on The Normal Discontents of Living
ELSIE LANGE
Elsie Lange | she/her | @elsielange
Written by Juliette Salom | she/her
Cover photo by Eremaya Albrecht, taken on Arrernte country
From Mparntwe to Naarm to Bilbao in the north of Spain, ideas of place and space are at the centre of Elsie Lange’s music. In the days after the release of her debut record - The Normal Discontents of Living - Elsie speaks to Juliette Salom about the experience of leaving, longing for and coming back home.
Photo by Luke Henriques-Gomes
There are a plethora of ways you can listen to The Normal Discontents of Living by Elsie Lange, and none of them would be wrong. But if you’re looking for that precious kind of out-of-body yearning and existential appreciation that is as rare as it is fleeting, there’s maybe only one way. Take yourself for a walk as the sun tempts setting. Head toward a river, then up a grassy hill. Watch as the fairy floss dusk threads through the flickering eucalyptus. When Heatwave hits, turn around. Try not to cry on your way back down.
Or, go and live for a moment in Spain. That’s where Elsie finds herself upon the release of her debut record. She’s sitting at her kitchen table in her Bilbao apartment. “There’s grey afternoon light and the house smells like the beans and asparagus I made for lunch,” she says. “Our apartment is quite small - it has white walls, wooden floorboards and terrible kitchen tiles, but I’ve grown to love it. My partner is cooking us mushroom bourguignon. It’s quiet, except for the spitting of the onions, my tapping at the keyboard, and the occasional squeak and close of a cupboard as we both listen to our own shows or podcasts.”
The indie folk pop musician has a way of describing space and place that cuts right to the core. Perhaps it’s a product of her Mparntwe/Alice Springs upbringing, or the experience of moving to and making music in Naarm/Melbourne for a decade. Perhaps it’s what led her to Spain.
Whatever it is, you can hear it strewn through each of the angelic songs that make up The Normal Discontents of Living. The ambience of existence is right there atop the surface, and sometimes hiding deep beneath. It’s sirens screaming, crowds passing, whispered words in stolen moments.
Each city sings its own symphony of ambience, and being in Bilbao has made Elsie long for the song of Naarm. More so than when she was living in Mparntwe, she says, “like my pining has been brought on by being back in the bustle again.” Before the end of our winter, Elsie will be back on Australian soil, playing shows and taking The Normal Discontents of Living around the country - right when we’ll need Elsie’s Heatwave most.
“Being so far away from home - both Victoria and the NT - while the music comes out is both strange and in some ways quite calming,” Elsie says about the album’s release. “In the past, I would play shows around a release to bring people along on the journey and physically drum up support. To be honest, it feels a bit like I’m watching the release happen through a foggy shower screen - which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.”
Photos by Eremaya Albrecht, taken on Arrernte country
Released via Wing Sing Records - whom Elsie thanks for “believing this record into reality” - The Normal Discontents of Living is an amalgamation of Elsie’s thoughts, feelings and experiences between the two cities she’s called home. “In a parched summer, the first thing I notice when I get off the plane into central Australia is that the heat itself has its own hum,” she reflects.
“A continual, buzzing dryness, and a feeling like the earth could crack underfoot. In winter, it’s blue sky, icy mornings and freezing nights, swirling birdsong, soft breeze and a bone-level relief. Those extremes in sound and feeling inform my music, especially when I think about them from afar.”
It’s that classic truism that is near-impossible not to experience when you leave the place you’ve known as a home. Distance makes the heart grow fonder, especially when the heart has dug its roots into the red dusts of coming of age. Elsie captures it - the red dust, the suffocating heat, the otherworldly winds - across every corner of the record.
“In Heatwave,” she says, “I wanted that harmonised swell to remind me of wind sweeping through the Ilparpa ranges on Arrernte country. In the heartbreak song Mend, I wanted the drama of the humid build-up before the summer rain breaks and fills up the rivers, which you can hear in the song’s finale after a slow, Warren Ellis-inspired synth ambience at the beginning of the song.”
It’s not just Mparntwe, either, that the album has grounded its soles in. Elsie’s time in Naarm is there, too. “In Long Dark Year,” she explains, “I wanted to hear the creaky floorboards of a Brunswick share house during lockdown, the sirens a reminder of the danger outside and the soft ways we comforted ourselves. I wanted to highlight the immense eerie quiet and how weird and wrong it felt emerging from that.”
“In Constant Hum,” Elsie continues, “I sing about that beautiful afternoon glow you get in Naarm that feels different to anywhere else in the world, especially in autumn. Those shafts of golden light that turn your half-drunk, cold cup of tea sitting on the bench into something beautiful. The first 15 seconds of the song are actually a voice memo, to create that sense of being in another, different Brunswick home with me, sitting on the floor and looking out the window while I wrote the song.”
Photos by Luke Henriques-Gomes, taken on Arrernte country
While seemingly as different as two places can be, it’s Elsie’s marriage of the two spaces that round The Normal Discontent of Living into a whole story. “Living in Mparntwe is so different from the city,” Elsie says. “From the landscape (the muted greens, greys and browns of the city versus the striking reds and oranges of the centre), to the lifestyle (it’s slower in the desert, in a beautiful way), to the live music scene (Naarm’s is the best in the world).” That story - the bridge of songs between these two worlds - are simply “vulnerable, intimate glimpses into actual things I felt”.
The desert, especially, can be heard throughout the entire record. Even if not mentioned explicitly, you can hear it in the breath of Elsie’s voice, like it’s living on the tip of her tongue. It only makes sense, then, that the desert itself informs her creativity.
“In the desert there’s space to think and feel and reflect,” Elsie reflects. “When I miss it, it’s like the saturation in my memories has been turned up. I think of it like creativity juice. The desert teaches slowness and its aridity inspires honesty. The land I grew up on is Arrernte country and I feel grateful to have known it and to love it as I do.”
“Before I moved back, I would visit once or twice a year,” she continues. “Sometimes at the height of summer, so the rocks were hot to touch, or in winter when it feels like everything is full of promise. Whenever I went, I tried to make time to write in the bush, taking a nylon guitar out and singing whatever came to mind. I usually wrote something that I would later be able to take back inside and fiddle with. The desert inspires me to play because there’s space to do so.”
Elsie may be the careful magician behind the spell that binds The Normal Discontents of Living, but it was helped realised by a team of collaborators that were the hat to the album’s rabbit. Working with longtime bandmates Alana Wilson (drums), Calum Newton (guitar), Bridget Chilver and Sam Miles (both backing vocals and harmonies), the record was also produced by Liam (Snowy) Halliwell.
Finished in Naarm while Elsie was back living in Mparntwe, The Normal Discontents of Living travelled thousands of kilometres of airwaves - over the red dust of desert and muted greens of valleys - before it was even released to the wild. It’s tempting to imagine that the album - like all great records do - has a life of its own.
Lucky for us, the album is now well and truly out in the wild. You can listen to it here, buy it here, and see what else Elsie is up to over here.
Photo by Eremaya Albrecht, taken on Arrernte country