Fields is also successfully maintaining a dedicated writing schedule while gigging enough to stay on the radar. Her latest single is a hint towards her sophomore album that is slowly taking shape, even though it’s still in an infantile stage. “This year was spent mostly writing and preparing to make my second album, which I’ll start tracking next year,” she explains. “I met producer-engineer Joe Hammond through mutual friends, and he’d been on my radar since I heard his work with The Harpoons, The Boat People and Kikuyu. A few months ago, we got talking at a party about putting pianos through amps, and I thought it might be fun to make a single with Joe at his studio Pots & Pans – so we did. We put combo organs through overdrive pedals, got Dave Rogers playing some chaotic electric guitar, dusted off my 1981 Omnichord and Joe even sampled some weird woodblock thing and used his mad-scientist sound skills to turn it into a wobbling robotic melody. ‘Snakes & Ladders’ is available for free download at georgiafields.bandcamp.com.”
When an artist decides to work under their own name, but not within the confines of a solo stage show, it can lead to ambiguity as to what roles the other members of the band play. “That’s something I wrestle with a lot,” she says. “When I started gigging in Melbourne I performed with a regular set of musicians and the band had their own name, but when they went their separate ways I started working with different musicians for different shows and recording projects. Then I had the good fortune of working with a revolving assembly we called the Mini/indie-orchestra – strings, brass, woodwind, and vibraphone. Things were in a state of flux for a while, and it didn’t make sense to name a band because each show might have different instrumentation and different players. Over the past year or so I’ve been working pretty regularly with drummer Tim Coghill and bassist Dave Rogers, and we have electric guitarist John Palmer making his debut in the band at The Empress Hotel this weekend. I’ve been feeling that it’s time to come up with a name for these sublimely talented fellas. Perhaps we’ll take suggestions at the show. Come down and heckle.”
Even Fields seems wary of labels like “one to watch” and the reality of those statements converting into tangible opportunities. “I don’t think you can expect reviews or endorsements from journalists to translate into real world opportunities,” Fields explains. “The only thing that can do that is writing good songs.”
And that is really the only thing she should worry about. Finding her place, and her audience, as she bestrides the line between indie-pop songstress and art-house musician is something she is both aware of and happy to embrace. “I love pop music – the melodies, the forms, the lyrics and the sequins,” she says. “A lot of music that the general public might consider ‘artsy’, if there’s repetition of melody and a good hook, I hear it as pop music. One of my oldest friends and most treasured musical collaborators, Judith Hamann, is an incredibly accomplished cellist who plays a lot of experimental, new music. We met in the high school orchestra (I swiftly gave up cello to focus on singing after I heard her play), and her love of noise landscapes and unconventional sounds inspired me early on to consider the idea of songs and sounds. We worked together to come up with the accompaniment for Sinking Relation Ship – I knew I wanted a winding machine noise to go with the lyric ‘mechanical romance alive.’ We tried hitting different woodblocks, trawled machinery samples, until she suggested a cordless drill. But that process was pretty idiosyncratic to that particular song. I don’t purposefully try and think of wacky things to put in my songs for the sake of it – it has to be an organic writing process.”
Some artists use songwriting as a way of purging emotional baggage while others need to be balanced and focused to create their sound. Where Fields sits within these two schools of thought is answered with refreshing honesty and just enough weirdness to start to figure out Fields’ personality. “‘Balanced’ and ‘focused’ are words not often placed next to my name in sentences,” she says. “And yes, I do purge emotionally when I’m writing. It’s taken me a few years to get comfortable with the fact that I write from a personal space. I used to think that made me less of a writer; less technically competent somehow. Even when I’m writing fictitious stories, I’m still approaching it from a personal angle; I can’t not. I start with the words first. I might have a line or a concept, or a few phrases in a rhythmic meter. Then when the time is right, I will sit down at the piano and coax out the melody. The process could probably be compared to doing a poo. You need to have something ready to come out, but you’ve also got to have the urge, and somewhere quiet and private to go. Hopefully what comes out in the song writing process will not resemble faecal matter, but you can never be sure.”
What more needs to be said?
BY KRISSI WEISS
