Let’s get down to brass tacks here; Olivia Chaney can fuckingsing. By the end of this interview, she has certainly left an impression, due largely to the stunning strength of her voice and songwriting, of course, but also in no small part to the breathless, self-deprecating candour of her conversation. As she finishes a glass of wine and roots around in a drawer trying to scavenge cigarettes, the variety of her performance history becomes a folk song in itself.
“If I’m really honest,” she says, “you see someone make ten records, touring the same old circuit, totally familiar with how everything works, nothing’s new. It’s just not my kind of career. I don’t have a set kind of gig that I play. I still do stuff in classical festivals, I still end up at Glastonbury if I’m lucky, I still play really bonkers, insular but fun little folk festivals surrounded by Morris dancers. I play in churches, in hipster warehouses. I’ve never been to Australia before, so between the Sydney and Woodford Festivals I’m trying on one hand to gauge what I’ll be playing, but on the other it’s like that excitement of just turning up at a festival without looking at the program, keeping things in the spur of the moment. It keeps you fresh. The moment you start judging audiences or trying to predict just how it will be, well, you’re just a bit buggered and jaded, aren’t you?”
Given her debut album is yet to drop, Australian audiences likely won’t know quite what to expect from Chaney. Her online presence is rather disparate, from the stirring original ‘Swimming In The Longest River’ to her exceptional cover of Joni Mitchell’s ‘A Case Of You’ (and I urge you to check it out before reading another word). What is immediately evident, however, is the quality of her live performances – something Chaney was keenly aware of when translating her songs into the studio.
“There were certain times I was met with this response of, ‘Do you want to make a fucking field recording here?’” Chaney laughs. “I really wanted to capture what I’ve been honing as a craft for years, which is performing live. That was all I had sometimes. I’ve seen some tough times, and sometimes all you’ve got is going out there and playing, just singing your fucking heart out and hoping that when you open your eyes, if you’re lucky you might have moved someone.
“If I’ve got any criticisms of the record, I think it’s not raw enough for me. But you ask yourself, ‘Where is that line?’ Shirley Collins and Bert Jansch, people in the folk world that I’ve grown up listening to, they almost are field recordings, you know? Jansch just rolled in and borrowed somebody’s guitar, sat down in front of a microphone, and they’re now iconic recordings. I can’t attempt to repeat that, but I did want something live. Ha – with the exception of one track that was recorded in this incredible church nobody really knows about. I literally struck up a deal with the priest, tucked a few quid his way, and we had half a day there in the freezing cold. I was feeling like absolute shit, and that was definitely a kind of one-take wonder vibe. It sounds so naff, but I’ve been working on and performing these songs for so many years, and I’m happy to let go of them now but they still mean a lot to me. I still mean the lyrics every time I sing them.”
Catch her at Sydney Festival 2015atThe Famous Spiegeltent onSunday January 11, tickets online.Also appearing alongside Violent Femmes, Nahko and Medicine For The People, Kate Miller-Heidke, Sticky Fingers and more at Woodford Folk Festival, Saturday December 27 – Thursday January 1.
