In a single year, Ella Hooper lost both her parents to cancer, split with her management and booking agent, and ended a long-term relationship. “It shook my family tree,” she says.
She credits her late parents, Helen and Jeremy, with the music obsession that started it all: “They gave me this language that speaks straight to my soul.”
Hooper has lived in public since she was 13, fronting Killing Heidi, the Violet Town teenagers who busked their way to triple j. She was also the youngest person and the first woman to win APRA’s Songwriter of the Year.
She recorded Overnight Success over several trips to Nashville with Sheryl Crow’s band.
I Got Eyes (ON YOU) is a honky-tonk piano knees-up, and it’s mad danceable. On Let It Fall, gentle fingerpicking drifts down like snowfall and Hooper lands on “I’m right where I wanna be”. When The Shit Went Down picks up cutesy “la-la-la” backing vocals at its halfway mark. Die Happy is her list of last wishes: “And if I die slowly in a hospital bed/Make sure there’s a speaker nice and close to my head.”
Our favourite Hooper is the one doing whatever she pleases. A sax solo? Why the fuck not. Overnight Success has a lot of that Hooper in it, and every word rings true.
Killing Heidi play Meredith in December.
Overnight Success is out now independently.
For more information, head here.
