“I sat down with Mike one day and he said, ‘Let’s work on this album closer to your own genre,’ ” Coote says. “These days you have to pocket yourself in a genre. It’s just about record sales – when you put them up on iTunes people can look for pop or country or whatever. Mike had known me a couple of years and we thought, ‘Well let’s just be clever about this and take our time.’ ”
Patience was necessary for Coote to wipe away distractions and determine what sort of music she really wanted to make. Perhaps it sounds like this should be easy, but Coote’s been doing this for a long time and she’d started to feel bound by external perceptions.
“I was a bit confused with my own genre,” she says. “People would pocket me into country-pop pretty much because I’d been going to Nashville for ten years or more. And also I’ve got family in Tamworth, so I was going there a lot and I performed at the [Country Music] festival about four times. But the thing is, I don’t really listen to country music. Mike said to me, ‘What do you listen to? I don’t see you as country music per se.’ He compared me to Ingrid Michaelson, and she’s definitely more indie pop. And I said, ‘I love her songs.’
“You’ve got to stick with what you love the most, because otherwise you won’t get anywhere because it’s not authentic.”
The album bears Coote’s name, but a lot of songs were co-written alongside other Australian songwriters, including Sarah Humphreys, Clive Young and Anthony Snape. All of the collaborations were conducted after she’d decided to lean closer to pop songwriting.
“Clive Young, he’s been in the industry for a long time. I got recommended to write with him,” Coote says. “He used to be a ‘90s pop star – used to be on Countdown and stuff. When I heard his name I went, ‘Mmm… don’t know his name,’ but I looked him up on YouTube and it was hilarious; I remembered the song [Something Special] from the ‘90s. He had a mullet and he had a black leather jacket. It was a pretty big hit in Australia.”
The album doesn’t include any radically contrasting sounds – although it does feature some rapping – but it does combine elements of pop, roots, rock and folk, plus the R&B groove of first single Free Wind. This was all mediated by Coote’s renewed self-understanding.
“We sat down and had a meeting and [Mike] pretty much said, ‘We can’t be fluffing around. We have to be 100 per cent focused on who you are and what you are.’ This is just who I am.”
Coote is launching Favourite Thing in Melbourne this weekend. The album has actually been ready to go for around 18 months. However, the release was delayed so that Coote could reassess her commercial ambitions.
“We were trying to pursue it over in America first up,” she says. “But at the same point I was thinking, ‘I’d love to break through on Australian soil – my own hometown – and see if they like it.’ I’ve been really lucky that I have a really good team here as well.
“People don’t know who I am. You have to put a single out and then you wait six weeks and put out another one and then release the album. Now it’s out and I’m happy.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
