Laura Jean

I was revisiting the 10 albums that made the Australian Music Prize shortlist this year when I took time out to listen to this second album from Melbourne's Laura Jean. I have little doubt that Eden Land will be among the final 10 next year. It is an outstanding record and may well end up with the sobriquet "best Australian album of 2008".

Starkly, irrevocably emotional, it is populated by timeless characters for whom the Bible is not a book but a life map, dressed in stays and buttoned boots, high collars and layers, caught in evening's low light, or gaslight.

The eeriness of opening track Magic Unnamed/Eden Land cracks open your heart, chills your blood and snatches you from the realm of the casual.

Optimism and some buoyant folk flowers in November and Lady Of The Lake before something darker - not grim, but marked by human failing and its inevitably - arrives.

The stories can be fascinating, not least of them Mikhael, which is sung from the perspective of a woman whose life revolves around her son to the point of obsession or dangerous absorption. "In a soft white shell, tiny and frail, lay Mikhael/I crouched to the floor lest his breathing fail." He grows, she doesn't, and the song ends with "I awoke when he was 17/His mother's heart born and broken in dreams."

Laura Jean is capable of something that approaches shimmering beauty. It's heard in the atmosphere of Anniversary, as her prominent voice lays down beside you and clarinet and viola augment the guitars. But in the same song she reveals a bottomless well of understated pain, loss, loneliness and the emptiness that follows inexplicable hurt. That pain is conveyed in part by the lyrics, which have a darkly poetic nature, but in larger part by the voice, which seems to be filling in the back story for you and taking you much further.

It's not a showy voice but it is both comfort and discomfort and, ultimately, rewarding.
Eden Land - carried on rustling folk, choir-backed austere pop and a mix of the hymnal and the personal - doesn't just walk in the same territory as PJ Harvey's recent White Chalk, that evocation of Victorian-Edwardian interior drama, it also deserves to be counted in the same company.
- Sydney Morning Herald

The section of the article concerning me (other songwriters featured include Grant Mclennan etc):

Eden Land, the new album by Melbourne songwriter Laura Jean, is a great example of this kind of space: a landscape beyond words, but defined by very particular melodic cadences and instrumental arrangements that both inspire and illuminate the lyrics.

Musically, she says, she referenced medieval choral music, Estonian folk and "the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing Christmas carols". In that setting, her lyrics evolved the kind of archaic formality and mythical imagery typified by Anniversary:

Hey brother hey, in the middle of May
On the first full moon, in the middle of the day
The greatest boon did bless my whole life
Even when I was a child, I knew I was your wife
Separated by a wall in a maze, in a maze
We walked side by side from the first of our days
Then a singing bird led us to a door of diamond wood
Remember its strange call?
We killed the bird, and we broke through the wood
But the world we found was not good

The baroque combination of viola, clarinet and choir enhances the sense of some arcane fable brought to life. In the last verse, when the dead bird returns to pass judgement on the sibling-lovers, the haunting march of the music and the weight of ancient literary allusions far outweigh the possibility of Jean racing Gabrielle Cilmi to the top of the pop charts.

"The idea of thinking about commerce when I'm making an album is foreign to me," Jean says. "I can't even imagine it. Some people I know do that: 'I need to write a radio song'. To me, an album is like an artwork. You're making a world. Beauty has to come first."

Her medieval fascination is not purely tonal, as it turns out. "In feudal times everything was local," she says. "People worked small, there was a lot of respect for ritual and celebration. I really think we'll go back to that one day: more living in the moment, not worrying so much about greed and profit." - The Age

The section concerning me:
Almost all the performers in this exhibition are experienced, but one of those who will be performing on the opening night, the central coast-via-Melbourne artist Laura Jean, is still pretty early in her career. Was there a difference in an artist maybe still developing that stage performance?

''I think some of the larger artists are still exploring their performance,'' Tarasin says.''It's interesting you mention Laura Jean, because I wanted to put her right next to Warren Ellis in the exhibition because her performance is as spellbinding and spirited. That's exciting. She is a very open human being and I think that comes with the territory with the performers: that you have to be open to being that free.''


- Sydney Morning Herald

THERE had been a long fallow period. A year without a song appearing in the consciousness, let alone on the page, and a question mark over when, or maybe if, inspiration would return. Meanwhile a first album, Our Swan Song, sat there waiting to be released, its inactivity mirroring and possibly mocking the creative inertia.

Laura Jean Englert (Laura Jean to record buyers, Laura to friends, Laura Englert to the taxman) was working in a brain-deadening job in a call centre in Melbourne and, while hardly friendless, she was nonetheless seemingly moribund.

Then one song emerged and another and another. It soon became obvious to Englert that this past year had been a period of such emotional upheaval that the fallow period was merely a flimsy dam wall and it was breaking. The result was 2008's outstanding second album of dark folk and spare classicism, Eden Land.

"I'd get home and just write and there it was. I didn't even try, it just came out," recalls Englert, sitting half under an umbrella in an outdoor cafe in the Rocks, as rain begins to sprinkle her thick dark hair.

"Sometimes I write things in my songs before I even understand what it's about. My first album, The Hunter's Ode, ended up being really prophetic for me. Basically the chorus says, 'I'll take no woman friend, I'll go to no town and you'll hide in no damn cave all through the winter.' Well, I left my partner of six years for a woman because I realised I'm gay, and when I first broke up with him I stayed in a place called the Cave, in the middle of winter, and I started going out a lot more.

"Then, for example, Lady Of The Lake [from Eden Land says], 'I'm your lady of the lake but I'm her brother too.' I'm really angry in that song. [It] started out about how long Our Swan Song took and how over it all I was but that song ended up being about how over I was with my relationship. And I didn't realise. Even though the lyrics are obviously about my identity crisis, so obviously me needing to express my masculine side … I didn't realise it."

Eden Land, a concept album set in a parallel world of paradise lost, is suffused with uncertainty about roles and destinations, with regrets and the recognition of repercussions; no matter if the decisions made are the right ones.

"There's a sense of being aware, on some level, that my whole life was about to change," acknowledges the 26-year-old, who wears a wedding ring to mark the ceremony she and her partner, drummer Jen Sholakis, celebrated in New Zealand.
"The album really is about leaving innocence and leaving a safe world into experience and adulthood. The songs came out of different things that all had this thematic thing, which all my work does, of parallel worlds. So a lot of my work is about expressing that feeling of split, of duality."

It's not hard to go from that theme to her own struggle with identity, one which goes back to childhood and a feeling that while loved at home she was "this freak" elsewhere.

"I think that's a massive part of it," she says. "I spent most of my life not fitting in and not understanding why, especially in high school. I felt so out of place growing up as a kid, I did have to create another world. And I was really sensitive, I wanted to please people, so I didn't realise about being gay until much later. I met my boyfriend when I was 18 and we had a very strong soul connection but the six years we were together were the hardest six years. I did a lot of self-reflection in that time but I didn't get a lot of life experience."

Englert pauses and looks into her coffee cup for some time. The silence is not out of any uncertainty about the frankness of her conversation. It's already clear that there's no guile and no regrets with her, only an optimistic sense of wonder at what the world throws up for you.

Then she looks up. "It's a very mysterious thing, figuring out being gay. People think sexuality is very rigid but it's not. For me, I can't really say except that I fell in love with a woman."

Laura Jean plays at the Clarendon Hotel, Katoomba, July 3, and the Harp Hotel, Tempe, July 4. Eden Land out is now through Scotland Yard/Cooperative. - Sydney Morning Herald