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Clare Bowditch.
'Autumn Bone' is an intense, uplifting acoustic musical experience, courtesy of the collaboration between singer/songwriter Clare Bowditch and her impressive backing musicians The Feeding Set. With each listen this record will work its way into your consciousness, and your life will be all the better for it. And not only is her record that good, Bowditch herself is such a nice, friendly person, it's no wonder the Australian music community has warmed to her unique style.
"I've been good, thanks," she says as she begins the conversation. "We just got back from tour last night, from the east coast leg. It went fantastically, it's been a great tour."
The "we" in question is her backing band The Feeding Set: "It's J. Walker, who's my guitarist, Marty Brown on drums, Libby Chow on French horn and Warren Bloomer on bass." Walker doubles as the singer/songwriter and main man of Machine Translations, who are co-headlinging the tour. I pondered how the guy's going to cope with standing up and playing the guitar for two whole headline sets per night.
"Basically, he and Marty Brown are the two hardest working people I know. [But] we actually let him sit down for most of our set."
The collaboration between Bowditch, Walker and drummer/producer Marty Brown (best known for his other band, Art Of Fighting) was an easy one. "Marty and myself are partners," she declares, neglecting to add that this is not just in music but in life.
"We've been working together for about eight years on different projects, like Red Raku, he then went on to be in Art Of Fighting, and he is a producer of the album ['Autumn Bone'] that we recorded at home with an ArtsVictoria grant. He was producing an album with J. Walker, Sodastream's 'A Minor Revival', and I really liked his work so we got up the courage to ask him to play on the album; which was really scary because I've always really liked Machine Translations' work. Anyway, he was keen to do that after he heard the demo and then he decided we should start a band. And then we have a couple of other friends; Libby is a really old school friend, and I knew she played the French horn but I didn't realise she could sing so well, so she also sings on tour."
This brings up a point I wanted to discuss: how on earth those amazing layered harmonies going to be delivered on stage.
"I laid down the harmonies and the vocals first off, with the guitar track, and then we laid down drums, and Libby's learned all the harmonies pretty much note for note, which is amazing. I don't have any musical theory so I don't think I could have repeated it again, it was all captured in the studio, so she took the CD home and learned it all. She's fantastically talented!"
Her album is very personal, so I decide to touch on how her life might have changed now she has sacrificed her anonymity. "I put off having a career in music for many, many years because I was scared of that. But when I was pregnant with my daughter Asha, when you have a pregnant belly, people just come up to you, they talk to you, they touch your stomach, you know? And I think that put me into training as to what it was going to be like to be in the public eye."
Finally, I ask her to describe what we can expect from her upcoming performance.
"You can expect a lot of stories and a really great night. We do a lot of chopping and changing between ourselves and Machine Translations so I do some singing with them and J. plays with us, so it will be a very fun and varied night!"
Ben Revi
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Clare Bowditch & the Feeding Set play a lunchtime show at Adelaide UniBar on and Machine Translations play at the Jade Monkey on Fri 23 April before joining Machine Translations for a show at the Jade Monkey that evening.
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