“I think I was expressing a frustration in my own experience. I wasn’t trying to speak for other people or in any way consciously saying anything political. It was coming from a very heartfelt place, even though it’s not a song about love. Or maybe it is about love; I love Australia and I’m passionate about Australian music. Not that I’m more passionate about Australian music than any other kind of music, but I sometimes feel as though Australia’s mainstream media and Government don’t value the depth and range of talent we have in this country. I was living in a city when I wrote that song. I wasn’t too hot on living in a city; the aggression on the road and everything was getting to be too much.”
There’s resilience within Jean’s tone. She speaks with a passion that can be heard throughout A Fool Who’ll. Louder than her previous efforts, Jean became aware of her surroundings and let her music do the talking. While some might not agree with Jean’s take on the world, one would be hard pressed not to be swayed by Jean’s thirst for truth when hearing Australia.
“Knowing how amazing we are, I can’t help but yearn for us to be even more amazing. I just want people to have a think about it; things like building more housing. Let’s use our intelligence and create something beautiful instead of something cheap. Sometimes that’s just going to fuck up in twenty years time. It’s just unfortunate that there’s not more foresight when it comes to infrastructure in this country. There’s a lot of issues in that song that I’m passionate about. It’s a very emotional song for me to sing.”
It took time away from Melbourne for Jean to get some perspective. She took off for the Victorian countryside and lived in near isolation. When she returned, she gave birth to a record much louder than anything she’s ever done. When asked about the idea that her time spent in isolation resulted in the need to crank up the volume, Jean insists that she had the idea before she left.
“I had decided to use electric guitars before I left, so it wasn’t a result of living in the country. I figured out that the songs needed to be on electric guitar, but my time away was spent working on the arrangements. How the songs were going to work, the dynamics of it all. I was thinking about other instruments. But it was good to be up there; good focus time.”
