Clearing The Decks

Back in 1996, relatively fresh out of a band called Truckasaurus, which she co-fronted with now RockWiz bass player Mark Ferrie, Melbourne singer-songwriter Lisa Miller released a debut album, Quiet Girl With A Credit Card, which managed to get a UK release on Demon Records. Her second album, As Far As A Life Goes, followed three years later. Though gaining plenty of critical acclaim, neither scored much in the way of airplay, but the latter gained her an ARIA nomination for Best Female Artist in 1999.

Unfortunately, while missing out the ARIA might have been a momentary disappointment, the fact that she found herself in contention with her label proved a more far-reaching problem. There've been more albums and even another five ARIA nominations, but in a very real sense, Miller had lost those first two albums. That's why she ended up recording Meet The Misses, her seventh solo LP, on which she has revisited songs from each of those albums, and in a very real sense reclaiming them.

“I guess I chose the ones that still we do occasionally in the set,” Miller explains of the selection process, “so they're the ones that we've lived with for a long time and grown on us, and the ones that can still translate into who I am now.”

In 2002, Miller released an album of covers called Car Tape that proved incredibly popular, despite the fact that it had been rejected by the label. “Car Tape was a way of me, I guess, regaining control,” she explains. “I'd been playing around with those songs, essentially demoing a new album, but I knew in my heart that I needed to move on and have more control and own my own thing. Car Tape was an option that they chose not to take on, so then I was free. It's an old story and it was tricky; I was wondering how I could actually give people something that they could be interested in, with regard to this album, without going through sordid details. And so by the time I got to putting out the record, and by the time it was finished, I realised that I didn't really feel like talking about all that stuff,” she chuckles, “because I wasn't angry anymore. The record just freed me, and it fills in that big gap in my creative past, I guess.

“It's probably not the right time to clear the decks but sometimes you don't have any choice – sometimes the decks just have to be cleared,” Miller laughs again. “I thought, 'God, I've done this second Car Tape (2) record [in 2010], so that's more covers, and then I'm re-recording these songs…' It was just the time, and I'd just been chipping away at it for a few years, doing a song here and a song there when I was recording the Car Tape record, so I thought, 'Let's put it all together and get it out of the way'.”

The beauty of Meet The Misses is that the provenance of either the songs or the album itself is irrelevant. As a collection, it has its own subtle beauty that doesn't need anything other than itself and the quietly sublime performances and finely understated detail of Miller and her co-producer and guitarist Shane O'Mara. And looking back, Miller has discovered things she hadn't seen in certain songs

“What comes first to mind is Safe As Houses, which was forthright in its old state, which is where I was at,” she tells. “I was also probably quite angry at the time, but Shane put this beautiful soft nylon-string guitar work on it, we took it down a tone, and I just suddenly realised how sad it is.”

Lisa Miller will be playing the following shows: