Looking Back

Fresh from performances at Folk Alliance in Toronto, taking her two boys to Bluesfest and finding herself among the top 20 in a list of Australia's top 100 singers of all time (as voted by her peers), Katie Noonan is relaxing over a cup of coffee up in Brisbane as she fields questions about her latest album, Songbook. The record is a re-imagined collection of songs selected from across the past 15 years of a career that began when her brother Tyrone invited her to join his new band, george, for a university band competition.

“A couple of times a year I do 'by request' shows,” Noonan explains the selection process that informed the making of Songbook, “where fans request songs and stuff, so that helped inform my process a little. I knew which songs in particular may have resonated with people a little more than others. But then also trying to reflect all my different albums of the last few years, so there's stuff from The Captains and there's something from [2007's] Skin and there's something from the george stuff and Elixir, and it's all kind of just little snapshots of my various releases. 

“Then there are five new songs that hadn't really found a home until this particular record,” including a short piano piece. “I couldn't come up with a title, so I just called it Untitled, which I might add iTunes [obviously] don't have a spellcheck, because on iTunes it's called Unititle! All the names that I could come up with were just far too wanky, so I just went, 'Alright, Untitled it is.' It's nice to have a little instrumental moment that was something different and a break from the vocals as well.”

While she might have only released three solo albums in the past 15 years, Noonan has been nothing if not prolific, and across several different genres. Since george called it a day in January 2005, she's recorded two albums with Elixir (a jazz/pop trio that includes husband Zac Hurren), an album of jazz and opera duets with her mother Maggie, a pure jazz album with Paul Grabowsky and two albums with classical guitarist Karin Schaupp, as well as one with her band The Captains and a variety of guest vocal performances on records by Pound System, Katalyst and Passenger, among others. 

But it was with george where it all started. The band released three independent EPs before their first album, 2002's Polyserena, blew things wide open, debuting at number one in the national album charts the week of its release and selling double platinum. There are three songs from Polyserena on Songbook, including Spawn, which originally came out on george's 1999 EP, You Can Take What's Mine.

“It was kind of weird actually,” Noonan admits, of going back to those george songs. “I mean I have played them a little at those By Request shows. Obviously we were very lucky with george with our success, so a lot of people know those songs, but it was interesting going back, particularly to Spawn. I mean, I remember writing that as a young kind of… girl, really. I was 19 and now I'm 36 in a few weeks, so there's been a fair amount of water under the bridge in that time,” she laughs. 

“So it was interesting going back to those lyrics. The weird thing about songs is also that when you write one thing, it means something at that particular time, but then, a few years later, it means something totally different, you know? As much for the songwriter as well as the listener; other songs that I love listening to at the time meant something and now they mean something else. So that's a kind of cool thing – I obviously had to still connect with it and want to tell that story and perform that lyric. So it was interesting and sometimes kind of confronting going back and looking at the lyrics again and remembering the moments that they were written in, and some of them were, you know, a bit intense,” she chuckles again.

Telling the stories behind the songs is also a component of the tour which Noonan will be undertaking to launch the album. It's her first completely solo tour, just herself and a piano – she's just become a Kawai Pianos endorsee by the way, though don't expect to see her behind a grand every night of the tour. The stories are also there in the actual limited edition physical sheet music songbook that accompanies the album release.

“That's something I've been meaning to do for years, because people often ask me for music, so with that I went even more into the songs and where I was and what they were about when I wrote them. With the songbook, the funniest thing was going through the photos and just seeing some incredibly poor fashion choices I've made over the years. There are a couple of photos where I definitely have the mullet, which my mother has to answer for, but you know, it was the '80s. There's one photo,” she cracks up, “where I'm in like this stone-wash denim kind of pinafore dress, which I remember was like my favourite dress. The whole thing's been a really nice, coming full circle kind of thing.

“Then with these gigs, they're more of a relaxed kind of feel where I'm telling people about the process behind the song and, yeah. It just felt like the right time to do this kind of re-imagining of stuff and bring it back to the simple format of just the voice and strings [on the album] and piano. I've never toured solo and I haven't played solo that much, so it's nice bringing it back to that and it's a new challenge, 'cause there's nowhere to hide – just nice and intimate.”

The Songbook album, which Noonan is releasing independently through her website, iTunes and at shows, is similarly stripped right back to just voice, piano and, on some songs, strings, recorded just before last year's ARIA Awards.

“With The Captains, we were lucky enough to have the ACO [Australian Contemporary Orchestra] on that record [2010's Emperor's Box], so I had some incredible string charts at my disposal. But I was picking songs that I thought, you know, would work with the added flavours of the string quartet, and then on a couple there's no piano at all – it's just strings and voice, on [george's] Breathe In Now and Special Ones, because I wanted to take them somewhere really different to the band versions. The string quartet that I love working with are based in Melbourne, so that's pretty much why we made the album there.”

Katie Noonan will be playing the following dates:

Thursday 11 April - Heritage Hotel, Bulli NSW
Saturday 13 April - The Basement, Sydney NSW
Sunday 14 April - Clarendon Guesthouse, Katoomba NSW
Saturday 27 April - Flinders Performance Centre, Buderim QLD
Thursday 2 May - Brass Monkey, Cronulla NSW
Friday 3 May - Lizottes, Dee Why NSW
Saturday 4 May - Lizottes, Central Coast NSW
Sunday 5 May - Lizottes, Newcastle NSW