Rachel Maria Cox is checking their phone in a crowded Starbucks in Sydney’s CBD. The Newcastle based singer-songwriter is getting a text message from a friend – an old friend is how they describe him, although the pair haven’t actually known each other for that long at all. “In years, it isn’t a long time, but in terms of the person who I was it feels like a long time ago,” Cox says, smiling a little.
Cox is sober now; something that some of their old friends find hard to get their heads around. They describe it almost like becoming a new person; there is a part of them that has blossomed now, and they doesn’t know if that’s always easy for people to take.
“It’s kind of weird hanging out with people who only knew me when I drank. A lot of my friends from Sydney and a lot of my high school friends knew me as a big party animal. I feel like they expect me to be a wild party animal now, so I think they’d be surprised to find out that now I spend a lot of time negotiating how much space my cat gets in the bed, and drinking tea and watching every single romantic comedy on Netflix in the bath. That’s my life now. I’m so boring. But I love it.”
One gets the distinct sense talking to the 22-year-old Cox that they have hit their stride. They have just released an excellent new record, Untidy Lines – a collection of songs that combines their penchant for gently devastating lyrics and pop punk sensibilities. And they seem happy; you know, genuinely happy; happy in the way that just radiates off a person.
And a lot of that is reflected in their music. Just as their last release, the excellent I Just Have A Lot Of Feelings dealt unsentimentally and honestly with loneliness, and (self) love, and the weird anxieties that come from living in a social media saturated age, so too does Untidy Lines never pretend to be anything other than confessional. It is the sound of a young musician who has mastered their craft, and, more than that, knows that it can help them say things they might not otherwise be able to put into words.
So although Cox has a “brand” – even casual fans of the songwriter might be aware of their love of Lee Harding’s ‘Wasabi’, Mother energy drink and Netflix rom-coms – that hasn’t been designed as a gimmick, or a way of throwing Cox’s audience off their scent. “Netflix is part of my brand because it’s a lot of what I spend my free time doing. I guess with my songs, they’re pretty autobiographical. And it means if people know my songs, then they know me for who I am. If you know my image as a musician, that’s like knowing me as a friend in a lot of ways, because it’s just the way I am.”
“It’s this authenticity thing, I guess. Netflix is part of my brand because it’s a lot of what I spend my free time doing, and it’s the same thing with my songs. They’re just a pretty accurate summary of my life. I try not to be too gimmicky; I don’t want them to date.”
Part of that meant going metaphorical instead of literal. So although Untidy Lines is astonishingly honest, it is honesty like poetry is honest. It is not a catalogue, or a litany of exes and damage done, and Cox’s story is not told in sordid details and name-drops. It is a record that you understand innately on the deepest level that you understand things, rather than a record that you academically process and disseminate. “It’s honest in sentiment,” Cox says.
“The whole record is probably less literal than the EP. I tried to make it a little more imagery heavy and metaphorical. I started teaching this songwriting course at my work, and that kind of made me think a lot about saying more by saying less.”
Cox bats a green tea back and forth between their hands. “You can almost track the order in which the songs on the LP were written just in terms of the most verbose to the least verbose. The least verbose songs are the most recent – because I like that approach. I have to edit more. That’s a good thing. It’s good for all my romantic partners. I mean, ’Emotionally Untidy’ as a song – that could have been a real emotional attack. But I tried to make sure that it wasn’t. I tried to be kind. I mean, partly that’s self-preservation: if I write a song that I have to play a lot, I don’t want all those emotions to be brought up every single time that I play the song.”
More than that, Cox doesn’t have much room for emotional attacks anymore. They are, in the truest sense of the word, at peace. And their music reflects that – the last song on Untidy Lines is called ‘Stronger Lines’, and it ends with the words “I am stronger than I was before, no, I’m not losing sleep anymore.”
“I don’t like holding onto bitterness,” Cox says. “Occasionally I will write a song that is bitter about someone, but I never play it live. I write it, I never record it. I play it once, for myself, and then it is done.” Cox smiles. “I guess I try to be a bit more forgiving.”
