Our interview with Sydney troubadour Angie is very nearly a thing of myth. Despite both our best intentions, finding time to chat became a Herculean task between her remarkably busy schedule and the unexpected curveball of losing her voice.

Stranger still, the day after our conversation my own voice vanishes for a time. It is like some laryngological version of The Ring, but with fewer wells. In a way, Angie is quite lucky that losing her voice isn’t a more regular occurrence, since when she sings, she really holds nothing back.

“I’ve never lost my voice before, but I completely lost it there for a while,” she says in a voice that is still quite husky. “But I feel like I’ve trained my voice to be strong just by the way I naturally tend to use it. Because I’ve worked with so many bands where I just scream, like, I’m really not a nice dainty singer. It’s rough, but that’s just the way that I sing. I feel like I’ve toughened it up. I don’t really do anything to keep it healthy, though; I don’t do any kind of exercises. The way I do things, it’s just something that takes time. After singing in bands for ten years, you get to know yourself, and you know how to use it. Right now it’s still a bit croaky, but I feel like I’ve worked it to a point of being quite powerful.”

She’s not overstating things: Angie’s voice has the great fortune to sound both strong and unique, which in part has developed from necessity. As a member of Straight Arrows, Circle Pit, Southern Comfort and various others acts, she has found herself competing alongside bands that aren’t afraid to make some noise. With the release of Free Agent, following 2013’s similarly solo Turning, Angie once again takes centre stage – yet curiously, though producing and sharing music is her driving passion, finding herself onstage is a more reluctant rush.

“I’m really shy onstage. I think that I don’t like playing shows and I don’t like performing. I don’t like singing in front of people, but I just want to do it so badly that all the anxiety I get from that, those feelings of being uncomfortable, it just doesn’t matter,” she says. “I can still get through because I want it so much. I’m not a charismatic performer and I always get criticised for that. I feel like some people are showmen, and are really into charming the audience. But not everybody has to do that, and a lot of people get attacked for not taking on that role.

“I think you can be a performer and present yourself in all different kinds of ways. You don’t have to be someone who’s like, ‘Hey, everybody!’ I feel like all different kinds of performers should be accepted. So I definitely get nerves, and I’m not really that captivating. I think there are lots of complex stories and feelings and movements in the music, and that should speak for itself. If people are going to engage with it, they’re going to engage with it no matter how you present yourself.”

Remarkably, the discomfort and bashfulness Angie feels onstage never seeps across into her playing. Part of you wonders if the reason behind this is less to do with shutting out the crowd, and rests more on the intensity with which she handles each song. Listening to Free Agent and hearing her thoughts on its composition – especially given she plays every instrument herself, bar drums – it’s clear that great thought goes into the structure of each song, where each instrument isn’t just a tool for the finished product, but possesses an odd kind of autonomy.

“The last record I did was the same set-up, I played every instrument. And it was really difficult. I didn’t make a conscious decision to do that again, but somehow… I’m really not sure why. Looking back at it now, it was an insane choice. I guess there’s a certain intimacy or familiarity I have with Owen [Penglis, producer]. I think if somebody else got brought into the process that would totally shift, but because we know each other so well we recorded it well. At the same time, having now showed the record to a band, sometimes I find it really difficult to communicate the idea to them without the songs completely changing. A lot of tracks that I play off that record live are completely different because of the stylistic nature of the players. And I really like that, but if I got people in to play on [the recording], they would have played it their way, whereas it’s all my way of doing things.”

With the album launch just days away, nerves or no, Angie’s fans are finally set to hear the next evolution in her sound. Though she holds no expectations for what people might think, her hope for some kind of connection is clear.

“All you can hope for as a musician is that people feel something, or enjoy something in what you’re doing. But really, from an emotional state, I would just like to think that people can mirror the emotions and words in the record, that there’s some resonance there. That they might not feel alone.”

Angie playsWaywards onFriday September 4, with Skull & Dagger, Sex Tourists, DJ Mike Spyros and Samuel Trifot.Free Agent is out Friday September 4 through Rice Is Nice.

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