Jen Cloher
recommended this month: a mighty singer-songwriter escapes from australia - and from the shadow of her famous partner
“If your partner is in the same line of work and they suddenly become world famous, you’re going to have to do some work around that,” muses Jen Cloher over the phone from Melbourne, as she mulls over the circumstances behind her breakthrough 2017 self-titled album. The partner she refers to is Courtney Barnett, who also plays in the four-piece band that will tour Cloher’s album in the UK in february. Barnett’s international success was the starting point for Cloher, who used her conflicting emotions as the foundation for a terrific, honest LP about envy, womanhood, Australia, politics and music.
“I really took my time to write the album and find out what I cared about enough to write about,” she says. “When you listen to the record it can sound like ‘Ah, poor Jen, Courtney went off to be a rock star and left her at home’, and you can hear some sadness, but when you dig deeper you see that’s just setting the scene. I was interested in what that meant for me.”
Cloher has now released four albums and co-runs Milk! Records with Barnett, and this “old-fashioned rock album” is partly about her experience as a musician in Australia. Songs such as “Great Australian Bite” directly tackle the problem of being an artist “from down under/Where no-one hears our thunder”. “It’s not a whinge, but it’s tough,” she says. “There’s such a small population here, it can be hard to sustain yourselves, and it’s so far away from the rest of the world.” On “Loose Magic” she distils this into a song about watching the Dirty Three. The song is a potted biography of the band, but also a celebration of music’s power. “I watched them perform and saw such a profound response from the audience, they were having all sorts of deep emotions,” she says. “I realised they were legends, they were doing what we all dream of. They are one of the few alternative Australian bands who actually manage to have a career.”
This ability to find positivity in a difficult situation can be traced in the arc of her songs about Barnett, which pepper the album and touch on envy, regret and self-pity, but ultimately end with beautiful love song, “Dark Art”. Although Cloher wrestled with feelings of jealousy and personal inadequacy, she is now thrilled by Barnett’s career. “There’s nothing worse than not being able to not wholeheartedly support somebody else’s success,” she says. She hopes her partner’s success will have a galvanising effect for female Australian musicians.
In that respect, a key song on the album is “Strong Woman”, partly inspired by Cloher’s Maori mother, and Cloher says she’s also enthused by the likes of PJ Harvey and Patti Smith – artists who haven’t given up as they’ve aged. “Every day you wake up and see the news, there’s something that could tear your heart apart, but that doesn’t relieve us of the responsibility of doing something,” she says. “We have to keep that positivity and energy regardless of the idiots that might be in power and the terrible things they do.” Jen Cloher’s UK tour begins on February 13 at The Dome, London