Clare & I jetted off to Melbourne this weekend to see the delightful miss Kate Miller-Heidke play at the Forum. It was a lot better than I expected. I knew she was talented and had a great band, plus I’m automatically predisposed to like anyone who sings a song called “ducks don’t need satellites”, but I didn’t realise quite how seasoned the whole group were as performers and entertainers. A pleasant surprise, and at only $50 for the ticket, a very reasonably priced one (plane trip notwithstanding).
Line-up wise, it was a pretty standard rock-show. Drums, bass, two guitars, piano, every one but the drummer sang, and not a hint of a backing track so far as I could tell. Stylistically, it was harder to pin down. I suppose you could broadly describe it as “pop”, but only if you’re comfortable with that definition encompassing liberal doses of operatic singing and shades of live theatre alongside moments of head banging, all executed with a healthy sense of humour, but not the the extent of undermining its sincerity.
OK, so I sound a bit like that old advertisement with the art critics (“an existentialist hurdy gurdy spinning around and around in a double negative reinversion”) but my point is that it wasn’t trying to be anything in particular. It was just being – very convincingly and unabashedly – itself.
I was struck by the contrast with some of the lyrics and music I’ve been trying to write lately, and realising how contrived I’m driving myself to be. Philosophical and overly wordy, and “deep and sensitive”, and it’s all just, frankly, a bit pants. Earnest and insightful lyrics are great, don’t get me wrong, but it’s all too easy to pick a topic which has the patina of “meaningfulness” (politics, war, addiction, mental illness) and then find yourself writing unbelievably trite, sophomoric, codpiece wearing “one foot on the foldback wedge” lyrics about it. Do I really have to rail on in painfully forced verse about the estranging denouement that our reliance on media and technology are conveying us toward, when I could just say “ducks don’t need satellites”? It’s the same message, but that song is pretty, whimsical, and makes me smile a little bit, at the same time as gently suggesting that it’s possible to be content without the trappings of modern life. Yeah yeah, ducks are silly and boring and not worthy metaphors for our lofty subject matters, but… you know what… arseholes to all that. I think I’d rather aim to be authentic – perhaps even insightful – about the mundane, than to end up like this guy:
"Hey guys, I think I just figured out a rhyme for 'disaffectation'. Can you get me a pen?"
I certainly don’t mean to say that weighty lyrics are always bad, or that irreverent, personal writing is prima-facie good. But I do know that I’ve been censoring myself without even realising it. And I’m going to stop. Because I don’t much care about being cool, or about fitting into a specific and arbitrary sub-category of a genre. Bring on the real 
