Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Tara Simmons

It began, in a sense, with her decision to work with producer Yanto Browning, who's worked with Kate Miller-Heidke, Art Of Sleeping and The Jungle Giants, among others. Brisbane-based singer-songwriter Tara Simmons had reached a point in her career where, while justly proud of the music she's created to date – two EPs and her 2009 debut album, Spilt Milk, that had established her trademark down-tempo sample-driven sound – it was time for changes.

“I actually did my previous EP [2007's All The Amendments] with him,” she recalls, relating the evolution of what became her second album, It's Not Like We're Trying To Move Mountains, “which was very, very uninvolved in ways. I basically wrote the EP really quickly, we went to a secret location, set up a recording rig and recorded over a weekend, and released that. For me, I wanted to work with him – and I've never even said this to him – but in a way it was a little bit of a test to see how we worked together and if it would be a good idea for me to do an album with him. And we worked together incredibly well; we really share a similar view of which way I should head and how I should sound. It's really, really positive.”

That said, only a small part of the work the pair did together as co-writers would end up on the album.

“Basically, I knew that I had to write some more upbeat music,” she explains. “I actually went through a stage there where I thought I would create a new band to do that, and I felt confused by the idea of taking Tara Simmons into a new kind of… genre, so some of those initial songs that I wrote with him were actually going to be a project we started together. But as we were starting to do that, Yanto came along and saw a couple of shows and saw that, it was almost like subconsciously, I was already implementing a lot of the things I wanted to do in my own show. So he kind of took a step back and said, 'I think you just need to do the Tara Simmons thing and do what you want to do.'”

Over the next 12 months, the pair worked through a lot of Simmons' ideas and gradually the new album took form. In the meantime, she was also reassessing how she wanted to present the new music live.

“I've got a four-piece that I'm taking on the road with me and it's a completely different band to the one I've normally worked with,” Simmons says. “When I started this project, as part of my vision for what this record would be, there were a couple of rules that were put in place; one was no glitch beats or samples, and no cellos, or no strings – I'd played cello and sung on quite a few of my songs – and we actually stuck to that. So what I now have is more a rock'n'roll band, I guess. I don't know what else to call straight up-and-down drums and bass; I'm on keys, with a guitarist who also plays keys.”

Upbeat the album may be, but as a songwriter who writes very much from the personal perspective, Simmons found herself in the least conducive position for the necessary spurring of creativity – in a happy relationship. So she looked at her past.

“I had to get back into a headspace at times that wasn't really all that great,” she admits, “and tap into stuff that does feel a little unresolved or open-ended for me, and write from there.”