Delving Deeper

Singer/songwriter Liz Martin is sitting at Sydney airport waiting to fly up to the Gold Coast for the start of a tour that will take her all the way down to Tasmania and, even before her first caffeine hit of the day, she's sounding pretty chirpy.

“We've been doing lots of gigs around Sydney,” she begins, “but we received a [Contemporary Music Touring] grant to go on tour. It's pretty exciting; I've only done a couple of gigs in Melbourne, Byron and Brisbane I think – that's been about the extent of any touring.”

Martin worked with bass player David Symes on her album released last year Dance A Little, Live A Little, which proved to be quite a departure from her previous two more introspective yet electronic-based albums, with the songs recorded more organically with various jazz and folk musicians.

“Live, the band changes all the time depending on the gig, but the one true constant, whenever I can get him, is the guitarist Dirk Kruithof, so he's coming with us. He's a little bit like Marc Ribot would like to play like,” she laughs.

“It's actually chicks that I've plucked from around the place, so Elana Stone is coming, to play some keys and accordion and sing. I wanted to have some proper singers this time round, so she's doing it and also Jacqueline Amidy has an amazing voice and is an incredible guitar player, but she's coming along to play bass and do vocals with us and she's also the special guest on the tour. And then I've got Cat Leahy from Melbourne to play drums.

“I saw her recently at the Mullumbimby Festival playing with Sal Kimber when we were up there and she's awesome. So it's a really chick-heavy band and sounds great.” Having gigged the album, primarily around Sydney, for a year now, Martin has seen the songs evolve as she's grown into them.

“I've played them with heaps of different combos so I've found they're really easily transformable from one format to another, so this time we'll have accordion doing lots of the warmer kind of string sounds and things like that, to really lush it out.

“We've played it with cello and clarinet in a little quartet and with a ten-piece band and now it'll be a five-piece. You know, it's got all the elements really, that are still on the album, of pop and folk and a bit of jazz, without that being a dirty word. We're also doing a bunch of new songs and throwing in a few old songs as well. And I've found lots of little other sounds, other people's songs hidden away in some of them,” she laughs again, “which is always bizarre.

“There's a little bit of Queen in one of the songs; there's a bit of Bowie, which I always knew was there and there's a bit of Rocky Horror Picture Show in there as well, which is bizarre. The actual songs, I don't know how I wrote them. Now when I look at them, there are a few, especially songs like Oh, that are just really gorgeous songs… I know what the words are about and whatnot but I just don't know how it all came into being and into place. It's really lovely and it's got a weird structure that just kind of weaves you around.”