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“I feel like a lot of the writing is anchored in nature,” she said.<\/p>\n
“And that’s my tendency as well.”<\/p>\n
She said the shifting rhythms of the Surf Coast also shaped the emotional structure of the album, which moves between stark introspection and renewal.<\/p>\n
“I think the themes are like, half the record is kind of introspective and lonely,” she said.<\/p>\n
“I was living at that beach shack, and it was freezing.<\/p>\n
“So part of the record is like this introspective dialogue. It’s lonely and kind of depressed.<\/p>\n
“And then the other half of the record, it’s kind of like pre-antidepressants and post-antidepressants.<\/p>\n
“So it’s seasonal \u2013 there’s winter and then there’s sort of like spring, which is coming back out and feeling good again.”<\/p>\n
Senior acknowledged that seasonal themes are common in folk music, but said she leaned into them without overthinking genre expectations.<\/p>\n
Living outside Melbourne also shifted her creative instincts, giving her space to work without external pressure.<\/p>\n
“I feel like there’s a sense of freedom when you get out of the city and you feel like you’ve just come out of a spell,” she said.<\/p>\n
“I felt like there was more freedom in my musicality just through being out, being on my own and just following my own direction rather than being so influenced by all the people around me.”<\/p>\n
That sense of distance is also reflected in Softly, Once Again, a tongue-in-cheek song that gently critiques Melbourne’s punk music scene and the pressure on artists to constantly amplify themselves.<\/p>\n
“It’s a cheeky little song. It starts off with the line, ‘So many punk bands in this town,’,” she said.<\/p>\n
“It’s just a bit of a joke about the oversaturation of punk music in Melbourne and how in some ways to me, I feel like it’s more punk to do things softly, and to not have to fight this incredibly noisy world, and just go off and do things in secret and not have to post about it.<\/p>\n
“And so there’s a lot of those themes on the record of just like, it’s OK to just go off and do your own thing.”<\/p>\n
For Senior, the quiet of Anglesea brought both creative freedom and solitude.<\/p>\n
“It’s such an outrageously beautiful place that it’s the kind of place where you just step outside and you’re immediately taken out of yourself,” she said.<\/p>\n
“So in that way it’s beautiful\u2026 and it was kind of isolating in that it’s a surf town.<\/p>\n
“The population explodes over summer and then for most of the year, we were the only ones with the lights on in our street and the whole street was so quiet.<\/p>\n
“And so that was in some ways a really beautiful experience.<\/p>\n
“But it led to some introspective writing.”<\/p>\n
Leah Senior will perform at The Eltham Hotel on 27 June at 7pm with tickets available at Moshtix.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
AUSTRALIAN folk singer-songwriter Leah Senior will bring her latest album Pt. Roadknight to The Eltham Hotel this month, performing songs shaped by the rugged beauty of Victoria’s Surf Coast as well as the growing social tensions that sit beneath its postcard coastline. Featuring on the album is Two Weeks, a quietly confronting reflection on coastal […]<\/p>\n