Felicity Groom

All these steps have led to the same place with the release of Groom’s second album, Hungry Sky. The current single, ‘Higher, Higher, Taller, Taller’, is the eldest of the songs on the LP, but it carried the seeds of what the album would become.

“There was a pretty strong idea,” says the Perth songwriter. “‘Higher, Higher, Taller, Taller’ was something that pretty much indicated a direction that I was interested in. Andrew tends to have an influential role, particularly in beats, over this album. And I was kind of keen to drive it down the more beat-oriented areas. So together and alone we were working on songs with that in mind. They were mainly based on the computer, because I’m more fond of working that way now, with MIDI, on the more beat-oriented stuff.”

There’s nothing bolted down about the music on Hungry Sky, other than it was recorded for the most part in Groom and Ryan’s lounge room. As a result, while there’s a core band on the album, there were guests who played a part – musical or supportive – in the proceedings, much like friends who would gather in a lounge room in the first place. Some of those guests just happen to be members of Tame Impala.

“That was a really cool aspect and a very different one to the last album,” Groom says. “Gossamer was done in two parts; I did the band recording, then I did the bit that I called the ‘solo album’, essentially. One was the traditional Black, Black Smoke band with [producer] Dave Parkin, and the other was with Sam Ford, and it was slightly more like this one in terms of inviting anyone when I wanted to.

“This album began that way, because we were just in the lounge room recording – Kevin Parker came over and helped do the first few [songs], and Jay Watson was in town and he came and played a bit of guitar and basically whoever was around would just pop in and hang out,” laughs Groom.

“We’d played the tunes we’d done in the day to them, so there were various people having an influence or being a part of it, regardless of whether they were playing or not. It was a really good way of doing it, because ultimately it helped maintain more control, for me, of what was going on in the songs, which I really enjoyed because every song has an infinite amount of ways that it can be.”

Of course, in spite of making such beautiful music together, Groom and Ryan’s most amazing creation is one-year-old Ivy, who chats and giggles throughout this conversation. Having a child is a profound experience for an artist. How has it changed Groom as a creative person?

“I think that will definitely be more prevalent in album number three,” she says, “but it’s definitely in this one, in the lyrical content. I was pregnant with Ivy while recording a lot of the vocals and stuff like that. So the focus on the future of this kind of crazy world we’re living in definitely had a bearing on the interests I was honing in on.”

What’s also interesting is how, through pregnancy and post-childbirth, the physicality of singing changes.

“Absolutely,” Groom says. “It was quite difficult because she was two weeks and five days overdue and I was singing a lot of the Rokwell & Groom stuff onstage and fitting in recording whenever I could, so I remember the room for lung capacity or anything was tight in there. So it was a bit of a challenge.”