SONGSTRESS Lucie Thorne has covered a lot of ground.
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The ex-Candelo musician is currently touring for her newest record, “Everything Sings Tonight”, on a 30-gig journey which has taken her from South Australia to Brisbane then down the NSW coast, and will take in a stop at her old home town in the Bega Valley before she returns to her current base of Melbourne.
“I think I’ve driven 4000kms in the last 13 days,” she said over the phone while in northern NSW.
“It’s been a pretty amazing tour so far.
“But it does get overwhelming.”
The songs on Thorne’s new record vary, from long instrumental passages to spoken word, with her signature poetic lyrics wrapped in dream-like music.
“I think I’ve always been a fan of spaciousness, and while I have been known to get my rock and roll on from time to time I love trying to create something that draws the listener in, and I think the direction on this new album is a step down that road,” she said.
“In a lot of ways lyrics are primary for me, I love storytelling and I love space for poetry - that’s got to be front and centre.
“[Also,] I really love the process of creating a whole album that has a beginning, middle and an end, one that works as a cohesive whole.”
Thorne and her collaborator, drummer Hamish Stuart, spent two days recording the new album in a studio in Berlin, a move which gave the album an “extra adventurous element”.
After those two days Thorne had most of the material – the guitar, drums and vocals – completed for the album.
“We had been playing some of the songs in shows for the previous six months,” she said.
“While the guts of the songs never radically changed, we never played the same one the same way twice.”
Thorne said the album’s title track was written they day before they began recording, while she had the text for song “The Rushing Dark” for ages but didn’t settle on the music until Stuart came up with a new groove on the studio floor.
A special guest on the record is Thorne’s own father Tim, who appears on the six-minute “Everything Sings”, reading part of a poem by TS Eliot translated into Romanian.
Music has been a life-long companion of Thorne’s, as she can not remember a time when she did not love to sing and dance.
“My parents do have an amazingly varied record collection, and there was always lots of books and poetry around the house, so I feel very lucky to have an incredibly nourishing upbringing,” she said.
When she was younger, some of the musicians she loved the most were Billie Holiday, Joni Mitchell and Janis Joplin.
“One of the people I always wanted to be when I grew up was Billie Holiday,” she laughed.
Thorne started as a jazz singer, but began to feel disconnected from the old standards.
“I’m up there singing, ‘look at me, I’m as helpless as a kitten up a tree’, and that’s not who I am,” she said.
In her late teens she started playing around with her own material, always considering her guitar playing as secondary to her singing.
It took her years to start thinking herself as a guitarist as well as a vocalist.
Thorne said she had a powerful chemistry with her long-time musical partner Stuart, who was one of her favourite musicians to play with.
“The musical conversations that we have every night as we are playing new songs, I feel like they just keep expanding somehow, they just keep going,” Thorne said.
“We really wanted that duet sound to be the focus of the new album.”
Lucie Thorne and Hamish Stuart will perform at the Candelo Town Hall on July 12 from 3pm for $22, supported by Erin McMahon.