It’s not particularly unusual for musicians to say they felt ‘trapped’ while writing an album – after all, a lot of records are born despite pressures both internal and external.
However, it is rare to hear an artist use the word in a practical sense. When Melody Pool explains the claustrophobic conditions she found herself in while penning a key song from her second album Deep Dark Savage Heart, she’s not speaking in abstracts.
“I came down to Melbourne and I was subletting one of my friend’s rooms,” Pool explains. “I was there for a month and I didn’t really know any of my housemates. I had pretty bad depression at the time, so I was locked in this room, and I was too anxious to go out and talk to people I didn’t really know. I was just holed up.”
While the temptation was there to cave in to her own personal black dog, Pool not only stood up to it, she borrowed its name for a song. “It took about an hour to write [‘Black Dog’] and then about three hours of crying,” she says with a wry laugh. “Then I went back and edited for a couple hours. That’s rare for me – I hardly ever edit. But I just wanted to make it a bit more poetic. I thought that it had a lot of potential. It was a pretty gruelling experience to write that song, which is why I think it’s stuck in my brain.”
Given its intensely personal nature, listening to ‘Black Dog’ inspires that odd mix of vicarious satisfaction and vague guilt one can feel when flipping through a friend’s diary. “Everything in my writing is usually connected to me in some way,” Pool says. “I really draw from it. I think that’s why I tried a bit of co-writing, but I’ve never been comfortable with it because it is so personal … I can’t ever imagine co-writing a song like [‘Black Dog’] with someone else. That was a really, really personal experience to write that song and to sing it as well.”
Though ‘Black Dog’ is about as emotive a song as one can imagine, it’s not the only track on the record that deals with darkness and despair. Deep Dark Savage Heart is a black wave of emotion – an avalanche of troubled, twisted compositions. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Pool found the writing of the album draining. “It was hard emotion-wise,” she says. “It was a pretty confronting record to write, but at the same time it wasn’t like I forced myself to feel those things in order to write it. It just sort of happened naturally.”
Pool generally likes to work impulsively, taking a kind of unconscious approach to her craft. She doesn’t have a writing schedule, and embraces the spontaneity that arises from working on a whim. “I [won’t] write for months at a time but I’ll bottle it all up and write a whole bunch of songs in a week or something. But I’ve always worked like that and I’ve always thought the songs are better from that, ’cause I can never, ever write when I’m forcing myself to.”
Though it’s easy to assume that writing Deep Dark Savage Heart soothed Pool, that’s a romanticised version of the truth. Reality is more complicated. “[Writing] doesn’t exactly make you feel better, it just makes you feel like you’ve vented enough to get it off your chest,” she says. “Sometimes it can be sort of worse, because you realise all of the things you’ve been thinking, and sometimes it can be better because you sort of figure out what’s going on in your head.
“I tend to just ramble when I write songs, and just kind of blurt out anything till I get to the chorus. Then I get to the point where I’ll have a rest. I’ll read back, and then I’ll be like, ‘Shit, that’s what’s been going on at the moment.’”
Though the album may not have entirely eased Pool, it has certainly had that effect on others, and the musician’s voice goes warm when she talks about the reaction certain songs on the albums have received. “It’s actually been amazing,” she says. “I was really scared to release [it] into the world, but the response that it’s had… Just people relating to it, or knowing someone and kind of understanding their friends who deal with mental illness. It’s kind of what I wanted. It’s kind of the reason I wanted people to hear [it].”
Indeed, there is something ultimately uplifting about Deep Dark Savage Heart, despite its trauma. Though it’s a document of a struggle, it’s one that ends with something being gained – the kind of progress that has been reflected in Pool’s experience of performing the album live.
“When you play [a song] for the first time – especially a song like ‘Black Dog’ – [it’s] really, really scary. It was the strongest physical reaction I’ve had from playing a song onstage before. I came off just shaking ’cause I felt so vulnerable. I felt so naked in front of 300 people.” She laughs, sounding strangely content. “But it gets easier. I don’t feel that vulnerable playing the song now.”
Melody Pool’sDeep Dark Savage Heart is out Friday April 29 through Liberation, and she appears at Paddington Uniting Church Friday May 20.
