Post-grunge meets pipe organ
It could just be 2020’s most unusual concert
The first thing that grabs you about Sarah Mary Chadwick’s music is the voice. A weary croak of a thing, it’s the perfect vehicle for Chadwick’s lyrics, which are alive with vivid confessions and depressions. And while Sarah Mary Chadwick is often the lead character in Sarah Mary Chadwick’s music (sample verse: “Left to my own devices, hair by hair, I’ll tweeze away every bit of happiness I see”), it’s less self-absorbed than self-reflexive, though she doesn’t necessarily agree.
“I’ve always written about things close to my life,” says the ex-pat New Zealander from her Melbourne home. “I don’t have kids or anything; I may as well think about myself constantly.”
Which may mean there’s time to do stuff like write a fivestar review concept album in just 10 weeks and return home to perform what could be Auckland’s most unusual concert of 2020: a one-off show accompanied by the Auckland Town Hall’s organ.
The thoughts expressed above come from the song Pretend Lover, one of the best tracks from the 2019 album
I don’t have kids or anything; I may as well think about myself constantly.
The Queen Who Stole the Sky, which Chadwick performs in its entirety this week.
The record is swathed in droning pipe organ; the album, and the concert that spawned it, were a collaboration between Chadwick and the curator of the immense Melbourne Town Hall grand organ.
“I know [Melbourne Town Hall organ curator] Miles Brown through music. I think they were interested in making the organ more contemporary and relevant, instead of just playing church music or taking school groups through.”
Chadwick usually writes on her own and to her own specifications but enjoyed the discipline of working to a brief.
“It made me perhaps lyrically blunter than I have been before and I want to carry on doing that,” she says. “And the instrument is so grandiose and overwhelming, I was very aware that I had to wear it and not let it wear me, so I was trying to write big to compete with the size of the instrument.”
Growing up on the family farm in Taumarunui, Chadwick learnt to play on a significantly smaller Casio electric keyboard. Aged 9, she inherited a grand piano and would throw open the farmhouse doors to entertain passers-by.
Haydn and Handel were superseded by heavier music and she formed Wellington post-grunge outfit Batrider in 2002, spending a decade with the band before flying the cave in search of a solo career.
None of which sounds like great preparation for playing pipe organ, with its banks of keyboards, pedals and sound-altering stops. But Chadwick doesn’t sound like she was daunted by the prospect.
“My classical piano background helped and everything works as you’d expect it to.
“I built a sound for each of the keyboards and made notes for which song was where.”
The organ gives any music a ritualistic quality. It’s the instrument of weddings and funerals; emotionally you’re in church.
Sarah Mary Chadwick