Songstress brings new music to our shores

Australian singer-songwriter Lisa Mitchell will treat local fans to a taste of her mesmerising new body of work when her tour stops off in Anglesea on May 28.

The national tour celebrates the release of Mitchell’s highly anticipated fourth studio album, A Place To Fall Apart, which has just been released via Believe and is also available on vinyl.

Six years since the release of her critically-acclaimed Warriors album, the new offering is a heartrending tribute to what it means to be alive and learning in the world.

Mitchell says it feels exciting to share these new songs of her heart and spirit with her fans, describing the lyrics as deeply introspective having been written in the thick of the first year of a global pandemic.

While showing a natural progression, A Place to Fall Apart remains faithful to the fundamental sonics tied to her honoured style of pure, tender vocals and artful storytelling.

“This album is a place to fall apart in,” she says.

“Take this patchwork blanket of melancholic love stories between the human and beyond-human and pitch it as a tent, either inside your lounge room or out in the bush.

“Lie down and look up at the stories.”

A Place To Fall Apart features previously released singles Zombie, released back in October last year, I Believe in Kindness and Dreaming, Swimming.

Another highlight is the stunning fourth single, Summoning, in which she teams up with Jess Hitchcock, a talented Indigenous singer-songwriter with family origins from the Torres Strait Islands and Papua New Guinea.

“We both find great connection and meaning in our ancestry, and so it is not surprising that we wrote this song in only one day,” Mitchell says.

“The song begins with us singing to the oldest trees in the continent, the Wollemi pines – only discovered 10 years ago in the Blue Mountains, after being presumed extinct – asking them for answers to our modern problems.

“It moves between a love-song and a conversation with the spirits of the land.

“We summon our inner knowing, and we call upon the wisdom of the land to help us find our way through this modern mess.
“Part love-song, part remembering of inner wisdom, and the support that is available from the land.”

Speaking about the process behind bringing the album together, Mitchell says she knew she needed “to create a world with beautiful musicians first, and then think about recording it”.

“I asked Jessie Warren (bass/vocals) and Kishore Ryan (drums) and they generously brought their beautiful and strange ways of seeing rhythm and melody to my songs before Tom Iansek (production) captured us in our natural habitat,” she says.

A five-piece band joins Mitchell on the launch tour which kicks off in Red Hill on May 20 and makes its way to the Anglesea Memorial Hall on May 28 for a 7pm show.

Support comes from Bellarine former local Chitra whose transportive music fuses influences of artists such as Julia Jacklin and Angel Olsen onto a bed of rousing rock, forged with an alt-folk twang.

General admission tickets cost $35 and can be purchased online from Trybooking.