Ten Tracks for Ten Years
Ten years ago Lach and I got married in a small country church in Henty, my brother singing a Ben Harper song while our muso friends played wind and brass instruments. Lach’s grandparents owned a bed and breakfast in a sprawling 1901 building in town so we had a “second line” type parade as all the guests walked from the ceremony to the reception. Our first dance was the Pride of Erin under the big tree in the backyard festooned with bunting the neighbours lent us.
It was a very serious occasion as you can see
This was a very DIY wedding as we were twenty-one and had a lot of friends but not much money. My friend Jo did hair and make-up at six am, my friend Michelle collected jars and ornaments for months to make the reception look beautiful, our sister Kendall made a giant sunflower cake, and my Mum and her sisters bunched together bouquets from billie buttons we picked from the side of the road. We didn’t own a car so we took the VLine to our honeymoon.
Lach and I met at a summer camp when we were sixteen, so this year also marks us knowing each other for half of our lives.
In the time we’ve been together we’ve survived a bushfire, a plague, completing VCE in small towns, moving to Melbourne as naive country kids, that year we had no money and lived above a bagelry with about a thousand cockroaches, the year we got burgled and lost our whole EP recording that was on the laptop (but not my wedding ring, which I found two weeks later in a sock), that year we had no bathroom, teaching at one of the toughest schools in Australia (literally a doco about it called ‘Testing Teachers’) and touring for three months across Australia.
Obviously, music has been a huge part of our lives.
When we got married we printed our wedding invites on brown paper CD cases that included a mix CD of our favourite tracks that could accompany our guests roadtrip to Henty.
Here’s the sequel to that mix CD -
TEN TRACKS FOR TEN YEARS
(CD’s being a bit by the wayside now, I’ve made a Spotify and YouTube playlist for your listening pleasure)
Beloved One - Ben Harper
This was the song I walked down the aisle too, my brother singing with his Maton guitar and with harmonies, brass and woodwind weaving in and out from uni mates and housemates. I was so happy I grinned my face off in a very undignified way, with a huge guffaw before the church doors opened.
2. Jack-a-Roe - Jeff Lang
Jeff Lang is THE guitar hero for Lach. We pretty much watch him every time he gigs in Melbourne, like a pilgrimage.
But Lach’s first guitar heroes were his Dad Gav and Uncle Ron who teamed up to play this song for the certificate-signing part of the ceremony. Who doesn’t love a song about a gal cross dressing as a sailor to rescue her love from war as part of a wedding?
We obviously loved it so much we recorded our version of it, interpreting Jeff’s dark moody 4/4 time to 6/8 with a d minor shruti drone punctuated with a fiddle jig.
3. Come Thou of Every Blessing - Sufjan Stevens
Our favourite hymn, this very vulnerable but joyful spiritual song that thirsts for connection to the divine. Also, this is THE hymn for musicians, “tune my heart to sing thy praise”. The composer gets it.
We had the church of guests singing along to this. Even the “here I raise my Ebenezer” bit which is a bit archaic but hey, we’re old souls.
We love this version: the banjo and the slightly wonky sing-along harmonies, the glockenspiel that was ever-present on any indie record from the early 00’s and Sufjan’s voice breaking with longing.
4. Banjo and Violin - The Audreys
This album was the first present Lach ever bought me and this song has become a bit of an unofficial anthem for us.
5. Picola - Rare Child/Broken Creek
This is one of the first songs we ever wrote together, on the back of an envelope sitting at my Grandma’s green table which I’m now typing this letter on twelve years later.
Our first musical project was Rare Child - a five piece indie folk band gigging in the wake of Mumford and Son’s ‘Little Lion Man’ winning Triple J’s Hottest 100 in 2009. With this project we recorded our first EP ‘Big Smoke’ (even filming a video clip on the farm, which you can see here).
We reimagined ‘Picola’ with lapsteel guitar on our debut album ‘Small Town Anthropologies’ for Broken Creek. You can compare the versions to hear how our sound has changed in ten years!
6. Wedding Song - Anais Mitchell & Justin Vernon
There was a heatwave the first year we were married. We lived in this apartment in Carnegie above Huff Bagelry where every morning I would sweep up all the dead cockroaches from the night before. We had no money and were working jobs that would happen on opposite ends of the day, so we hardly saw each other. The only way to stay cool in this apartment was to fill the bath with cold water and lie yourself in it for as long as you could stand so that your blood temperature would drop. I would play the album ‘Hadestown’ on repeat in that hot summer, romanticising our whole situation as a survival tactic.
7. Hell and Highwater - Sal Kimber & The Rolling Wheel
Another hot summer of the 2020 bushfires in Corryong. We had heard Sal Kimber perform at Port Fairy Folk Festival the year before and were stunned by this song. Like Lach, Sal Kimber grew up in the mountain valleys around Corryong and we loved that we could hear the Australian landscape in her voice and sound.
Then the song took on so much more significance as 2020 unfolded for us and the rest of the world, “hell and highwater we’ll make it through”. We wrote our song ‘Here is my Home’ about that time with a bit of this song in its DNA.
8. Funky Tonight - John Butler Trio
As a teen, Lach was full into Metallica, growing his hair long and getting bottles thrown at his band at the school social. Then (one fateful day) on the ABC he saw John Butler play a lapsteel guitar and knew this was the music he wanted to make.
He was wearing a John Butler band t-shirt when we first met at a summer camp, his nails now long to play fingerstyle guitar. We both became firm fans, jumping on the John Butler Trio forum in the computer labs at school and having our hearts broken when John cut off his dreads and the band broke up.
But at least we will have that amazing moment on Australian TV when Keith Urban sits in with the John Butler Trio in their prime at the 2007 Aria Awards.
9. My Oh My - Punch Brothers
It started in 2009 with Crooked Still’s Undone in Sorrow giving us that feeling of this is the music we want to make, and then the Punch Brothers completely blew our minds in 2015. This gave us the phrase “chamber folk music” and drove us to wanting to completely plumb what was possible on our instruments. Maybe you can hear this influence in some of our tunes?
Also, how happy is this song?!
10. Shady Grove - The Chieftains with Tim O’Biren
This is famously the song that almost broke us up when Lach got full banjo obsessed and I felt like I couldn’t relate to the lyrics at all. But we made it work by reworking the song and it was the first track we arranged for our debut album.
We always make it work; re-writing, re-working, re-imagining, re-mixing. That’s the folk process, like this version of ‘Shady Grove’ with the Irish Chieftains and bluegrass guitar-god Tim O’Brien. Everyone creates their own version of a folk song. It’s the folk process but it’s also kind of the process of partnership and making a life together.
