Tomorrow Is Now

By 1998, the indie power pop four-piece The Falling Joys, had decided to take a break from a pretty hectic few years of touring nationally and internationally. Settled in Mount Victoria in the NSW Blue Mountains, their frontwoman, singer/songwriter and guitarist Suzie Higgie was taking stock.

“I wanted to do something really, you know, laid back,'” she recalls with a laugh, on the line from her current home just outside of Yass, the genesis of the album, Soon Will Be Tomorrow. “I had a few songs that I'd already written, and because my partner Matt [Crosbie], he's been Nick Cave's live engineer for over twenty years, so I'd got to know the guys through him, I heard Conway [Savage]'s piano playing and got to know his stuff he did and I thought, 'That's something different, let's get together with Conway, if he's interested.'… And that's pretty much how it came about.”

In the end, Savage contributed a couple of his own songs to the album, and it ended it up much more of a collaboration than a Suzie Higgie solo effort. “Once we got playing together, I could sort of see where it was going. Just One Of Those Things, the last track, is probably the most interesting because that was such an experiment in writing… I had the music and I had the title, but I didn't know what it was going to be about [laughs]. So the challenge was to go away separately and write what we thought would work... So we both went away and then we literally stuck them together and turned it into a singing conversation, with a few edits. That was fun.”

The resulting album was originally released on Hope & Anchor, The Dirty Three's label, and was then picked up by a label in London called Lion Milk, “and then they just disappeared off the face of the planet,” Higgie admits. “You can still sort of get it on Amazon but it was getting harder and harder to buy… so we thought, well, let's re-press it and put it out there again.”

Once Soon Will Be Tomorrow was released, life immediately got in the way, Higgie starting a family while Savage got on with Bad Seeds and solo projects, but the reissue has finally provided them the opportunity to perform it live in concert.