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In making music, i think and talk a lot about “Atmosphere” - that intangible thing that creates a sense of time and place in a song, and connects the listener to the “moment” or vignette that the writer or performer is sharing. It’s that thing where you hear a song and feel like you have peered through a window to watch a small scenario unfold, and perfectly understood the essence of what was going on. Its the magic of a song communicating more detail in a few minutes than a movie could in an hour or more, or a book could in a week. It’s the thing I live for in music. 

It’s been a week since Lin (Julia Sound) and I released “I don’t wanna change” and I’ve spent most of it working on the mountain and finding time to talk about the track when I get home each night. Struck me today how different this has been from past releases - how I’m more comfortable making something and letting it speak for itself, instead of turning myself inside out trying to find where it belongs. I didn’t realize it when Lin sent it to me, but there was a sparse, cold concrete feeling in the initial track that spoke loudly to me, and steered me into writing about change and resistance, and what its like to see beyond your attachment to a situation or thing to finally understand your own bottom line. A lot has shifted within me the last couple years, and that shift shows up everywhere, all the time. It did again here. Funny to be singing about not wanting to change, and then talking about how much has changed, but the change here has been to become more of myself, to realize how much more of that I can become, and how much I don’t want to change it.

Meanwhile, “Heart Beats Quicker”, the song I wrote with Little Wise continues finding new heights. We wrote it in Melbourne after I’d fucked up so bad and stranded myself on the opposite side of Earth from my family while the pandemic kicked off and borders were shutting everywhere. Every time I hear the song the anxiety hits me all over again, like I’m back in my brothers spare room, jangling away on his old Harmony archtop, improvising words, mumbling something about my heart beating faster than it should and never letting someone down again. To keep my hands and my mind busy while I waited for the Canadian embassy in Australia to dig me out of the hole I’d dug for myself, I put the word out to see if anyone wanted to write. Soph came round and after I played the vague idea for her we dived into talking and writing like it was therapy, beating our shared anxieties as parents into a form that eventually became the song. I loved it when we wrote it, and I really loved it when i heard the finished recording. Thanks Little Wise/Soph for giving our idea a life, and for delivering the song so beautifully. Thanks Fraser Montgomery (who I have never met) for understanding the idea and so perfectly matching the atmosphere of the song with the atmosphere of the production.

After rupturing a tendon in my hand at my day job on New Year’s Day, I’m just weeks away from picking up my guitar again. The pressure is building at the bottleneck the injury has created in my workflow and life, but the frustration i used to lean into has been replaced with anticipation, and I’m dying to hear and feel the tension and atmosphere of whatever I write next.

[larissatandyofficial]

Wrote this song with @littlewise which is landing everywhere now and currently #3 in Australia. (Congrats Soph!) https://www.instagram.com/p/Ccra5gzrseh/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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Just sitting here bleaching my own teeth while I make recording plans and observe time flying the way everyone said it would. Its fall and I just got excited about snow being not too far away. Everyone else ok? Love, L https://www.instagram.com/p/CUL8YMQlIcM/?utm_medium=tumblr

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[larissatandyofficial]

Drive

You see it all over the internet. Kids, and some not kids, holding a water bottle by the lid, and flipping it upward. The bottle goes up, and comes down. It lands, standing right way up. The reaction is instant - joyful disbelief, the thrower's arms and eyebrows flying up as they look around to see who else witnessed it. 

I live and breathe songwriting. And mostly, it's a quiet and pleasant and deliberate walk from origin to finished song. But sometimes, when the going is real good, it feels like that dumb but obviously exhilarating bottle trick. This week I released a song called Drive, and it's one of the few bottle flip songwriting moments I can recall experiencing. 

One night at the 5 spot in East Nashville, a friend introduced me to Texan, now Nashvillian songwriter Van Darien. A week later, I was sitting in Van’s living room on a hot and humid day, tuning my guitar and listening to the gentle clinks of Van making iced coffee in the kitchen next door. Van handed me a glass and picked up her guitar while I took that sweet first slug of coffee. I froze immediately. She had added coconut flavoured sparkling water to the coffee, and maybe because my brain had already settled into that quiet, perceptive mode it writes best in, I sat stunned in psychedelic wonder at the intensity and difference of the flavour, feeling the gentle carbonation on my tongue. When my consciousness finally came back to the room I was sitting in, Van was strumming a C chord and repeating “Dri-ive” over it. I wasn’t thinking when I asked “where is she driving?” and from there the song unfolded. 

