Achieving Something Out Of A Shit Experience

A self-confessed "drama queen" and "bogan" (and, she also spills, a secret Harry Potter obsessive), Pool was born into a family of country musicians, her given name no coincidence. "No one thinks it's my real name, but it's totally real," Pool says. "It's on my birth certificate." She grew up — in Kurri Kurri, 30 minutes outside of Newcastle — singing with her parents, but at 17 started writing folky songs under the influence of Joni Mitchell and Laura Marling.

"One day, after five hours of crying, I wrote this song. It didn't make me feel happier, but it helped me pinpoint what I was feeling."

Pool came up through the country music circuit and cut her debut LP, 2013's The Hurting Scene, in Nashville. But, three years on, after endless shows (including opening for The Eagles), and tours of America and Europe (where, she jokes, "the most disconnect I had with [overseas] audiences was between songs, when I'd do my bogan Aussie banter, and realise how sarcastic a person I am"), Pool has grown into herself. On her second LP, Deep Dark Savage Heart, those old country traces have washed away. Befitting its title, the album is a full of shadows and ache, grandeur and drama, Pool drawing influence from Agnes Obel and Angel Olsen. The LP's lyrics are often self-lacerating, filled with confession and vulnerability, a tone set by single Black Dog which details the singer-songwriter's struggles with depression upon first arriving in Melbourne.

"I was subletting a friend's room and was so anxious and depressed that I didn't really leave that room," Pool recounts. "I was completely consumed by these feelings. But, one day, after five hours of crying, I wrote this song. It didn't make me feel happier, but it helped me pinpoint what I was feeling, and what I was going through. And it was just cathartic, like I've achieved something out of a shit experience."

The first time Pool played Black Dog, in Wellington opening for Marlon Williams, she describes the experience as "surreal". "I'd just written it, and it was the last song I played," she says. "And I got off stage, and I had to walk down these stairs, and poor Marlon had to help me down the stairs because I was shaking so much from playing this song."

Another album standout is Mariachi Wind, a song about navigating the waters of transient relationships that Pool wrote when she was "unhappily single". "I'd never wanted this amazing, magical romance where nothing was ever wrong. I really wanted human things, like hurt, complexity. You don't just get into a relationship to experience the good things, [but] all of somebody. Dudes I've dated have been like 'You're too upset, this is too hard.' And, like, for fuck's sake, everyone gets upset. It's a natural human emotion. People give up too quickly on their relationships, and even their friendships. Anything human about it, it's like it's too confronting. Whereas, I love that; to me, that's what life is about."