This Mojo's Workin'

To listen to the eponymous debut album from the artist who calls herself Mojo Juju is to descend into a world populated by characters and sounds that you might bump into in the novels of Raymond Chandler, with a twist of that Latin American pachuco culture that seeped into America's cities in the '40s.

“A lot of my influences as a songwriter have not just been music,” the Melbourne-based musician admits. “It's been literary and cinematic. Big fan of the noirists – not just film but also writers, Chandler, Bukowski, all those guys, have been major influences.”

That said, Juju originally staked a claim for our attention fronting a loose collective from Newcastle called the Snake Oil Merchants, which drew on aspects of cabaret, punk and early American traditions from New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta. She'd already made tentative steps to establish her own voice last year, releasing a debut solo single, Horse Named Regret, though the Merchants only officially dissolved at the beginning of this year. Even so, Juju wasn't necessarily all that prepared for life as a solo artist.

“It's been extremely daunting, to take on a whole album and make all those calls, you know, without having seven other people over you on every decision along the way,” she laughs. You can be really adamant that you are right when there's someone else to argue, but when you're alone trying to decide whether or not you're doing the right thing…

“One thing that I was certain of was that I wanted to make an album that was about the songs and the songwriter. Before, with the Snake Oil Merchants, it was about a whole bunch of things all going on at once, and it was very collaborative. So you'd write the bare bones of the songs and then take them in and everyone else had their way with them, which was really exciting 'cause you never knew where it was going to end up. But this time around I was… not really thinking about the album overall. I was just writing songs and writing as much as I could, and each one of those songs had a distinct flavour and I had a very clear idea of where I wanted that to end up.”

Diverse the album may be, but the 14 songs all sit together very comfortably, reflecting the common threads that underlie them – sultry rhythms and dark, seamy tales of, not NYC or LA, but Kings Cross and Newcastle, the places she knows best.

“I didn't always know how to get it from there to there but had an idea roughly what I wanted it to sound like ultimately and then kind of headhunting the right people for each job. So it wasn't like putting a band together and then going, 'How do I make the band have something to do during that song?' It was the song first and then the band. I've never been very good at being just one thing at a time, so the songwriting kind of goes all over the place – in country and rock'n'roll and blues and there're some Latin kind of rhythms in there.

“I guess narrative has always been a huge part of it for me too. The tradition of blues and country music a lot of the time; folk music and even jazz, they're all telling stories – really personal ones or completely fictional stories that have some kind of human element that resonates universally. So, I think there's a lot of truth on this record, but then some of the details – names and places – have been changed to protect the guilty and covering some of my tracks at the same time as being really revealing and pretty raw at times.”