Oyster (Issue 59, August 2005)

Sounds About Town

By Jake Stone

"If you walk along the same route everyday, you see different things. I think you get a lot of good lyrics when you are walking. Sometimes I'll go on the same route for a week at a time. Then I'll get bored and change it. I'm quite restless generally"

Twenty six year old singer/songwriter Holly Throsby is a complex creature. About as light and dark as a person can get, the prodigious young musician is intentionally difficult to pin down in person and in print. In all areas of life, she simply doesn't suffer fools gladly.

Her 2004 alt-folk debut On Night showcased a sophisticated blend of gently insistent melody and poetically dense, personal lyricism, delivered in a breathlessly idiosyncratic vocal tone. Beyond that, there was a seductive sense of mystery, of a deep and personal world only partially revealed. In fact, her songs are as deep and contrary as the people and situations they spring from. Throsby talks about relationships, "I never like to assume that I know people, because I always wind up being wrong. When it first happens it's frightening and sobering, but as you get older it just becomes more interesting."

In much the same way, Throsby is wonderfully willful in life and surprisingly vulnerable on record. She makes complex songwriting sound compellingly simple, and as such, On Night is a record of astonishing depth, standing head and shoulders above the work of her peers. Released through the increasingly influential indie label Spunk, the debut received a four star review in Rolling Stone, and was lauded by The Sydney Morning Herald, among other heavyweight press.

Lifted from her debut, Triple J favorites like 'Up With The Birds' and 'Things Between People' crept onto the airwaves, possessed of the same subtle self-assurance as their author. She remarks on her approach to songwriting: "I wait for melodies, but it's different with lyrics. I think it's awful if lyrics sound laboured, but there does need to be a little labour involved. Melodies are more involuntary. I also don't think it matters how verbal you are in real life. I don't think that social fluency translates to elloquency in a person's craft...it elloquancy a word?"

Despite her fierce sense of humour and intellect, Throsby doesn't stamp all over a song or a room like she might. She simply works steadily and doesn't take shit from anyone. When talking about striking a balance between lyric and melody, Holly reveals something of her overall attitude to songwriting. "I don't want to be too clever about things, ever. I don't like it when people are too clever. There is, however, an element of perfectionism to it."

Between supporting genre leaders like Devendra Banhart, Mark Kozelek, and arguably the biggest alt-folk star of them all, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Throsby was also recently selected as one of only fifteen Australians to travel to the US and appear at the South by Southwest festival showcase in Austin, Texas.

While many would have seen the festival as a make-or-break career opportunity, Throsby instead was hoping for "fun...to see some old friends, drink some alcohol and have fun". Didn't she have any hopes for world fame and whopping record contract advances at all?"

"That's not how I feel things are going to happen for me. I don't think I made a record that says things like that. I'm not in a hurry. I want to make a lot of records, and I think about that a lot, so there is no hurry."