As I remember it, a while later, we had ourselves a couple verses but no chorus. I felt something coming up, but with no idea what I was about to sing I said “how bout this?”, and the entire chorus came out in one go. “I can shoulder a little bit of blame, and I can live with a little bit of shame, everybody gonna say what they say, But I don’t wanna live this way. I’d rather be alone than afraid”. Van said, “How did you do that”, and I said “I don’t know”.

Let me be very clear about this: I’m NOT a genius. I might be a decent writer at best, but I could name a hundred writers better than me. I had, however, been living in Nashville a while, and writing every day of every week with really great songwriters. Spending all this time in shared consciousness with good writers was sharpening my instincts. Even the daily “grind” of sitting in traffic on the way to music row, creeping up to that exit at Demonbreun, became a kind of meditation that I still use now, where my brain clicks downward through the gears, from the whirr of life and logistics, to being still, and ready to write. Something happened to me during that time, like a new pathway was forged in my brain, connecting my mouth to a deeper part of my consciousness. 

Things just bubble up now. And I’ve developed the nerve (confidence? trust?) it takes to just sit there and wait for it, which makes it sound like it happens without effort, which isn’t the case at all. When I write, I think of my mind as a room. If I take a minute to open all the windows and doors, a breeze eventually brings something in from outside, and I become curious about it. Maybe the neighbour is baking. That is butter right? And sugar. That's a pie for sure. Apple pie. Wait. No, it's stonefruit-ey. They’re making peach cobbler. But why? 

And that’s pretty much how writing alone feels. If I’m writing with someone, it’s like a friend is visiting and we both pick up the scent of that cobbler. I say something about it, which gives them an idea, which gives me an idea, which gives them an idea, and we leapfrog our way to something neither of us would have thought of on our own. 

Of course I’m not even half the writer I wish I was, and if I could choose between, I dunno, unimaginable wealth, and creating a superhighway between whatever deep part of your brain generates ideas, and the part of my brain that speaks, well, I don’t think I’d hesitate in turning down the money. Honestly, the day I realised this, was one of the best days of my life: You don’t need to have a huge collection of amazing ideas. You just need to work consistently at turning your brain into a really good idea generating machine. And if I can make my brain into one of those, well that kind of is unimaginable wealth. 

Writing Drive with Van was really fun, and I enjoy listening to the finished song. I think you can hear in the chorus melody how much Roy Orbison I’d been listening to, and Van’s original idea - the dri-ive that snapped me out of my sparkling coconut coffee hypnosis - is there, in the same key and contour as when she first sang it, holding the narrative together by bringing us back from the protagonist's thoughts, to where she is and what she’s doing. This song represents what I love so much about co-writing: the chance to write a song you love, but would never have come up with alone. Hope you like it.

Hear the song here: https://smarturl.it/4yarwo

Watch the video here: https://youtu.be/bPPWbYeRpCU

Love, Larissa

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[larissatandyofficial]

Friends, make a playlist..Fill it with songs you think my new single SIRENS sits well with. Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Deezer, whatever. Tag me. Gonna send my new Sirens T-shirt out to my favourites. Love, Larissa

[larissatandyofficial]

Sirens.

Of all the places I have lived, there is only one that comes to mind when people ask me where I’m from. I didn’t grow up there, but I lived there for a crazy period of my life, when almost everything was going catastrophically wrong, and I was bonded to this place and the people who live there forever.

You can drive into my hometown, Murchison, from two different directions. Both have signs that state the population of the town, but they don’t match, so depending which way you arrive and leave, it's like a bunch of people just moved here, or a bunch of people just left. No one calls it Murchison. It's Murch. There's a pub with a wonky pool table, a post office which used to be run by some creepy twins, a pool I never swam in, a general store, one cop shop (police station) with just one cop (hey Ricky), and a winery just a minute out of town where two of my favourite people, guido and sandra make a bunch of great wines. Passing through this tiny town on the banks of the Goulburn river, you’d think not a lot happens here, but like every other small town in rural Australia, this unassuming facade belies the real goings on of the place.

