There's a particular kind of stillness that comes before Rowena Wise writes a song.
Not silence, exactly. More like a suspension. A pen, a notebook, and a 90-minute timer counting down beside her.
“I am such a purist,” she tells me. “Whenever I songwrite I need a pen and paper in front of me. I usually set a timer nearby so there’s something holding me accountable in such a disembodied, abstract process.”
A small ritual, less discipline and more a way of staying tethered while she goes somewhere unmapped.
Most of Bad Things Feel Good*, her sophomore album out August 7 via Beloved, was written this way across two years of near-constant touring, much of it far from home. I ask what it is about distance that opens something up for her. Her answer takes its time.
Rowena Wise – Bad Things Feel Good*
- Where: Howler
- When: 15 October
- Tickets here
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“There’s something about being in an environment that’s so intrinsic to my perceived sense of self, where I’ve lived for years, with all this phantom backlog of habits and rituals that give me this concrete feeling of identity,” she says.
“But when I’m elsewhere, that’s not present, and I can just think about expressing myself in a more malleable way.
“It’s a palette cleanser, spiritually. I’m more distant from my sense of self, so I can make sense of emotions in a more objective way.”
It’s not a throwaway line. It’s the whole record, really, an album less interested in arriving somewhere than in what it feels like to move through the in-between.
Her 2024 debut, Senseless Acts of Beauty, was about rebuilding a self after loss. This one questions whether that self was ever something fixed to begin with.
So has she become a different person, writing it?
“Totally,” she says, no hesitation. “Senseless Acts of Beauty was a big wake-up call that it’s important to value vulnerability and honesty as an artist, because people will connect with it.
“That album was about overcoming great heartbreak, loss of self, pain. This one is more like, I overcame that pain years ago, and I’m supposed to know who I am now, but I don’t.
“Nobody has it figured out, especially when it comes to love. I just wanted to write the songs I needed to hear.”
Even the title holds its own private theology. The asterisk isn’t decoration, it’s confession.
“It’s almost like an imagined footnote,” she says, “’bad things feel good’ with the exception of a very long list of things; heartbreak, alienation, depression. It feels really bad. But pain is also the catalyst for growth, and there’s something beautiful about that. About the intensity of being alive.”
She doesn’t say this like a lyric. She says it like something she’s still working out in real time, which is, I think, the point.
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That same instinct, to let things stay unresolved rather than resolve them for effect, shaped how the album was made.
Recorded live over three days at Ratshack Studios with producer Rob Muinos, bassist Richard Bradbeer and drummer Jess Ellwood, it favours breath over polish.
Wise describes handing the songs to a band for the first time as something closer to being witnessed than being produced.
“I’d equate it to when you’ve held a private thought for ages, and you express it to someone and they go, ‘I know what you mean.’ You feel validated. Hitting the studio with the band, the songs actually existed outside my own head.
“It’s not a perfect album by any means, but that’s why it’s special, it’s raw and human.”
You can hear that in her voice, which moves between soaring and quietly crumbling sometimes within a single line. I ask whether that vulnerability was intentional or something she noticed only afterward.
“The best vocal takes were the ones where you can hear I meant it,” she says.
“Sometimes the technically best takes just didn’t have that unnamable feeling. It wasn’t conscious, maybe subconscious, just trying to be as honest as I can.”
She mentions her earliest work, released under the name Minke Roe, as a kind of former self, polished, pop-leaning, further from where she stands now.
“I do like the imperfections now. I think people resonate with them. I hear a lot of bigger artists going back to raw instrumentation lately, maybe it’s an anti-AI kind of artistry.”
When I ask how it might feel to perform these songs live, something in her settles rather than lifts.
Touring Australia later this year with a full band, she says, should feel more grounded than her first album cycle ever did.
“With the first album, I was feeling my way through it. This one’s informed by the full band touring I did, so I think there’ll be a lot of room to have fun, embrace it, feed off everyone’s energy.”
A recent night at the Brunswick Ballroom, joined by the Northside Musicians Choir, still seems close to the surface when she talks about it.
“It felt like I was onstage with a whole group of brumbies racing behind me. Eighty people singing my songs, spooky and beautiful. I wish I could’ve fit them into the studio.”
For all its weight, she’s careful to say the record isn’t a bleak one.
“It has a lot of compassion and tenderness,” she says. “It suggests that growth comes not from overcoming your humanity, but accepting it.
“If you find yourself somewhere different from where you expected to be, that can be a beautiful place, but it’s okay to be scared there too.”
Catch Rowena Wise at Howler on 15 October. Tickets on sale now.
