1.Growing Up
I’m very lucky to have grown up in a house filled with books, art, records, ideas and music-loving parents. My dad’s a poet, and my mum’s a DJ on the local community radio station, so it’s no surprise that language and music have remained such enduring loves of mine.
2.Inspirations
There’s so much great music being made in Australia, and i get a lot of inspiration from my many dear friends and comrades who are out there weaving their mighty sounds around the country. This could be a very long list, but here’s today’s tip of the iceberg: Liz Stringer, Lost Ragas, Jimmy Dowling, The Yearlings, JoJo Smith, Shane Howard, Suzannah Espie…
3.Your Band
I still play a lot of solo shows, but my more usual lineup is a duet with drums. Hamish Stuart has become my regular wingman, but there’s a selection of other very fine drummers that I love working with too. For this year’s Majors Creek Festival, I’ll be reuniting with the excellent Jay McMahon, who I first worked with back in the mid-2000s when I moved to the Bega Valley. I sure am looking forward to making music with brother Jay again.
4.The Music You Make
It lands somewhere on the lyrical folk/rock’n’roll spectrum, I guess. I love the condensed, poetic nature of song form, and I love the stretchy spaciousness, and the harmonic freedom of a band that’s just one electric guitar and drums. My most recent album Everything Sings Tonight is predominately a duet record with Hamish Stuart which we recorded the guts out of in a little studio in Berlin over just two days.
5. Music, Right Here, Right Now
I reckon the music scene in Australia is in great shape at the moment: there’s a lot of great music being made, we’ve got really vibrant community radio across the country, and there’s a lot of folks hungry for live music. I do a lot of regional touring, and I’m especially heartened by the enthusiasm and diversity of audiences in smaller towns and localities. I’m also really heartened by the overwhelming sense of camaraderie and community that exists among my fellow touring musos. It can be a pretty marginal life in some respects of course, but it sure is rich in a myriad of ways.
[Lucie Thorne photo by Heike Qualitz]
Lucie Thorneperforms atMajors Creek Festival, Majors Creek, Friday November 11 – Sunday November 13, along with Neil Murray, Raised by Eagles and more.
