By Arne Sjostedt
There is something magical in so many songs. They have the potential to turn your head around, deliver wisdom, fix your heart or just lift your spirits enough to let fear go and get through the hour.
Holly Throsby, one third of indie rock supergroup Seeker Lover Keeper, isn’t surprised when fans reach out and say their music connects with them.
“I think of it like this, ‘That’s what songs do to me’. And I guess in that sense it would be the most sparkling achievement of my musical life if I could affect anyone the way my favourite songs affect me.”
Perhaps it’s because when you tell a story or investigate an emotion in an honest way, listeners who share the same experience are bound to connect.
Let it Out, the first single from ‘Wild Seeds’, the group’s follow up to platinum selling self titled debut, is such a tune.
Accompanied by a creative and powerful video that features Magda Szubanski, it is an example of the universal in our human experience delivered in song.
“The psychologist Carl Rogers put it like this,” Throsby says. “’That which is the most personal is the most universal.’ And I think that is most certainly true, because I do think that sometimes when you do go deep in and try and really capture a personal experience, of course it is a shared human experience by the nature of us all being human. It’s an interesting paradox.”
About “relationships, friendships and camaraderie, and a sense of shared experience of where we are all at in our lives,” for ‘Wild Seeds’, Sarah Blasko, Sally Seltmann and Throsby took a different approach to their song craft.
“This time we wanted to be more all in creatively from the outset,” Throsby says. “The last time we collaborated on all the production and all the arrangements, and we would sing each other’s songs so it felt very shared by the end of the process. But I think we wanted it to feel shared from the outset this time. And we deliberately made the space for that.”
A relaxed sounding Throsby says that this group is a way for all these successful artists to come together and share the load.
“It’s kind of like a support group,” she says. “We always wanted Seeker Lover Keeper to be a project that we could all just do because we enjoyed it, not to feel any pressure around it, and to just have fun with it. And it does really feel like that. There is something relieving about not being the central focus of the project. To have that be a shared experience. I think in that sense it does have a more relaxed feeling.”
It is an attitude that lends them a certain sense of freedom on stage, where each member is able to not be too ridged in their approach.
“When we come together, of course we rehearse for our shows, but I feel like our shows have a certain off the cuff feeling to them which I think is what we all really enjoy. It feels fresh. Which is what we wanted the record to sound like.”
To achieve this, Throsby says the group only rehearsed for one day with the band, and then set about recording the album live.
“We also wanted it to be quite direct and really just be about the three of our voices and putting that in front and the harmonies and the words and the things that we were concerned about when were were writing the record to be at the forefront.”
Seeker Lover Keeper will perform at The Playhouse at the Canberra Theatre Friday 6 September 2019, 8pm. Tickets at canberratheatre.com.au.