“Holy shit! That would be really fucked!”
We may never have met before, but already I like Taasha Coates a lot. The Audreys’ frontwoman has just put her four-month-old second child to sleep and found herself facing the unexpected prospect of falling pregnant every time an album tour rolls around. At least, that seems to have been the pattern so far, and with two albums left on her current record deal she might want to keep the bassinet handy. While Coates has balanced motherhood and music with gusto, my totally reasonable request for a family band is swiftly rebuked.
“I’m gonna say no,” she laughs. “Look, I’m taking your point on board, but I’m going to say no. I think there’s a word for that kind of thing, and that word is ‘exploitation’.”
Coates is a gregarious speaker, and laughs a lot; it’s next to impossible not to be entertained by her musings and odd epiphanies, which serves her well onstage. Yet for a short time, while pregnant with her first child, that inner entertainer had started to slip away.
“I’d been travelling and making music for ten years or more, and when I got pregnant I thought, ‘Here’s my chance to do something different.’ It was either that or macramО,” she laughs. “Until my baby was around six months old I just sat at home, looked after him, went out with the pram for coffee. Basically did all of that stuff you see mums do. And I didn’t really miss performing … at first.
“It’s such a nomadic life, being a musician; it’s quite rootless. I really enjoyed the complete opposite. But then I got persuaded to go along to the ARIAs. I was being a real grump about it, but my manager convinced me I’d regret it if I didn’t. So I squeezed myself into a frock, and we won! And of course you get this massive buzz, and I got to hang out with all of my musician friends who I hadn’t seen, and I realised I’d totally forgotten about this whole other side of myself. Soon after, we did this festival that we’d booked ages ago, because festivals have such a long lead-up of course, and I found myself onstage thinking, ‘Why on earth have I agreed to this? I don’t even know who the person who would get up and sing in front of people is anymore.’ But of course I snapped right back into the persona and realised, ‘Shit! I really love it!’”
Having won the ARIA for Best Blues and Roots Album for each of The Audreys’ first three releases (and picked up the nomination for current album, ’Til My Tears Roll Away), if Coates had indeed decided to stay away from the ceremony that night, our musical landscape may well have turned out that much poorer. To that end, however, establishing just what exactly is Australia’s blues and roots scene is no simple task.
“You’re not very objective with your own music,” Coates says. “You might have an idea of what you want to sound like, but you might not actually sound anything like that at all. We went to the Americana Music Festival in Nashville last year, and interestingly, Americana in America is actually quite narrow. I talked to some people about it and they said that because there’s so much radio in America, all of the stations and all of the music magazines become quite specialised. That then starts to narrow the definition of certain music. I was complaining to them that I found the folk scene in Australia quite restrictive sometimes. There were these ideas of how you were supposed to sound, and if you went out of that, people start asking you to explain yourself. But people told me that it’s exactly the same in America. I mean, if I had to pick a genre, Americana is what I would probably feel most aligned to, whatever you call it here. Whether that’s blues and roots, folk – whatever people want to call it, I’m happy to be playing it.”
However you style it, the songs are superb – dark, soulful and catchy. Coates shares writing duties with guitarist Tristan Goodall, and while there are a multitude of artists out there who struggle to find the right synchronicity with a collaborator, within The Audreys it is as natural as drawing breath.
“Tristan comes to my house and stays for a week, and he’s there every freakin’ morning for breakfast, every night after dinner. So a lot of work gets done, or at least, a lot of work gets talked about being done. I’ve found collaborating hard with other people. Tristan and I just work, for whatever reason. Part of it is having done it for so long there’s no ego involved, no-one is putting out an idea and being precious about it. If Tristan says he doesn’t like something, I’m not going to go, ‘Well, fuuuuuck you.’ I’ll more likely say, ‘Yeah, you’re right, it is a bit shit.’ It’s usually quite a fun process. And we tend to get stuck at the same time, too. We have a good flow. We’re like two halves of one songwriter, so there’s no competitiveness. It’s organic. Oh, fuck!” Coates cries, laughing again. “I hate that word, ‘organic’. Let’s just pretend I never said that.”
Deal.
The AudreysplayKidgeeridge Music Festival 2015, along withYou Am I, Mark Seymour & The Undertow, Adalita, Lior and more, atMilton Showground,Friday May 1 – Saturday May 2. Til My Tears Roll Away is out now through ABC/Universal.
