A New Zealand born and bred Artist.
A free track…(visit the site)
A lady fond of blogging.
A brand new album called ‘Flags’.
An album that was written on trips to the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina and Northern California’s Bodega Bay.
Her Mum discovered her playing “Do-Re-Mi” from The Sound of Music on the piano when she was two, and made sure Brooke always had access to instruments.
Her earliest musical memory is of watching her great-uncle Athol, “a one-armed trumpet player,” practice circular breathing on his horn.
At 7, she began piano lessons.
At 12, she began writing songs…
And has been writing ever since.
‘Flags’, a title inspired by her writing trips in the more remote parts of the U.S. “I was traversing these incredible landscapes and wondering about all the people who had worked this land and what their lives were like; how they had come to arrive in and then leave these places,” she says. “One day this image of a flag popped into my mind and I thought, ‘Our lives are like flags — staked in the ground and flying for a short while to mark our territory,’” she says. “We fly our colours — our history, belief system, culture, identity — but eventually our flag will wear out and return to the ground and someone else’s flag will replace our own. That theme weaves its way through my new songs, like ‘Ice On Her Lashes,’ ‘Crows and Locusts,’ and, of course, ‘Flags.’ The characters in these songs were flags, and now we’ve come to plant our flags in the ground where they once were.”
“Ice On Her Lashes” is about the cycle of grief. “There’s that moment when you get a phone call and find out that something life-shattering has happened and you look around and wonder how other people are still going about their daily lives, sitting in traffic or buying milk, when yours has just been changed forever,” Brooke says. “The song is about how most of us will at some point be somewhere in that cycle. Life goes on and the pain doesn’t go away, but it becomes liveable.”
Brooke is an exceptionally clever young woman with an incredible gift of being able to translate and speak a different dialect of this language.
Her mind is refreshing and I find her truly compelling. She has a deep understanding of her craft, and her willingness to share and explore these ideas is fascinating.
I highly suggest you read some of the entries on her blog regarding ‘songwriting’.
Exert:
Bloody inspiration. I think it’s every lazy journalist’s default fallback question. “Where does your inspiration come from?”. Stepping back a bit though, I think the question used to irritate me so much because I really didn’t understand what they were asking, let alone how to answer it. For most of my songwriting life, I’d always just “feel” when a song was churning around in my belly and I’d go to an instrument and it would come. Or I’d be at an instrument mucking around, then a song would turtlehead and I would get to work chipping and carving and coercing and bribing it out. But which aspect of that was “inspiration” and how it had come to me – I find that impossible to pin down and I certainly don’t think it’s necessarily anything I did in that moment to have it come. If we speak of inspiration as the spark that lights the fire, I suppose much of what we do as songwriters or artists is like banging stones together – preparing, being aware of our internal ‘climate’ (see previous blog), reading, writing, scribbling, sitting at an instrument and playing and fiddling and noodling – and hoping furiously that if we bang our stones together for long enough, a spark will eventually come.
I’ve always identified with the Michelangelo quote: “I saw the angel in the marble and I carved until I set him free.”
As it relates to songwriting, the “seeing” is the inspiration (the churning in the belly, the spark, the thing that fires you up so much that you cannot keep it in) and the “carving” is the craft, the tools with which we set our “song” free.
Something in The Water from Brooke Fraser on Vimeo.
I've had this album on repeat since I bought it on Saturday. And the first track 'Something in the Water', just makes me want to get up and dance. It's sweet and really makes me smile. I love the vintage feel the video has, and the animation just adds a whole other element of 'cute' to it.
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