Save A Prayer

Shelley Segal is reminiscing about her musical upbringing on a warm Friday afternoon. The singer-songwriter from Melbourne, now 25 years old, tells Inpress that she started singing when she was just three. She knows because there's an old home video of her singing Phil Collins's Groovy Kind Of Love as a toddler. And like many young people her age, Segal says the first album she ever owned was Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill when she was nine. She remembers the day her mum bought it for her. “We were in the shop and mum saw that it had the Parental Guidance warning label on it, and she said to the lady at the counter, 'Oh, is this going to be alright?' And the lady goes, in front of me, 'Yeah, it just says “fuck”, and she's probably already heard [that word], so it's fine'.”

Hearing young Morrissette letting out her angst to the world was a momentous time in Segal's life. “It was the first time I realised that music could say something,” she says, “that it's not just about the sound or your voice.” She was moved to write by Ani DiFranco, too, who Segal admires for putting her ideas, stories and politics into her music. Like DiFranco, Segal has always written songs as if they were entries in a journal.

“I guess it started as a bit of therapy, 'Oh, this thing happened to me,' and so I sang about it. That's probably the start of my sound, which is really a storytelling kind of style. My songs are like my journal and I share them with people. Whether it's getting something off my chest, sharing a thought, a reflection or an idea and the way it makes me feel – I try to paint a picture.”

Segal feels particularly passionate about her picture of religion (or her lack thereof). Growing up in a Jewish family, she bought into religion quite devoutly as a child and teenager. Then when she was 19, she left it and now sees things from an atheist perspective. Most of all, she feels she was brought up with little choice but to believe in religion, which left a bitter taste when she started to question what she had been taught.

“I was brought up in a community where the school and the people I was surrounded by all shared the same view of how things occurred, all based on a two-thousand-year-old text. You believe these things and they're not really challenged. But I started to learn things about the world that contradict what I'd been taught. In a way, I felt I'd been duped all this time. I realised that kids need to learn to think critically and not to just take people's words on everything. That was the fundamental change for me: learning that I want to have good reason for what I believe.” 

Segal created a whole album out of her change of heart towards religion, simply titled An Atheist Album. The folk-pop record quickly gained traction and popularity in America and Segal was so busy touring, writing and even speaking at secular activist conferences over there that she never gave the album a proper release back home. She puts her popularity in America down to religion being more dominant in the culture and therefore the secular movement is more active and pronounced. Segal has since made a new album, Little March, which she says is not focused on religion, and the sound is softer and jazzier. She wrote it with the help of New York-based jazz guitarist Adam Levy.

She has decided to release the two albums at once in her home country. “I never really got to properly release An Atheist Album here,” she says, “but it's something that I really want to do and hopefully it will bring up a few issues here, because it's written from an Australian perspective. We only finished recording Little March in December last year. The main reason I want to release them both at the same time is that I think it really reflects my writing.”

Shelley Segal will be playing the following dates:

Saturday 23 February - Unitarian Church, Darlinghurst NSW
Sunday 24 February - X&Y Bar, Brisbane QLD
Wednesday 27 February - The Toff, Melbourne VIC
Saturday 2 March - Tatts Hotel, Lismore NSW