Talking To Monique Clare
Nic Norton catches up with the teacher turned singer songwriter
From teaching music in war-torn Afghanistan to winning album of the year for her 2022 debut Sight at the Australian Folk Music Awards and her 2024 tour of the UK and Europe including appearances at Cambridge Folk Festival (England), Kaustinen Folk Festival (Finland) and Seto Folk (Estonia), 32-year-old Monique Clare is firmly establishing herself in the music scene. Her new album was recorded live this Summer during a tour of venues (about 16 shows) across Tasmania - which make up the Festival of Small Halls.
"I always wanted to make a live album, ever since I wrote, two songs in particular - Charlie, and Butterflies and Whiskey," she said. "I wrote those songs and I love playing them live, but I just don't feel that I'm going to record them on a studio album."
Charlie has a wonderful joy to it, with an enthusiastic audience harmonising in a chorus.Monique said: "It is definitely loosely based on - a collection of high school crush experiences. "I wrote it a few years back now, maybe. I probably wrote it in like, maybe even 2019 - as far back as that. "I can understand people having a real resonance. "I get people singing the harmony part and so I think there's, you know, it makes sense that people would remember that song." She said people were always asking for the song and she decided she had to record it.
Monique said the other reason she decided to record the album was because "because we had the most wonderful sound engineer on Festival of Small Halls - Lachlan Kidd (with mixing engineer Luke Woollett and mastering engineer Zac Barter). "He just straightaway said: 'I'm going to record every single show. So then if you want to make a live album from it, you can have all of the audio recordings.' "It's sort of a dream come true to have multiple takes to choose from."
The album starts with the song Hourglass. "Hourglass is one of the first songs that I ever wrote for cello and singing. So I released it a long time ago, 2017," she said. "I was still sort of finding my feet because I grew up singing in church choir. "My dad run the church choir, my mum's dad runs a church while, he ran the church choir and I had to sing in both of them. Three choirs every week. "And the thing is that you learn to sing with a British accent even though it's Australian. You just sort of follow the British music model. "I could only sing with a British accent. I was definitely not trying to stand like an English choir boy, but there were still remnants of it in my voice. and then when I joined the band, The Maes, I went on tour, and listen back to it and they'd be like, can you can you sing like an Australian? Like how you talk?
"So while touring with them I learned to sing in my own accent. So I've been wanting to re-record that song at ages because I can't stand listening to the old version. It just sounds like it sounds fake to me. "I've also worked a lot on my voice since then. So, I wanted to wanted to do a version that's just a lot more me." She said this was quite a personal song: "So this was at a point in my life where I'd graduated from university, from the conservatorium in Queensland on classical cello. "I did that entire degree, knowing that I didn't want to be a classical musician. "I graduated and made a beeline for America where I could go to lots of fiddle camps for folk music camps, and get some lessons from some much more progressive folk and contemporary cellists. "So I did have three months and it was quite the rollercoaster experience because I was learning a lot, but most of all I was meeting just so many new people all the time and people from a different culture.
"It is English speaking but it's still culturally different from Australia with the humbleness of England. "And every single folk music camp, there would be a new set of about 100 or so people to meet and try to fit in with and all that, and so I was, you know, I was meeting really cool people and having a lot of fun, but also really struggling and feeling like, you know, I just didn't know anyone well enough. "Then when I got to the very last camp and, you know, and I just kind of really, really clicked with someone, but it was, yeah, I don't want to go the whole point of it is. I guess this also just after Afghanistan. "I had some pretty hectic emotional experiences and then gone home from that and just felt like I was reeling and trying to understand what was real. "You know, it was such a mess. "I'd often wake up in the middle of the night, like gasping for air.
"I was trying to figure out what to do with my career because I got this classical cello degree. And then I started just needing to sing and write lyrics together. "That was the only way to get all of this off my chest."
She said the song Butterflies and Whiskey is the "other one that pretty much exists as a live song, and I don't imagine I'll record it on the studio album". Monique said: "That I wrote after my second time at Tellluride Bluegrass Festival (Colorado). The first time I went to that festival, I was playing in a band called The Maes, and it was so much fun, but it was noticeable that we were one of the only bands that had, a few women in them - we were sort of the women, you know? "And I happened to be in Colorado, a number of years later and I was there with my partner and I was just blown over because so there was so many incredible women on stage. "just shredding their instruments, and one of those was Molly Tuttle, who's. Oh, gosh. She's great. "I had all of those sounds kind of ringing around my ears as I flew back to Australia and this song came out and I think it's sort of as if Molly Tuttle played the cello sound-wise. "Lyrically, it's about the kind of chaos of living with ADHD for better or for worse.
"A lot of the time it's a roller coaster, then it can become a really scary thing. "The world has changed so much. It's become a lot less friendly towards brains that work like this (with mobile phones and social media etc). "I'm happiest is when I'm out in the forest picking berries."
She also has a keen wanderlust which earlier in her life saw her teaching music to children at a school in Afghanistan. "It's very bittersweet to talk about because of what happened over there and that the school that I taught at doesn't exist there anymore," she said. "It's one of those things that's so awful. I can't even sometimes feel an emotion about it because I'm sitting here in Australia with everything just so normal and nice. "I just can't really wrap my head around the reality of it. "But I met some amazing people there. There was some really incredible, talented musical students who actually moved out of Afghanistan before the Taliban took over again. "A few ended up in America studying at universities there, studying music or other things.
"A lot of them are studying politics, which is really interesting. to be able to help Afghanistan in some way. "One of my little cello students, Mina, she's so cute. She's such a go getter. Now she's studies at Harvard. "I was lucky enough to see one of the piano students who went on to study composition. We saw each other in Boston a few years ago. Wow. That was great. But, it's always very, very bittersweet."
Monique is now putting a call out to her friends in Australia to borrow instruments for a new album which she's recording with lots of instrument played by her. "I am so excited. I feel like this is a sort of a lifelong dream because I always, always love just getting on an instrument and trying it out and especially in high school because I'd just spend a lot of lunch time standing in the music department where they had guitars hanging up, a piano, drums," she said. "At some point I was given a bass guitar, and a teacher was like, oh, do you want to play trumpet, we can give you free lessons? So I was like, yeah, sure, I'll play the trumpet. "It's going to be very me, I just really wanted to do it all myself. I know how to record. I will still 100% be sending it off to the mixed place.
"I love coming up with like, textures. I did composition for music. "I can say, in terms of the song choices, I've tried to kind of keep it to these songs that create a story arc of my life over the pandemic, which, you know, involved this love story, that was one of the most heartbreaking things of my whole life. "So there's definitely the saddest song I've ever written that's going to be on this album.
"There's this song there's this song that's about sort of just jumping right into something and trusting your ability with it, which is what happens if you jump into a long distance relationship in a pandemic. "There are also songs about just sort of living this really quiet life, this quiet home life, becoming sort of a gardener. "It really follows this timeline. And sonically, the same, I mean, it does bounce around because I think it's basically building on my first album that my first album was sort of like, definitely indie folk." Monique, who is planning to return to the UK in September next year, has also been renovating her home in Brisbane, but has had to put a hold on that. "I've basically abandoned the renovations so that I can do my album," she said.
For more about Monique, check out her website. https://www.moniqueclare.com/
(Nic Rigby is part of the band Nic Norton and Alice Morell and the County Band nicnortonmusic.com)
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