To break the fourth wall a little bit, 99% of interviews arranged for this site come from publicists working on an artist's behalf. Imagine the surprise, then, when a handwritten note and a physical CD ended up in The Music offices for what felt like the first time since Kevin Rudd was in office.
The note, like the music on said CD, was written by Zoe Elliot – an independent folk musician living in the Shoalhaven that's releasing her first EP in 13 years, My Heart Remembers.
Talking to The Music over Zoom, Elliot is chuffed that this approach made her stand out amongst an endless array of press releases and digital streams. “I don't know about you, but everything feels like it's so detached lately,” she says.
“Everything you're doing is online – even something as simple as doing your groceries. It all feels like it's being done for you than by you, and that makes me feel really disconnected. I like the handshake that comes with something physical and something real. We're a rare breed!”
The Sydney-born Elliot has been enamoured with music since she could remember, playing saxophone and trumpet in the school band before she eventually landed on guitar.
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Her debut album, the unpretentious and rootsy Precipitate, arrived in 2010 and lead to supports for a young Matt Corby and the late Renée Geyer. She became a regular on the folk-festival circuit, and released a follow-up EP in Black Dog circa 2013. After getting married, moving to Kangaroo Valley and starting a family, however, music took a backseat.
Relocating to the south coast – first the Valley, then Bomaderry – felt like more of a natural change than you might expect for someone born and raised in the city. “People have a lot more time for each other here,” says Elliot.
“Every community is so tight-knit, especially when it comes to music. In Sydney, the indie-folk scene was just too evasive and too cool. That was never me – I like being out the front with everyone else. I don't want to be special.”
During an expedition to the Kangaroo Valley Folk Festival, Elliot met singer-songwriter Paul Greene – one of the area's evergreen musical exports. He immediately embraced the new arrival in town, encouraging her to share the new songs she'd been slowly working on over her fallow years.
Zoe Elliot performing at the Nowra Tea Club (Credit: Lisa Grant)
This eventually snowballed into the recording of My Heart Remembers, with Greene using his own studio Sounds Delicious and playing most of the full-band instrumentation himself. “Where do you find a guy like that?” wonders Elliot aloud.
“Paul is a great bundle of energy. He's full of ideas, and he's really open and generous. He's a great person to bounce ideas off. We don't always agree on everything – he likes a fuller sound, and I like to strip it back and play with layers. We exist in that collaborative space together, and we're able to find common ground in that. I'm so fortunate to find someone like that locally.”
My Heart Remembers is a tender, intimate collection of songs that, while certainly having ties to her previous releases sonically, could have only been forged out of Elliot's later stage in life. They're older, wiser songs – still as tender and heartfelt, but with a better understanding of the world around her.
Elliot reflects on the story of Jeremy, the EP's third track, which was a song she originally wrote with her now-former partner: “It foretells all these big things that are going to happen in Jeremy's life,” she explains, “and I wrote it about all these other stories about people I knew. When my life kind of unfurled, I started to live out parts of that song. I knew I had to record it – I was like, 'this has so much more meaning now'.”
As for the tender title track, it lived its own life before ever being recorded – ironically, by soundtracking the loss of one. “I'd always play that song for my best friends, and for one of them it was her favourite of mine,” says Elliot.
“When her grandmother passed, she asked me if she could play it at her funeral. I recorded an acoustic version just for them, and it felt really amazing to be part of something so personal and special. That song has gone some really interesting places. It's held a lot of difference spaces for a lot of different people.
“To me, it's a song about those people where you can't imagine your life before they were there. I had it with my faith, with my ex and now with my kids. When you look back, even though you know they weren't, you feel like they were there at all those pivotal moments of your life. Maybe that's why it appealed to the funeral of a grandmother.”
Fresh from selling out shows in both Kangaroo Valley and Nowra, Elliot has her eye on more performing now that My Heart Remembers is out in the world both digitally and physically.
She and her band – which includes Greene on lead guitar and backing vocals – are set to head south to Manyana to launch the EP at a show right on the sandy shores of Cunjurong Point, while she's also booked in to perform at the Kangaroo Valley Folk Festival exactly 15 years after she played there for the first time.
The beaming smile on Elliot's face says it all: She's back in the embrace of one of her life's true loves, and doing it all on her own terms.
“Music is my joy project,” she says. “I came back to it because I love it – not to be in a scene, not to make a hit, for the love of it. To be with everyone again. I'm finding all of these wonderful little pockets of like-minded people and music lovers.
“If there's good music and good people, things are going to be amazing.”
Zoe Elliot’s My Heart Remembers is out now.
This piece of content has been assisted by the Australian Government through Music Australia and Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body
