For Danielle Caruana – the Mama Kin in Mama Kin Spender – taking new songs out on the road is all part of the songwriting journey. Caruana and creative partner Dingo Spender have been on tour around the country since the release of their third album, Promises, in August, and the songs are doing much of the talking.
“During the part of the album cycle where I get to bring the songs to life in a live audience setting, they just get illuminated by the connection that they’re making with other people,” Caruana says. “They get bigger than the sum of just the parts of us singing and playing them. It’s almost like they get the breath of the people that the songs are resonating with.
“It’s such a relief to be thematically and physically beating out these songs and having to sing them out because it feels like I’m slowly imbibing the medicine they were designed to be.
“They came to change me these songs, and it’s only in the playing of them over and over again that I get to have my shape changed by them completely. I heard this thing once. It’s like, a song has that kind of thing in it. You go do it 100 times before the work is done and we’re at about 20 times of doing them. So they still just feel like raw and visceral material.”
Mama Kin Spender’s songs have always touched upon all the colours of life and Promises is no exception; they are achingly honest.
“These songs came from a place of having no words,” Caruana explains. “They came from a place of being really frozen in my relationship that was in a state of collapse, and ultimately transformation, but at that stage disintegration in a lot of ways.
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“I went into the writing session feeling really mute and it’s like one by one, the songs gave another piece of understanding to me of what had been happening, where I was now at, what we needed to do, and what might be possible for the future. It was like it was drawing a map, but it didn’t draw it in a straight line and didn’t draw it in order. And it wasn’t until Dingo and I realised as we were making it that these songs had a story between them, and we started putting them in order. We were like, ‘So what’s the bits of the story that are missing? What would happen here?’ And then we’d [be] like, ‘Cool, well, let’s write what would happen here.'”
Caruana calls the creative process for the Promises the craziest writing experience of her life.
“It still took all the actual rigour of writing, but it was also a mystery,” she notes. “So we were solving a mystery and then this language started doing its own work. It was cracking me open in real time, and I was cracking Dingo open in real time as well. And the more we did, the more there was.”
The next step was not just simply to take them into a studio to record the songs, but for Caruana to play them to her husband, John Butler. It was an important moment in their relationship.
“I was like, ‘I feel like I have new information about what’s happening with us and it’s within these songs, this music. There’s information in here. There’s language here that I haven’t been able to articulate before, and I can’t say it better than what is said here.’
“We sat down and listened to those songs, and it broke both of us wide open. They still do — when John’s in the room and I’m playing those songs I admire the strength and capacity of character it takes to stand there and hear that kind of truth, because it’s personal and it’s private, but also it’s liberating because it’s true.”
Butler also recently released a new album, Prism, which he is currently touring with. While his album touches on similar themes, Caruana says it reflects more widely upon various aspects of his life in recent times.
“I mean, his album was sort of partially relationship, partially internal structure of what’s happening between him and the world at the moment, then partially grappling with the passing of his father and mortality,” she explains.
“But I feel like my album — because it was a concept album — was all that it was. It’s an arc. There’s definitely songs on his album that are absolutely dealing with the same theme. I actually keep imagining a gig where we do a bit of a back and forth, where we have both of us onstage, and Dingo and I onstage, and we get to tell the story from two sides. Maybe that’ll be a theatre show in the future (laughs).”
Unsurprisingly, the raw and emotive tracks from Promises have hit the heart of crowds on tour. The feedback has been immense.
“Oh, so much feedback,” Caruana says. “So many women… and men, actually, but mostly women in this stage of life, really wanting to hang back and let us both know that these songs have helped them make sense of what has otherwise felt like a really confusing fog. To see rage accessed in a healthy way, that it’s designed to light stuff up rather than burn shit down, is very liberating.
“We’re definitely getting so much feedback like that, that the songs are really landing, and we’re playing all the songs from the album on this tour. It’s just been so much fun.”
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The Promises tour has taken Mama Kin Spender through Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland so far. Queenscliff Music Festival lies on the horizon, with Acabellas, a local community choir, joining the duo onstage for several songs.
“I love the model of a festival that takes over a town,” Caruana says of Queenscliff. “I think it’s a win-win situation for everybody. I know the community always gets behind them in a really different way. It’s really meaningful. It’s something that sits on everybody’s calendar. It’s not something that sort of happens out of town in a way that kind of draws energy from the place.
“And I think the examples of these festivals around Australia are the ones that kind of can survive the surging and the retreating of the energy around festivals in general, because they don’t only serve one demographic. They are really music and arts-focused. They have really motivated teams, but they’re of the community, and they’re of the place. I think this model is just the best, and Queenscliff do it really well and always have.
“It’s one of those ones that you put on your list of ‘when we make this album, we would like to do these festivals.’ Queenscliff is always on that list.”
Queenscliff Music Festival happens from November 28th-30th at Princess Park. Tickets are available from qmf.net.au.
