Jill Farrar On Internet Cats And Toxoplasmosis

Jill Farrar loves cats. Her bandmate Gregory Crocetti, who is a scientist, thinks that she has toxoplasmosis — a name which she initially suggested as the title of their debut album but "that was voted down in the band." They settled on self-titling. 

"It's a parasite that lives in the brain that you get from cats… humans can also get this parasite and it makes them like cats more," she explains. This is totally the reason YouTube has exploded with cat videos.

"My housemate [who owns the cats] tells us that 'hana' means 'flower' or 'beautiful' and 'maru' means 'round'… and together the word 'hana maru' means 'excellent' or 'gold star'."

Speaking of cat videos, the band name actually pre-dates the viral Hana & Maru cat friends, but according to Farrar the band is actually named after two real life cats called Hana and Maru, just not the internet ones. "They're brother and sister and they're really really awesome, as all cats are. My housemate [who owns the cats] tells us that 'hana' means 'flower' or 'beautiful' and 'maru' means 'round'… and together the word 'hana maru' means 'excellent' or 'gold star', so we thought that was very cute. Years ago when we were looking for a name I was riding along, as you do in Melbourne, and [thinking] 'we need a name, we need a name', and I wondered if someone would be crazy enough to name their band after their cats, that would be really funny!"

The band play "chamber pop" which is a genre they conceived "that was the closest thing to what we do. With chamber pop we wanted to acknowledge what makes us kinda different, like our string section that is pretty awesome, and you don't see bands around that have that dedicated string section. For us the strings are core to our sound," she explains.

The Melbourne-based band originate from other cities, with Farrar moving at 21 from Sydney "because I wanted to be somewhere more creative," she laughs. "We all came to Melbourne because it had the kinda culture that we were looking for in terms of music. It's such a fantastic city, there's lots of small and medium sized venues which are essential to growing the culture of supporting young bands."

All band members hold down different jobs outside of their music — Farrar is a writer who originally "wanted to be a playwright; I moved to Melbourne to write my play, but I never wrote my play. I dropped out of art school because I didn't know what I wanted to make art about," she giggles. Two members have their doctorate. Both science and art are utilised in their film clip for Whole Heart, which features a bird's-eye view of an 'operation' on a photograph of a woman, from whose chest various cutouts of objects are pulled and placed around her body. "There's all this symbolic collage to play with and tell a bit of a story of not just the song, but how the band has formed." It's too complex a metaphor for Farrar to go into in depth, but there are "a lot of cat images" for obvious reasons.