Figuring Out That Not Everything You Do Has To Be Perfect

"I brought home a bunch of boomerangs at Christmas, and [my family] freaked out; it's so exotic to us!" enthuses Terra Lightfoot. The singer-songwriter from Hamilton, Ontario - who isn't related to Canadian folk hero Gordon Lightfoot - came to Australia for her first-ever tour here late in 2017, and says it was "enlightening" for her and her live-band, from playing a late-night show at infamous Melbourne rock dive Yah Yah's to seeing the bona fide countryside.

"We stayed in an old English country house, a stone house, in Majors Creek [in New South Wales]," Lightfoot recounts. "The woman who was billeting us out said, 'Be careful, there's wombats out at night-time.' And, sure enough, we could hear them, this big bumping [noise] in the night. That's a wombat! To us, that was so crazy. We also saw an echidna up close, because William Crighton, our amazing tour-mate, one day was driving, stopped the van on a dime, led us out into the forest, and found an echidna, and ripped the thing out of the ground to show us its long snout. It was amazing."

Less than six months later, Lightfoot is returning for her second Australian tour, playing shows in a variety of locales, from cities to coastal towns. As well as hoping to see more of our country, she's planning on playing some new jams, the first of what she's written for a forthcoming fourth LP. If she can summon the nerve, that is. "To be honest, I'm freaking out about the new [songs]," Lightfoot laughs. "It's quite harrowing, for me, to play a new song in front of people. It reminds me of my piano recitals when I was five years old."

Lightfoot still recalls her first piano recital, at five, vividly. "I remember being so upset and terrified," she says. She'd been taught piano "as soon as [she] was able to sit up at the piano bench" by her maternal grandmother, a pianist who'd spent years playing country songs, live on piano, for the train that ran between Toronto and Montreal, an eight-hour round trip. Her grandparents lived in a big lake house in Ontario - near where Lightfoot grew up, in rural Waterdown - where the self-confessed "tomboy" spent her time outside. "In summers I went swimming, out on the boat, running around in the wilderness," she recounts. "Then, in winter, there was snow everywhere. You could skate on the lake, and we'd cut down our own Christmas tree and drag it back to the house."

Lightfoot cut her songwriting teeth both playing acoustic guitar and in high-school rock bands. Her first LP, a self-titled 2011 debut, came in the mode of folky singer-songwriter, but over the years - as she toured endlessly, gathering a tight live band in the process - Lightfoot's music has grown louder and bluesier, with more rock'n'roll swagger; powered by her evident chops and howl of a voice.

Lightfoot's big breakthrough came with 2017's New Mistakes, a record whose title wore a tribute to the happy accidents of recording and the new frontiers of touring. Her third LP was a breakthrough not just commercially, but also as the realisation of her artistic evolution. "This whole process," Lightfoot offers, "[has] been about finding my most authentic sound. For me, that means putting blues songs on a record in 2017. I'm not a blues artist, but I love the blues. I can't be ashamed of what I am. New Mistakes is about being proud of who you are and writing what you want, even if it's not electronic music.

"New Mistakes is all about learning and the process of becoming a human, becoming an adult. Exploring all the ways we've made mistakes in our lives; recognising and reflecting on them, then trying to go out and make new ones rather than getting into the same repetitive patterns, making the same old mistakes. I think mistakes are beautiful. Especially in recording. There would be takes of things that weren't perfect, but they'd be the ones we used, because they sounded beautiful. As a person, it's something I'm figuring out: that not everything we do has to be perfect."