You Are What You Eat

When people talk about Evelyn Morris the word thrown round most frequently is 'talented', with a rolling list of superlatives and descriptors to sandwich it. She's regularly hand-picked by touring and recording artists (like Ariel Pink and most recently, Pond's Nick Allbrook) to provide back-up for their projects, but her own project, the solo act-turned-band Pikelet, is where the real expression of talent happens.

Embarking on Calluses, the follow-up to 2010's Stem, Morris took bandmates on a retreat out of Melbourne to write the album together, but it didn't result in hugging trees or making friendship bracelets for each other out of moss. Morris describes the condensed writing time as both “fruitful” and “vaguely emotionally rollercoasty”.

“We really got through a bunch of band dynamic issues while we were there... Or maybe created some more.” When asked if the band might be in the market for a Metallica-style live-in psychoanalyst, Morris is enthusiastic: “Yeah we need one of those, we really do!”

There's a sense though that Morris is doing a fine job of the analysis herself, explaining the latest album's focus on death, anxiety (the last track Peephole apparently came about with Morris telling herself, “'Right, I am going to fucking totally outline exactly what happens when I spiral into an anxious puddle,”), and, Morris says, “there's a lot of feminism in it.” For Morris, the way artists are discussed in music journalism and even between friends is indicative of a sense there's still different standards applied, different preconceptions brought to music made by women, including her own. “I love referring to bands as 'all-guy bands',” Morris laughs, agreeing with the strangeness of the 'all-girl band' label when it's reversed. “Oftentimes you'll be told, 'Oh but your gender doesn't have anything to do with it' but then so often gender titles are related to female artists. They'll say 'female artist' they won't say just 'psychedelic pop artist' or whatever.

“There's this overall sensation of being a female artist,” Morris says, but then explains that a relative paucity of peers can create greater room to move. “The whole time I grew up I was a tomboy, so it didn't really bother me because I would look at dudes doing music and relate to them just the same as I would a woman. I mean there are a fair amount of women, but there's just a fair amount more dudes. But for those same reasons it's difficult for some women to access their creative output within themselves, that also means that if you do access that creative output there's so much scope, so many different areas of expression to play with because it doesn't feel like it's been done yet.”