Shiny Happy Person

A couple of weeks ago, a woman came up to Melbourne singer Clare Bowditch on the street and, wearing a big grin, told her that she hated her. In fact, the woman said with glee that she and her friends took great delight in hating the affable songwriter.

But rather than back away slowly, Bowditch was rapt. She is getting used to, it after all. And to be fair, the woman wasn't talking about Bowditch herself, but Rosanna - the character Bowditch plays on Australian drama Offspring.

Like Bowditch, Rosanna is a musician and a mum and her role in season three of the Network Ten hit threw her in the path of young married singer Mick, played by Eddie Perfect.

For a few weeks there, around the country, fans of the show were struggling with the internal dialogue of liking this warm creative woman, not dissimilar to Bowditch herself, but hating the homewrecker.

“I saw Eddie live actually,” Bowditch explains.“I went to Adelaide Cabaret Festival. I was getting some funny looks. That was the week it was all up in the air, whether Rosanna and Mick would get it on. It was quite uncomfortable. But Eddie's festival show was great.”

For the Melbourne musician acting was quite a big step out of her comfort zone. “I'm really pleased I did it. But I was very scared and it was very challenging. Because you're talking about John Waters and Norman Gunston and Deborah Mailman and Asher Keddie, not just Eddie and Kat [Stewart, who plays Mick's wife Billie], these amazingly talented, craftful actors. So yeah, I did have a mild panic when I realised they were serious. Eddie was very kind. He gave me lots of good coaching in the make-up mirror each morning.”

While it was an unusual step for Bowditch, it was part of a concerted effort the singer/songwriter has been making over the last few years to build a sustainable career out of being an artist. Though the perception is often that successful Australian musicians are raking in the dough like the big earning US chart-toppers, the reality is always quite different. So Bowditch has learnt to diversify, whether that be by acting, writing the occasional magazine article, or hosting an in-flight radio channel for Qantas.

“I was always going to be a lifer,” Bowditch says of her decision to pursue music. “But before I didn't know how to make a consistent living as an artist and that was really frustrating and heartbreaking. I knew that, as a band, we were making unusual, good music. I knew that it deserved a chance. My frustration was, 'How do you let people know about it?'”

Bowditch says a big part of unlocking that secret was learning that the closer your public persona is to the you your friends and family know, the more you're able to find an audience, something that Offspring bears testament to. The song that Bowditch worked on with Perfect for the show, You Make Me Happy, has become Bowditch's very first Top Forty hit. It's also a great way to introduce her new album, The Winter I Chose Happiness. Though the album has all the trademark Bowditch features - the sharp, intelligent pop, Bowditch's rich, warm voice - there's a deep beauty here that suggests an artist finally finding the voice she wants the world to hear. Where last album, Modern Day Addiction, was Bowditch critiquing the world and all its flaws, The Winter I Chose Happiness is a much more personal journey.

“I think I needed to go through what I went through on Modern Day Addiction to be able to come to a place where it was actually important for me to have some peace, to find myself. We spend a lot of our lives trying to get other people to tell us we mean something, and there's a certain point in our lives where it no longer matters what other people think and we ask ourselves, 'What do I mean to myself? What do I say to myself last thing at night and first thing in the morning?' There was a lot of blame on the last album.

“These are songs that explore alchemy in a way. How can we transform whatever it is that we go through as human beings, which is suffering, into something that is inspiring, something that is heartfelt? Are we going to allow ourselves to do that when it's so much more attractive sometimes to keep writing songs that allow me to feel comfortable where I'm at? This to me was a more radical choice than writing a traditional folk album.”

At first, Bowditch says she resisted the idea of writing an album about happiness. But the theme was persistent, constantly asserting itself, just as addiction (Modern Day Addiction), lust (The Moon Looked On) and grief (What Was Left) had come to inform previous albums. And like with Modern Day Addiction, once Bowditch realised the idea couldn't be shaken, she embraced her topic.

“This album there's a lot of research,” she explains. “The research never directly feeds into the album lyrics as such. It's really just me exploring around the topic. It was really a personal challenge for me to step out of the story that I'd always told myself about needing to suffer to create art.” As part of her research, Bowditch listened to a lot of Dixieland jazz and there are definitely moments on the album that celebrate the style, but The Winter I Choose Happiness isn't a retro record by any stretch. Second track, Thin Skin, even ventures into Arcade Fire territory.

“I was looking into the kind of music that sounded obviously happy,” Bowditch says explaining the Dixieland connection. “I found it ironic that Dixieland music was made between two major world wars and out of that experience of war came this exuberant music.” A more surprising aspect of Bowditch's research saw her study to become a life coach. “I thought, 'What's the most uncomfortable thing I can do? Oh, I'll do life coach training.' I found it really confronting. I did it while I had a back injury basically. I did it online while I was holed up in bed in April, May and June this year but I'm really glad I did it because it's given me so many more tools to work with artists.”

For Bowditch it's a small step from finding happiness to passing on what she's learnt to fellow creatives. So next up, after she takes these new songs out on the road for the first time, is her Creative Business Mentorships. Though she's been mentoring young artists for a while now, Bowditch's new skills have prompted her to take a more formal approach to passing on her knowledge. But first she has to answer the million dollar question; whether all this research and ruminating on the topic of happiness has really made Bowditch any happier?

“I can't even tell you how much happier I am.”