Tree Changes

Even as they handed her the gold disc for her assured cowgirl-costumed debut album, To The Horses, Lanie Lane was deciding to escape.

“I think I needed to get away from a lot of things,” she explains. “I’d been living in the city for ten years or so and never thought I’d not want to be in it.” Yet she eased out to a secluded corner of the Victorian countryside – and surprisingly began enjoying the silence.  

“I realised how much I needed that quiet – just not being bombarded with the city’s buzz all the time. It’s not all bad – I go to Sydney or Melbourne now and it’s like a big amusement park. I stay at a hotel right in the middle of Sydney and you go past all the department store windows and all the traffic. But it just doesn’t seem real to me. It’s all consumer, and so all-consuming.

“I now just feel connected to the people who are important to me, the things around me, and I can fill up the rest of the space with what I’m creating.”

Three years on and the result is Night Shade, an altogether more personal record, as Lane processed her feelings, and looked inside and out. Or “just became a bit more of a grown-up,” as she half-jokes. The singer is still fond of her first record, but now sees it differently: “The music really wasn’t saying anything – it was a lot of random stories. This one is just more cohesive, a record of the time I’ve been through.” 

She even approaches the process around the album differently. “When you’ve done it once, you have some kind of idea of how it all works. Even doing interviews and stuff – the first time it was all about the things that were happening to me, the experiences rather than the music: ‘Oh, you worked with Jack White, you sang on a You Am I album’. Now it’s more about the things I’m passionate about, the things I’ve tried to express on the record.”

‘Intimate’ is a word often used in relation to Night Shade. Lane admits it’s sometimes not easy to be so honest in a song: “To look inward you got admit everything that’s in there, good and bad – it’s not easy. We all often avoid it; it’s risky, and it’s probably going to hurt. But if you do confront what’s there, it opens like a space inside you where creativity can bloom. It’s so rewarding when you let it happen. You can find some real peace with yourself.” 

That acceptance extends to her own creative process. “I haven’t written a song since recording the album,” she admits. “But I’ve got all sorts of visual ideas – for artwork, videos. I really can’t switch it on or off. I just go with what my brain wants me to do. Right now, I don’t think I’ve got anything new to say in a song, in a lyric – but next week I might, so I just let that happen.”