From The Beginning

How do you pinpoint the beginning of something? First gig, maybe? Or first song written? Maybe it starts earlier than that: drum lessons in high school, or when the lead singer picks up a guitar for the first time. “I guess you have many beginnings,” Emily Lubitz of Tinpan Orange suggests. “I guess you could say I started singing in the bath with my sister.” 

Another beginning took place when she and two other members of Tinpan Orange, her brother Jesse Lubitz and multi-instrumentalist Alex Burkoy, were busking in the streets of Darwin. The band had travelled up there for the dry season to make a bit of money playing music, away from the competition of the busier Southern cities. A few members of the family who run the now FolkWorld, then Fairbridge Folk Festival, happened to be holidaying in Darwin at the same time. They walked past Tinpan Orange busking barefoot in the streets one day, stopped to listen, and encouraged them to apply. 

“In a way we see Fairbridge as the place we turned pro,” Lubitz says. She describes the slow build of the crowds over the handful of gigs they played over the weekend, the way ten people at the first turned into a packed room by the last. “No-one else could get in!” she says. 

The following week, at a gig at Clancy's, they arrived expecting an audience of perhaps 30 or so. Hundreds showed up. “It was packed!” says Lubitz. “It was like sardines. I think it was like a turning point for us. It was really this moment when we could actually take ourselves a little bit seriously... It was a point where we were like, 'Hey, we could maybe do this for a living.'”

They were right. These days, married to Harry Angus of The Cat Empire and with a son who's almost two, Lubitz is a career musician. Regulars in many places on the festival circuit, Lubitz has lost count of how many times Tinpan Orange have been to Fairbridge. Later this year, they're heading to Canada for an international tour. And through all this, through all the gigs and busy touring schedules, Lubitz, Angus and their son have managed to stay together as a family. Lubitz says it's remarkably easy; they simply take the baby with them. 

“In a way, it's a very complementary lifestyle, having a baby and being on the road,” Lubitz says. “Because on the road there's a lot of dead time. There's a lot of time that you're waiting: you're waiting for the airplane, the sound check, the show. I think I got to a stage before I had my baby where that was actually really troubling me – that dead time – and I didn't know how to fill it.” Before, it was an awkward combination of books and knitting. Now Lubitz and Angus spend it entertaining and caring for their son, who also seems to enjoy the lifestyle. “He's constantly surrounded by people,” Lubitz says of her baby. “He constantly has, like, six adoring men trying to get his attention.”

It's a whole new beginning in itself and Tinpan Orange's newest album, Over The Sun, is partly about this transition – from the end of one major beginning to the start of another. Since their 2005 debut album, Aroona Place, Lubitz has gone from busking barefoot in Darwin to marriage and motherhood and a little house in the suburbs. “I guess it was about looking back on times when life was a little simpler and I was a bit freer in certain senses – that feeling of being a tad nostalgic for it,” she says of Over The Sun. “It was more a reflection on what I'd left behind. I love where I've come to. But I guess I felt like I had to honour what I'd left behind.” 

Tinpan Orange will be playing the following dates:

Monday 29 April - Mojo's Bar, Fremantle WA