In The Margins

Taking their name from Chanelle Afford's late grandmother, Agnes Kain, singer, keyboards player and percussionist Afford and guitarist Stefan Simunic continue, lyrically, to explore the interstices of life and love that sometimes blow up into uncontrollable things like passion, sadness, fear and jealousy on their third album, Before We Finally Meet.

“Jealousy – that's interesting,” Afford admits with a chuckle. “Jealousy comes up a fair bit on this album, doesn't it? That's interesting in itself I suppose, because I do a lot of the lyrics, but I think we've drawn a fair bit from a lot of experiences from family and friends that's been going on around us this year. So it's not all little personal secrets!”

It's not likely, for instance, that part of anyone's personal experience is to imagine one was a chair that could wrap its, “Old wooden arms around / make you happy / keep you warm.” (To Be A Tree). “I dreamt about that song, and in the morning I woke up and had a shower which, without giving too much away, is where a lot of my good work comes from,” Afford laughs again. “I jumped out of the shower and Stef had been playing some music in the lounge room. I'm like, 'I've got a song, we need to write this down', and that was it. That was the one song that wrote itself.” 

Like their two previous albums, 2007's Keep Walking Or I'll Kill You and 2009's Across The Ocean Grey, Before We Finally Meet was essentially recorded and produced by the duo in spare rooms, kitchens, lounge rooms and laundries in Sydney, with a guest vocal courtesy of Evan Purdey for the aforementioned duet, To Be A Tree, “flown in” from Melbourne, and the sparse couple of drum tracks recorded at a proper studio.

“The first album was pretty much a lot of acoustic guitar and percussion,” Afford explains. “And then we were travelling when we did our second album, so we hired some guitars and stuff. But we didn't have a lot of gear with us and so with this album we ventured into a bit of electric guitar, which Stef was really keen to do, because he just wanted to kind of step a little bit away from the more traditional sulky pop that we were doing.

“And since we were more in Sydney when we were recording this, we had more time and got to think a bit more about the instrumentation,” she continues. Aiding the duo in presenting the new album live are cellist Simeon Johnson from The Dawn Collective, and drummer Lee Carey from Dead Letter Chorus. “We managed to get some lovely friends involved to play a cello, there's a bit of trumpet on a couple of tracks and [we] also worked a lot closer with the drummer. So it's been a really lovely experience doing this album, because we've been a lot less rushed than we usually have. I think we had a better idea of what sound we wanted this time as well.”

“Not only with the subject matter, but also in some songs, I tried to paint a little bit of a landscape,” Afford explains. “We were reflecting a little bit on travelling. There's a song on there, Still Grey. We were going through photo albums and there was a lot of imagery from [Iceland's capital] Reykjavik, because we travelled there in 2009, and it was nice to be able to revisit that trip and paint a landscape lyrically about our time there. I think the energy on this album makes it really fun to play live, but it's still true to our style, with the lyrics being more about stories and having a fair bit of meaning.”

Agnes Kain will be playing the following shows:

Thursday 29 November - Notes, Newtown NSW