Not only will the tour feature Bowditch showcasing songs both past and present, she will be joined by her good friend, Sydney-sider Lanie Lane. According to Bowditch, their initial collaborations evolved naturally, quickly yielding results. “We sat down in a room together and this song, Now You’re Home, popped out pretty quickly,” Bowditch reveals. “I loved her approach to making music… it’s sort of nice and relaxed like mine and just about trying out some ideas… and that’s why she’s going to come and be my collaborator on the Winter Secrets tour, along with the audience.”
Bowditch’s definitive aim to include the audience on her tour displays a wonderful, game-changing approach to performance. Nervous ticket-holders have little to fear, however: the songstress has only the best intentions in mind, with a kind of celebration in store. “The Winter Secrets is always a big one,” she explains. “In effect it’s about reminding people of their creativity. It’s a solo Clare Bowditch concert where I have guests. I basically give the audience an opportunity to engage if they want to throughout the set. It’s completely up to them. It’s all about acknowledging the creativity that exists always in the audience. That’s one of my modern day addictions, that conversation and collaboration between strangers.”
Clearly, then, the Winter Secrets experiment offers somewhat of an exciting step into the unknown each night. However, despite any potential for chaos and calamity, Bowditch wouldn’t have it any other way. “I have such a good time on this tour, because anything could happen. There’s a lot of laughter in between all the chaos as well. It’s intentionally comical, it’s been written as if it were a stage-show, in a way,” she reveals. “There’s structured elements but really it’s up to the audience on the night and how it goes. I like that link. If it all fucks up, they can rest assured that I’ll carry it for them!”
Meanwhile, this latest tour continues to promote Bowditch’s most recent work, Modern Day Addiction, the record released in August of last year. When offered a moment or two, Bowditch is able to reflect upon her achievements with the record. “I guess it still feels quite alive to me. It was our first top ten album, that’s always a surprise,” she says of Modern Day Addiction. “It was nearly a year ago and I’m really, really proud of that album. We put years of our life into something that sounded contagious but was actually as rich in ideas as you wanted it to be. Again, like anything I do, I like to make sure there’s plenty in there for anyone who’s interested in going beyond the surface.”
Modern Day Addiction appears to follow a trend, bearing a thematic coherence shared by its predecessors. “I think I’ve always allowed the themes of the album to let themselves be known to me. For example, What Was Left ended up being an album about an exploration of grief. I didn’t know it was going to be that, it just occurred in the writing of it. It was the same with The Moon Looked On, which was really a discussion about the emotions of lust and longing.”
However, though as thematically strong, Modern Day Addiction offers a departure from Bowditch’s previous ventures, born from different ideas and philosophical notions. “We are really obsessed with this myth that we’re not good enough and someone out there is good enough… that there’s some product out that you can buy that’s good enough that will make us feel right,” Bowditch muses. “I was really wondering where the substance of life was, basically. It’s always some philosophical dilemma that I’m going through that ends up playing itself out through music. “
“A lot of the things that I am struggling with are really too boring and heavy to write about unless I’m able take a satirical and comical view of it,” she explains. “It’s just about owning up to the fact that we live in hyper-addictive times. In between all of that, where’s the human being and what are we if we’re not sex and drugs… and what else is there that makes up a human being? Particularly in popular music, we’re constantly fed the line that it needs to be light and meaningless in order to be good. I completely disagree. I think popular music is the perfect medium with which to discuss meaning.”
Furthermore, an open forum is important to Bowditch. “As a general mode of operating in the world, I feel most alive when I’m connected with the world around me and I feel a compulsion to contribute. I’m someone who has little people who are growing up in this world and I feel very strongly about it.”
Meanwhile, Bowditch has a couple of key projects in the pipeline. Fans will be delighted to hear that, among them, a brand new release – an EP – is on its way. “The EP is called Are You Ready Yet and it’s just something that sounds gorgeous and I wanted to have as an in-between,” Bowditch explains. “I was invited to co-write a show called Tales From The Life Of Eva Cassidy. I’ll be singing her songs at The Athenaeum Theatre for two weeks in August.”
For Bowditch, it’s about shaking things up. “It’s just what I like to do. I shuffle things around at least twice a year and that means doing something creatively terrifying or new or something that makes you vulnerable as a creative person.”
