If you haven’t heard of Loren Kate, then clearly you haven’t been listening in the right places.
The winner of the 2014 Telstra Road To Discovery competition is no stranger to the stage, having performed across Australia for a decade now and featured at some of the most outstanding festivals this gig-loving country has to offer. Now, after years of attendance, Kate has finally been invited to join the lineup for the Woodford Folk Festival. It will be the cap to a rather busy year.
“[Today’s] the day after Mullumbimby Festival,” Kate happily sighs, “so I’m pretty tired but I’m feeling good! I’m in the Northern Rivers area and just went for a swim. Life’s pretty great.”
While her touring schedule has indeed been hectic (and with two children along for the ramblin’ ride), it sounds like Kate would have it no other way.
“I’ve never really played much in Queensland, so part of [the excitement] is finding a new crowd, playing for new audiences. You always hope to find fresh ears. And my partner plays at Woodford a lot, he’s one of the children’s entertainers. So I’ve always looked at him up onstage there and thought, ‘Oh, maybe one day…’” She chuckles. “The plan is to just focus on my shows up to Woodford, and if songwriting happens in that time as well, that’s great, but right now the focus is performance. I have a few festivals over the summer after Woodford, and then I want to have a whole EP written and ready by the end of next year.
“I started going to Woodford quite a few years ago. My first time was 2008, I think. I played the old Chai Tent – it was such a wonderful venue. I played a lot with Women Out Front; they’d get me up to perform every morning. I had just the best time, but this is my first time being invited as an artist in my own right, so that feels pretty cool.”
Kate’s latest EP, Til Night Meets The Sun, is her fourth release, written across two years and led by the brilliantly bittersweet ‘When You Leave’, composed for an ex-partner who passed away. It is a brace of songs that stays very true to Kate’s songwriting ethos of honesty and wordsmanship, and she is quite content to think of herself as an autobiographical writer.
“That song came out really easily, which I put down to every word there being something completely truthful. There’s no lie in there, that’s who he was to me. So in that way, writing it was easy. From the very first, I’ve tried to write very honestly. I think I write quite differently from other people. I get these big bursts, like I need to vomit them out, so I just pick up my guitar and see what comes. It’s always something unexpected, it’s never a sit-down-write-a-song-about-this kind of thing. It’s always very spontaneous. Sometimes I’ll write a song and think, ‘What is that?’”
Kate laughs. “Then a few months later, I’ll see it as something I clearly needed to deal with but only just found a way of saying it. I’m definitely tapping into stories of my life, but it’s something that other people seem to be really able to tap into, and they start sharing their own stories with me. I grew up listening to singer-songwriters, storytellers. They’re kind of my favourite genre, and I’m not that good at making up stories, so I end up having to just tell my own life. Luckily it’s pretty colourful.”
Loren Kate appears at next year’s National Folk Festival 2016 at Exhibition Park, in Canberra, Thursday March 24 – Monday March 28; and Woodford Folk Festival 2015/16, Woodfordia, on Sunday December 27 – Friday January 1.Til Night Meets The Sun is out now through Vitamin.
