Believe It

"It was really a series of lucky events,” chuckles the bubbly Shelley Segal, who's only just recovered mobile service after a falling tree knocked lines out. She's six or seven weeks home in Melbourne from a three-month tour of the US, and if the writing and recording of her latest release, Little March – a collaboration with American jazz guitarist Adam Levy (whose CV includes stints with Norah Jones, Tracy Chapman and Ani DiFranco among others) – is a series of lucky events, so to is her whole career.

Back in 2011 Segal moved to London, ostensibly to do some backing vocals for a project her dad was working on – he plays in a Jewish wedding band – and met producer Tom Nichols, who offered her a production deal which resulted in her debut, An Atheist Album. That album then, as she describes it, “gave me traction in the US, because there's a really big secular movement at the moment and that's the first record, a very accessible record, stylistically – it's mostly pop and folk – and that movement felt it was fairly representative. So I've been invited to do a lot of speaking engagements where I go through the album and talk about my experience of changing my worldview from a believer to a non-believer. That in particular has been very popular in the US.”

That album's producer knew Adam Levy from an earlier project that they'd worked on together, and thought he and Segal would get along and so he put them in touch. “I was in New York,” she explains, “and Adam was living there at the time, so we spent a week together writing songs and getting to know each other, and we loved the songs that we made. But we didn't plan to record them – we just wrote them and played them in our own sets.

“Then, just before we recorded the album, in December last year, and just before that I was thinking I love these songs, I love them being part of my set and it would be so nice to have a copy of them. So we found a time in both of our schedules and Adam had a good friend in LA who has a studio and so we arranged to do the record with him. His name is Husky and worked on one of my favourite albums ever, Knuckle Down, by Ani DiFranco – when I saw that in his discography I was screaming!” she laughs.

“It was beautiful. We just spent a week together in LA – we'd put down the songs during the day and then we'd go and get coffees and hot chocolates and it just really felt like friends together spending time making music, and I think that really comes across on the record as well. The first day I met Adam we started writing together and I was, as you can imagine, very nervous – I'm here with the best guitarist in the world! And he was just so warm and made me feel very comfortable and at ease straightaway. It made it really easy to write together.

“I remember when we wrote [opening track] Glad You Asked, we were having a discussion about the difference it can make in a person's day by somebody just kind of doing small acts of kindness. A lot of these songs stemmed from discussions about life and people and friendship and relationships.”

Segal heads off to the US for another tour at the end of August, hopefully with a few new songs written with Levy on this lightning launch tour.