#lizstringer

If you’re new to Liz Stringer, brace yourself. Hers is not a voice made for gentle days. Both lyrically and tonally, Stringer writes and performs from the meaty heart of things. She offers both salve and pronounced question mark: bending the bars of time with an other-worldly timbre that pulls one into a space that is simultaneously challenging and comforting. I’ll shut the fuck up now. Enjoy.

What's this album about then?

The album's about a lot of things really. Unrequited love, friendship, corporate bullies making excuses for their shit behaviour, capitalism, social differences, drug addiction. It's about a lot of stuff. How'd you go making it? I loved making "All The Bridges". I recorded it at Type Foundry Studio in Portland, Oregon with Adam Selzer, an absolute legend who my friends Mick Thomas, Darren Hanlon and Shelley Short had all worked with before. The studio was beautiful and felt great to be in, the bassist and drummer, Luke and Benny, were so skilled and lovely to work with and Adam and I were on the same page about basically everything. It felt freeing to be in a completely unfamiliar environment, working with people I'd never met before. They had no expectations or pre-conceived ideas about me and vice versa. We just all wanted it to work. And it did, as far as I'm concerned. I tend to get stressed in the studio. there's a lot at stake and I can be incredibly self-critical and turn on myself in a really aggressive way. It must be unpleasant to have to deal with for everyone else... That's not to be confused with being a 'perfectionist'. It's not perfection I strive for (partly because I don't believe it really exists), I'm just trying to replicate in the studio what I hear in my head and how I've envisaged the songs, in some cases for many months, beforehand. That's pretty much impossible to achieve completely.  I put much less pressure on myself for this album. I had so few expectations and was well aware that the odds were such that there was a good chance that it wouldn't work. That Adam and I may not have gotten on, that the players may not have been the right fit for the songs. There were a thousand different unknowns. But, true to the typical contrary nature of art, the fact that I put so little pressure on myself and on the process allowed this album to be the one that has most clearly achieved the original vision I had for it. It's like falling in love. You can't force it. The more room you allow it the more space it has to flourish, even though the compulsion is to squeeze the life out of it. I got lucky with how unselfconscious I was making "All The Bridges". It was a fluke and an odd and wonderful combination of situation, timing and good fortune. I don't take that for granted for a second. Why do you do this stuff? Excellent fucking question. I ask myself, almost on a daily basis, the same thing. I suppose don't know how NOT to do this stuff. Songwriting and music have always been the centre of my world that everything else in my experience has been constructed around. It's how I express myself. Apparently, babies use their feet as a powerful sensory tool early on. It's how they learn about their environment, about the world and their place in it. That's what music is, and always has been, to me. It's a way to make sense of an otherwise formless, confusing space. What can we give you/do for you for you to keep going? Thrive? I guess just remain interested and engaged in the art people around you are making. And keep making it, if you're one of those people. Sometimes it can feel like shouting into the darkness. But if you know that even one pair of ears is receiving and processing, in some way, what you're doing, the darkness can be very quickly lit up. LIZ STRINGER’S NEW ALBUM IS AVAILABLE HERE, NOW.

FOR ALL UPCOMING TOUR DATES PLEASE HEAD HERE.

“ALL THE BRIDGES” LAUNCHES OFFICIALLY IN MELBOURNE AT HOWLER ON SATURDAY 17th SEPTEMBER.