Sure, there's the billions of years old meteorite that landed in Murch in the 60s. And the POW camp which is now a low security prison, just out of town. But there are things that have happened in that place which will never make it to wikipedia, or even be heard outside of conversations between locals. Because that's what it is like in small rural hamlets in australia. It always struck me, living out there, that rural life is so rich with Natural Drama. It seems like no one ever dies peacefully in their sleep - it's either some unbelievable, traumatic accident, or worse, someone just goes out to work one morning and they’re never seen or heard from again. And truthfully, it was my own experience of this - when my mum's partner passed away in a gruesome accident about a hundred feet from the front gate - that instantly made me a part of this town and it’s story. It's a story I relived on my 2017 album, The Grip. 

In small towns, you’re almost forced into community. Aside from joining forces to get necessary work done (because one person has the truck, one person has the labour, and one person has the hay), your life intersects with everyone in town eventually. You can’t disappear in the crowd and you get to know people that you might not naturally connect with in a big city, where you can pick and choose your interactions. In a small town, liking or disliking someone isn’t a thing - you just know them and that’s all. And when you get to know people, free of the expectation that you need to like each other in order to coexist, you discover that you have more in common than you ever could have imagined. Living in a small town, you can’t help but develop a familial fondness for everyone, whether you love them or don’t, because you start to know and understand the generations-long stories that made them who they are. 

My mum and I were working in our top paddock one day in the stinking heat. Our conversation drifted into talking about a guy we knew, and how he always seemed to land himself in trouble that he could have easily avoided. I was swatting flies away from my face when I said, “He’s a nice person. He just has that idiot streak.” I wrote it down. I put it in my bank of things to write about at some point. 

When I finally got round to working on that idea, I had left Murch, emigrated to Canada, and was living on Vancouver’s notorious Downtown East Side, perched on the seventh floor in my studio apartment. The Opioid crisis was raging in just a few blocks of the city and I lived right in the middle of it. Sirens wailed around me constantly while an unprecedented number of people lost their lives to fentanyl and carfentanil. It was confronting at first, with every siren reminding me that yet another family was having the worst day of their lives, but eventually my ears adjusted to the sirens, and I started to hear birds and low conversations on the street again. And as my ears adjusted, my mind did too, a self protective mechanism I guess, and I stopped pausing to think of what every siren represented, and got back to working and writing. I started writing exclusively in the key of E, which seemed to work with most of the sirens, setting them back into the music, creating harmonies to the melodies I was writing, and allowing me to focus. I kept writing about emergencies though. A song called SIRENS emerged. And this week, SIRENS is finally being released. 

The song's narrative came together quickly. What is now the final verse/outro was the first part I wrote. In trying to flesh out the idea of the idiot streak, I teased out a story in my mind of two bored kids getting themselves into trouble. It isn’t autobiographical, but it isn’t not - it reaches into the stories of my youth: a close friend losing control of her car and dying when I was 17, and the many times I found myself in unsafe cars with drunk teenagers behind the wheel, which in turn got me thinking about the recklessness, fueled by loneliness, that defined my life back then, growing up not straight and not in the city in the pre internet world. 

I recorded this song in Nashville, with my friend (and roommate at the time) John Little, at his little studio on Dickerson Pike. I was only a few days out from making the trek back north to Canada after a long stint in Tennessee. We were standing in our kitchen just off Trinity Lane throwing ideas around about who we’d like to bring in to play on the recording. I wanted a drummer and bassist that worked together a lot and had some kind of glue between them. John scratched his beard and said “oh we should get the Jons!”, meaning Estes and Radford. From there we quickly settled on trying to get Dan Knobler in to play guitar, and Ryan Brewer who I’d known back in Melbourne before either of us had made it to Nashville, to play keys. Dan also ended up mixing the songs.

I was a closeted Soul and Motown fan when I was a kid. While everyone was enraptured by Nirvana's Nevermind, and Pearl Jam’s Ten. I was making secret journeys to the city, riding the train for an hour to go buy cassettes. I’d fallen hard for Aretha and was slowly building a collection of her work bought with my burger flipping money that came in at $6.84 an hour. There was a guy at the record store I'd go to who helped me source some harder to find things, which had me reaching into Aretha's gospel catalogue. By way of these records I drifted into Motown, and  when I think back to that time in my life, every step I recall is punctuated with the sound that defined motown for me - The funk brothers. THAT tambourine. Jack Ashford. 

