] Ali [Chant] in the studio, and because I’m such good friends with her, I thought, ‘It’d be great for her to sing’; and it wasn’t hard for her to get from Oslo to England to record. That’s how it’s always gone, with Jenny and I: we’ve been inspiring each other for 12 years, since we first met playing gigs around Melbourne.

How’s your grant-writing game?
I’ve become pretty strong over the years. I used to get a grant writer to help me when I was young, and they’d get a percentage or whatever. But nowadays I just write my own grants. I’ll often have to apply twice, and I won’t get it the first time. That’s why it sometimes takes me a while between albums, because I’m working on getting the money together. But it’s integral for me to do anything even remotely ambitious.

“Musicians have always had other jobs … it’s something you have to deal with daily.”

There’s this moment in Come Worry With Us!, the documentary about the Silver Mt. Zion – and about the perilous nature of art-making as career, embodied by a band where the main couple are also new parents – where the main guy, Efrim [Menuck], says about applying for a grant: ‘I don’t think it’s the government's responsibility to prop up struggling rock bands.’ It was an almost shocking sentiment to hear as an Australian, where viability as a musician is so often tied to government cash.
My feeling is that the government does have a responsibility to the arts. And in any budget they’ll have a bunch of money allocated for the arts, in the same way that they’ll have money allocated for science, or for defence, or whatever. And I’ve always felt: if they’re giving money to musicians, then I’ll put my hand up for it. It’s like: ‘Great, I’ll grab some of that!’

It’s a funny thing to decide where you draw the line. Like with crowdsourcing, you can say: it’s not my audience’s responsibility to pay me to do what I do. There’s so many different beliefs you can have about what’s right and what’s wrong in getting the money to make art. It’s a fraught thing, and I think it always has been, forever. There was, historically speaking, a very short time, a blip really, in the late 20th century when bands made a lot of money. But musicians have always had other jobs; they’ve always travelled to make money. And it’s something that you have to deal with daily. It’s always going to be a part of whatever it is that you’re doing, whether you like it or not.

Writing about the latest Twerps record, and the opening song…
Oh, yeah, “Give me what I worked for! Money!” Pay me what you owe me, what a sentiment.

It’s amazing that there aren’t more songs around like that. Maybe it’s supposed to be gauche to talk about, but so much of making music or art or doing any kind of freelance-y 21st-century work is asking people to actually pay you for what you’ve done.
Gillian Welch has a song called ‘Everything Is Free’, which is a great song about being a musician. The words go: “Everything is free now, that’s what they say/Everything I’ve ever done, I gotta give it away/Someone hit the big score, they figured it out/That we’re gonna do it anyway, even if it doesn’t pay.” That really nails it. Musicians are lucky to be able to experience music on the level that they do, that blissful feeling that comes with it. So, someone long ago worked out that musicians will always do it for the joy of it, even if they’re not getting paid. Someone always gets paid, but it’s not usually the musicians. The music industry is like any other industry: the middle-men get all the money.

I’ve tried to make peace with it. The hardest thing is feeling like a valid member of society. You have to battle with people not understanding that you’re a professional even if you don’t make a living off of it. It’s hard, sometimes. I work in a café, and people will ask about making music, but they don’t really understand what it is that I actually do, and the world that I’m in. Sometimes they’ll ask me: “Where do you play?” And I’m like: “Look, I’ve played every venue in this town.’ Most people don’t get it, they don’t understand this world of independent music. Where music is just music.

“Most people see music as a commodity, like a car or a home.”

Most people see music as a commodity, like a car or a home. They just want music to do something for them, to fill a need, to play in their car on the way home in peak hour or to listen to when they’re working out. It’s not an art form to them, it’s just something functional. Just like people who buy a painting because it goes with their lounge room. It’s a very small percentage of people who have the ability or the discernment or the taste to listen carefully, and listen properly. It’s about having a fucking brain and actually having an opinion and a reaction to what you’re experiencing.

Most human beings are fucking stupid, and they don’t have a complex inner life; they’re just out there reacting blindly to what’s around them, so how can you expect that they’ll be able to listen carefully, or see carefully, and truly experience a work of art? When you’re making music, you’re by definition already working with a small percentage of humanity. Most people just think you should go on Australian Idol. They’ll ask: “Well, why haven’t you auditioned for X Factor?”

If your grant-writing game ever goes south, that’s clearly the next step.
Well, my auntie is actually a producer on The Voice, so I know all about that world. I’ve got an ‘in’, babe. Watch out.

+

‘Laura Jean’ is out now on CD, vinyl and digital through Chapter Music. Read Kate Hennessy’s review. Launch dates below.

Sat, Oct 4 – Northcote Social Club, Melbourne, VIC [w/Grand Salvo + Totally Mild]
Fri, Oct 24 – The Red Rattler, Sydney, NSW [w/Jack Ladder (solo) + The Singing Skies]