Stealing Magic

“I just rocked up at my hotel room, and I’m looking out my window. There’s four cows, about 50 kangaroos and a llama. Shit just got surreal,” Cuarana announces with a chuckle. She has just reached her destination after a long slog, part of the little two-date tour she’s doing as Mama Kin before the album tour with We Two Thieves. 

We Two Thieves is something of a different tack for Cuarana, as her Mama Kin persona has become ingrained in Australian music tradition. While We Two Thieves, the act she shares with Tinpan Orange’s Emily Lubitz, are stepping more and more into the Australian folk spotlight – even more so as they’re about to release their debut album, At Midnight We Ride – it’s hard to look past the respective resumes that have lead them here. Tinpan Orange is probably the most well known of a cherished cadre of quirky indie pop bands; Cuarana herself works alongside her husband John Butler with Jarrah Records, and then has produced an equally respectable catalogue of music. Her last Mama Kin album, The Magician’s Daughter, was both a critical success and an awakening to Cuarana that storytelling offered her a new range of freedom in her songwriting, something that has carried over to We Two Thieves.

“I kinda delved into writing more fictional pieces with The Magician’s Daughter, and that really gave me a sense of, I guess room in how I write. It was the first time I’d written anything that wasn’t strictly autobiographical, and instead was this series of stories about these fictional characters. But they were still exploring things from a particular human aesthetic, you know? I found it was this process of using fiction as a way of explaining something personal. And I felt very liberated by that, because it was a realisation that I could really branch out with how I wrote songs, but at the same time convey the messages and ideas that were important to me.”

At Midnight We Ride is packed full of such songs, with intricate and emotive lyricism telling the stories of various characters, but at the same time exploring the passions and ideals of Cuarana and Lubitz – femininity, family life, the ordeals of being a touring musician. Naming one of your tracks Ned Kelly seems like an obvious conceit to this idea. 

“With Ned Kelly, I think we were both looking at this idea of what it is to be with someone who has a very strong ulterior goal,” Cuarana explains. “Ned Kelly really became the ultimate analogy for that. And then the Delta Dawn thing [from the duo’s popular live track Delta Dawn Meets Ned Kelly], that really sprang from me just really connecting with this character as I grew up who everyone thought was mad because she waited for a person that no-one ever knew about. Basically, we were just exploring an idea, and when you find one that fits, it’s magic.”