While listening back to what we’d just recorded that day in Nashville, Jon Estes and I got talking about tambourines, and off hand I said “Imagine if we could get Jack Ashford in to play on this”. Jon said “he's in Memphis you know”. And the conversation continued I think, but I was already thinking about how I could find him, and maybe record him. Was it even possible? I found what I could on the internet, and sent a Hail Mary email that I figured wouldn’t get to anyone, but later that night, my phone buzzed in my pocket. It was a Memphis number. Jack, now in his 80’s, was calling me. 

The next day John and I drove to Memphis and walked in the door at Ardent Studios, where so much of my own record collection was made, by artists like Wilco, Bob Dylan, Big Star, Al Green, Mavis Staples and so on. Big Star’s Jody Stephens now runs the studio and greeted us. We got set up in Studio B, Jack arrived, we recorded, we talked, we left. Then John and I tore out onto I-40 and headed back to Nashville, singing smokey robinson songs the whole way home.

So much has happened between that day and today, but I’m excited to finally share some of these songs. SIRENS is out today, but next month, and the month after that, there’ll be more songs. All of them will arrive with a companion music video made with Brian Lye, whose oddball genius I’ve admired from afar for years.

You can listen to Sirens HERE

Watch the music video HERE

And look at the Sirens T shirt design I did HERE. If you like it as much as everyone else seems to, there’s a way to get one for free… 

Just go to wherever you stream or consume music: Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Youtube, whatever.

1. Make a playlist of songs you think go well with my new single Sirens. 

2. Share your playlist on whatever social media you use, and tag me. 

I’ll send you a tshirt in your size if your playlist is my favourite. Extra points if it’s shared widely and listened to a lot. If I can’t decide which is my favourite (highly likely), and can’t pick a clear winner, I’ll just send out more t-shirts I guess. If all that seems like a lot of work, just go ahead and buy yourself a shirt HERE.

Feels weird to be sitting in North Vancouver, Canada, writing about a release that brings together my life in rural Australia, my life in Nashville, and my life in Canada. But I guess that's how it works. Thanks for reading and listening. 

[larissatandyofficial]

[larissatandyofficial]

NEW SINGLE “SIRENS” - MAY 21, 2021

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NEW MUSIC COMING ON MAY 25, 2020

In a few days I’m releasing a new “track” with some friends. I didn't refer to it as a “song” just now because even though I wrote lyrics and melodies for it, the structure is a little different to what I think of as a “song”. It's just one track, and it's an excursion to a different place for me. You’ll see. 

Every release marks a point in the timeline of in your career and it’s hard to avoid stepping back and looking at it. This will be the first thing I release since 2017, when I put out the record I made in 2015. It featured songs I played live since 2011, most written around 2010, some around 2008, and some traceable back to 2004 or earlier. Crazy, given how many songs I actually write, but I guess it's true - life IS what happens while you’re busy making other plans. Releasing music has always been my other plans, and life has been me working a day job, touring a few months a year (god I miss touring), and writing every day, occasionally working up enough steam to get into the studio with other musicians to commit some of my songs to a hard drive. Only a fraction of the songs I’ve written have ever made it out to the world. 

This week I found a folder called MASTERS. I downloaded, unzipped, and found a trove of unreleased songs. I pressed play, and fell into the rabbit hole. Before I’d even reached the end of the first verse of the first song, a lump showed up in my throat. Here were all these moments, as great now as they were when they were made. The soaring harmonies that seemed like magic to me back before I understood how harmonies work, still lifted me. My voice, so young and rough, from when I was a much worse singer with a very australian accent (where did it go?) and my mind was less educated (and more free!). And the guitar playing I miss so much - my brother Ryan before his ears forced him to quit playing and take up a career in engineering - so groove-y and expressive. The way he drifts, then locks on and lets go - it’s like he’s driving slowly, squinting, looking for the turn, and then the moment he sees it, turns quickly and hits the gas. All of these moments are buried in these recordings that only I have heard. 

It’s not because I’m some kind of perfectionist. It's just that I’m constantly pulled in different directions. Music is my safe haven, but it also causes me a lot of anguish, because I never have the resources to get things done. I’m always too busy paying the rent and nourishing other people's dreams. So while it was a joy to find this treasure, the anguish wasn’t far behind, in hot pursuit of my happiness. I daydreamed for a moment about releasing these songs, and before I’d even completed the thought, that vague hope transmuted .I started to fret about the queue of unreleased music, and where this stuff sits in that ever growing line, along with the songs i recorded in Nashville and Memphis in 2017, and the soulful folk record that is slowly filling up another hard drive right now. As the queue gets longer, the anguish finds more to feed on.

