Straight off the back of a solid ten months of touring her album All The Bridges in the US and Canada, Stringer is hunched over her computer, busily preparing some last minute details for her run of Australian shows next month, all to be a little different from her northern hemisphere stint.
“I’m working on a new Facebook banner,” she says, “This [will be] the first time going out with the band since the album tour. It’s going to be slightly different in the sense we have a different bass player. Timothy Nelson is opening the shows for us, he’s an amazing songwriter from Perth and he’s going to be sensational when he plays with us too.”
Even though Stringer tours her home country frequently, she’s hasn’t yet had a chance to fully realise her 2016 release to its full potential, so the upcoming shows are proving both a point of excitement and causing a little self-doubt. “I hadn’t made an original album for four years,” says Stringer, “I had a live solo album [Live At The Yarra] in 2014 so this one in comparison, I wasn’t writing a heap at the time, had a bit of a slow patch and I just needed to get back in the ring and kick start stuff again.
“I feel like I didn’t have much to draw from but when we went in to record, the songs feel cohesive to me and we had to get the songs out of the rusty part.
“[With] the intensity and pace of recording, the songs in the studio settled in to each other but when I went in there, I didn’t feel they felt it. Maybe that was it – I’m used to recording when I have a lot more to draw from, when I have a bunch of songs and I wasn’t 100% convinced it was enough. I didn’t necessarily feel like that at the time but the whole process really helped me to kick start my creativity again , it served in the sense that it went back to my own music – it felt like a stab in the dark but it worked,” Stringer says.
Though she may feel her latest collection started off rusty, All The Bridges resulted in a beautiful body of work thatis classically Stringer. Her crisp and resonant voice carefully hovers over beautiful acoustic melodies that serve to have their gravity amplified with the backing of a band. Feel It Now is indeed, one such resonant song, lingering pensive themes and a touch of gentle sorrow – and it carries a lot more weight than fans would at first realise.
“My mum died when I was quite young,” Stringer says. “She was only 48 years old, which is not far from where I am now, and the older I get it makes me think about life and its events and circumstances. Not having access to ask her what it was like when she knew her end was so close, that was difficult to write the song, so I tried to spin my own perspective.”
Indeed, in writing Feel It Now, Stringer had an opportunity for reflection and gained a wonderfully wholesome perspective on life that many of us would do well to learn from. “What that whole experience taught me, losing her so young, is that shit can happen, you have to be present and enjoy what’s going on – I’ve never been good at that but I think it changes as you get older.
“When you’re younger you pinpoint parts in your life and measure your success by them – ‘Oh, when I’ve toured this much I’ll have made it,’ or ‘When I win this award I’m successful’ – you think when you have all that, your career will start. But really, I’ve always been there, always been in success – I’m in it now.
“If you think that to the detriment of what’s happening right now, it’s counterproductive.”
By Anna Rose
