Second Chapter

Having overcome her initial shyness to record and release her debut album, Beat And Holler, back in 2010, Danielle Caruana, who travels as Mama Kin, has become quite the seasoned trooper, performing on concert stages around the world. Not that she hadn't, by default, done a few before stepping out as an artist in her own right, since she is Mrs John Butler, opening for him as well as for The Waifs and so on. So contemplating her second album, The Magician's Daughter, Caruana was always going to approach it a little differently.

“I did some songwriting study in between the two albums,” Caruana explains, “and a lot of the ideas for those songs came through that period, which I felt really liberated by because I felt like I was kind of running out of experiences to write about, and through this other channel I learnt how to write, um, fiction I suppose – while it still being deeply personal. It opened up a whole rainbow of possibilities for me in my writing, which was really exciting and musically felt really liberating as well.”

Holding the stories of The Magician's Daughter together are themes of connecting or disconnecting, of mother/father and mother/daughter relationships. “In some way, all the stories are connected to a place of fear for me, or a place of longing, or a place that I'm grappling with anyway. But I felt that rather than speak about the direct fear or the direct longing, I could paint a much more vivid picture by writing a story around it, and I've realised through this the great liberation of being a writer, like this amazing thing we get to play with, this exploration we get to make, while mining our own experience, painting it with the full spectrum of experience.”

Caruana called in Jan Skubiszewski, one half of Jackson Jackson and whose father is a film score composer, to produce the album, and there's certainly a cinematic quality to it. “I think one of the major things about working with other musicians and working with producers is that you kind of bring them this song, which already has this kind of pathos, and you ask them to give that pathos a colour or a shade or a sense. So you're saying embellish what you hear here, and then you hope that they interpret it in a way that somewhere in your body you already know that it is. So this is the thing where, as a songwriter, I'm waiting for moments of recognition.”

As for the characters that populate the songs on the album: “They arrive almost fully formed it seems. At what stage of the writing I think is the interesting thing. So a song like Cherokee Boy, that's one of those rare songs that arrives fairly intact – all the parts, they just come. When I started writing that song… It gave me the heebie jeebies because I knew straight away it was this massive loss, this abrupt ending to the idea of life, of what life was going to be for this person, this abrupt ending to this assumed continuity. As people we invest so deeply into the idea of our future, I knew that song… It was almost like I didn't want to write it, and even still when I play it, or when I was playing it for the guys in the studio, I could rarely get through a complete delivery of it without breaking down and just going, 'I don't even know if I want to sing this song – it just feels too sad'.”

Mama Kin will be playing the following dates:

Wednesday 13 March - Lizotte's, Kincumber NSW
Thursday 14 March - The Basement, Sydney NSW
Friday 15 - Sunday 17 March - Blue Mountains Music Fesival, Katoomba NSW
Saturday 23 March - West Coast Blues 'N' Roots, Fremantle WA
Thursday 11 April - Northcote Social Club, Melbourne VIC
Friday 12 April - The Loft, Wanrnambool VIC
Wednesday 17 April - Lizotte's, Newcastle NSW
Friday 19 April - Civic Hall, Mullumbimby NSW
Saturday 20 April - No. 5 Chruch St, Bellingen NSW
Sunday 21 April - Pelican Playhouse, Grafton NSW
Thursday 30 May - Fly By Night, Fremantle WA
Friday 31 May - Clancy's Fish Pub, Dunsborough WA