I tried to address the anguish last year. Tired of spinning my wheels, I took some good advice from my wife - to take a break. Not from music, but from trying to make a decision. Over the years she has watched as my excitement about songs was robbed by what we call “The Loop”. Originally the Loop was just excitement turning into frustration when I couldn’t come up with an achievable plan to get something I’d written out into the world. But the Loop got bigger over time, and the self criticism more total. The Loop now turned excitement about a new song into the sound of coins clinking down the drain as my expensive US visa works its way to expiry, it made me imagine tumbleweed accumulating on the inroads I’d made in Nashville, where I’d started to build a writing career off the back of the few things I had released, and the Loop reminded me that even though other artists had started recording and releasing songs i’d written,  my own plans had been delayed over and over. The Loop told me everything I wanted was getting further out of reach, and turned my love of writing songs into a gateway to feeling terrible.

I drew a flowchart on the wall of my kitchen, hoping to identify the problem and maybe a solution. But every trip through the flow, every option, led me back to the same thing.. No money, no time. It didn’t matter how easily I could record at home, I’d still have to pay someone to mix it, because the songs need to sound good and I’m not a great mixer. I could get good at it, but that would take time which is already limited, and whatever time I do have, I want to spend extracting songs from myself because I only have one goal in life: to have something to show for all my ideas. The flowchart helped me identify that at least, but still left me wedged between feeling terrible if I write songs and terrible if I don't. 

So when a friend - a beatmaker and DJ, reached out and asked me to work on a track with her and another friend, I jumped at it. I could just write, and sing a bit, and we’d put it out quickly since they’d help bring the track to completion. I wouldn’t be solely responsible for driving the project across the line, and i’d have some new music to share in the first half of this year, even if it was just a single track. It might even boost my momentum and desire to keep releasing things. I jumped in. 

I didn’t think too hard about the fact that it was House music. Sure, it’s a world away from the music I release and perform, but it doesn’t feel foreign to me. Long before I worked out I was a writer, I did my time in the club. Chewing my cheeks and dancing til morning to avoid that enormous hole in my soul, the one that would eventually be filled with songs when I found my way back to playing guitar. And once we got to work on the track, I started to feel like I was making peace with my past, like all that avoidance hadn’t just been years wasted in a dark room - it meant something, it amounted to something. I’m still that person, and that person was me, and who I am now was always there, even back when she felt lost and the club was the only place I knew to look for her.

Hopefully, doing something so different doesn’t alienate the people who have been brought into my life with the music I’ve released so far. For me, this has been a fun trip, and a chance to blow out some cobwebs while locked down during a global pandemic. There are whole albums worth of songwritery music made with guitars coming down the line, I promise. Thank you for being patient with me while I bring them slowly into the world. 

In the meantime, I made you something to dance to. 

[larissatandyofficial]

[larissatandyofficial]

📷: @whereimshootingfrom @zachkleisinger https://www.instagram.com/p/BnKQlraFCdC/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=aacmptoovnh9

[larissatandyofficial]

Had the time of my life here in the maritimes. Thanks everyone who turned out in Sydney, Saint John, Fredericton, Charlottetown, Breadalbane, Rustico and Halifax. Special thanks @melmills26 for getting the ball rolling, Donnie and Alison and @doktorlukes , gary and Anne, @roguecoffeesj @clintoncca and @jeff_liberty , paul and liz at Lansdowne, @rootsandsouleddie Jon Soderman and @grimrosscraftbrewing , the fine folks of PEI, @irishmythen and @catherinemusic for the late night songs and conversation, @backalleymusicvinyl and @dylan_menzie , everyone at @cbc and @cbc_music esp @angela.walker.560 and Bob Mersereau, gary and laura moon, @carletonhalifax Mike Campbell, @lynnmac1979 @mattandersenmusic and Sue Fowler. 📷: @melmills26 x (at Halifax International Airport, Airport Authority Administration)

[larissatandyofficial]

I AM STOKED to be headed out east this month. I’ve only ever been to Atlantic Canada while working on other people’s tours. Now thanks to @melmills26 I’m headed out there on my own. COME SAY HI. (at Anne of Green Gables Museum)