I cannot believe I am saying this but we actually got a show in amongst this madness! And it wasn’t just any show, it was our annual Holiday Hootenanny including my band and amazing special guests Ali Barter, I Know Leopard, Mo’Ju and Timothy James Bowen! Given the circumstances surrounding it, I still can’t believe the show went ahead, and as a celebration of the fact that it did, I thought I’d do a little IMAIL recap.

As many of you know, I am an absolute Taylor Swift tragic. The first time I heard her music was when I walked into a Video Ezy (yes, you read that correctly) at age 14 and the music video for Love Story was playing on the store’s TV. Shortly after that, my guitar teacher showed me the song White Horse, and I was officially hooked.

After Sydney’s first lockdown in 2020, my first gig back was with my band at the Vanguard in Newtown, and my hands were shaking so badly that I had trouble playing guitar. As someone who already suffers from a lot of anxiety, I found that returning to the stage after so long was truly a rattling experience, as I’m sure it was and will be for many others.

I spent a lot of time during our four months (!) of lockdown reflecting on my life in music so far and all the decisions I made that brought me to where I am today. It’s been fifteen years since I started gigging professionally as a child, and that time has seen a lot of people come in and out of my life – triumphs, pitfalls, sage advice and crazy bullshit. I’ve learned a lot about how to trust, and what’s motivating the lessons and stories people are trying to push onto you. I thought it might be useful for some of you out there for me to reflect on the best and worst career advice I’ve ever received.

I read a great book called Joni Mitchell In Her Own Words – Conversations with Malka Marom (highly recommend), and I remember being struck by something Joni said about being a child at school and often feeling like an outcast. She said that she learned from a very young age that she could take the feeling of not fitting in and turn it into something that served her. She framed her alienation in her own mind as being a source of her power rather than a hindrance to it. Her individuality brought her confidence rather than loneliness, and that’s something I’ve tried to put into practise in my own life too. This philosophy is actually what inspired the lyric from Inside Out, “I love the outside and there’s power here for me”.

Today, I wanted to chat to you about how to start writing songs. I start singing when I was 8, playing guitar when I was 12, and writing songs when I was 13, and it’s been a constant source of joy for me since then, as both a creative outlet and a form of therapy. Maybe you’ve always wanted to give songwriting a try yourself, or maybe you’re just curious about how I started writing. Either way, here are some tips for how to get started, based on my own beginnings, and the tricks that help keep me continually inspired and developing.

Merch is the number one money maker for artists right now. Most of us are unable to tour due to lockdowns and border restrictions, and we earn next to nothing from steaming services (more on that in the next point…), so buying merch from our store for yourself or someone you love is more helpful than you may realise! I’d love to recommend BandCamp, a platform which many artists chose to sell from, including myself. BandCamp have dubbed the first Friday of every month BandCamp Friday, where they waive their revenue share on all sales, meaning every cent of your purchase on that day goes straight into the artist’s pocket. BandCamp Fridays have saved my ass more than a few times during this pandemic!

Collaboration is one of the most important things in music, in art, in life. Collaboration is really just relationships, and those are something everyone has to deal with in their life. I get asked a lot about collaboration since I started to embrace it in my music in the last few years, after many years of steering away from it. The biggest secret to collaborating well is choosing the right people to collaborate with.

I’ve been sitting at home for two months in lockdown, when I should have been on the road playing the songs from my new EP Bastards for you with my band. Instead, the tour has been pushed back to November, and I’ve been hit with heaps of anxiety – about the future of music in this country, if I’ll ever play again, how I’m going to earn money, the case numbers and people struggling to secure vaccine appointments, etc. I know many of you are dealing with your own anxieties, and I thought it would be helpful to share my tips for pushing back against those feelings.