The Wild Reed: The Sculptor

I am a sculptor
In every moment
I watch you drift away
Weightless
And if I was with my love
I’d live forever . . .

For “music night” this evening at The Wild Reed I share a favorite track of mine from Jenny Morris’s 2002 album, Hit & Myth, released 22 years ago this month.

It’s “The Sculptor,” and as Morris herself explains in the article that follows the audio below, it’s a song that was inspired by the 13th-century Sufi mystic and poet Jalaluddin Rumi.

. . . Your eyes say things to me
Your lips speak pretty words
I watch you drift away
Weightless
And if I was with my love
I’d live forever

_____________

Myth Congeniality

The Sydney Morning Herald
August 16, 2002
It is nearly a decade since Jenny Morris has been anywhere near what is popularly known as The Forefront. Her last hit album was 10 years ago, although she was back in the headlines recently when a portrait of her by artist Jan Williamson won this year’s Archibald Packing Room Prize.

Yet, if you are an Australian in your 30s or 40s you likely have several Morris songs etched into your brain, even if you don’t remember the exact titles.

From the mid-1980s to the early ’90s, the Sydney-based Kiwi spent a surprisingly large amount of time at the sharp end of the charts with such poppy offerings as “You’re Gonna Get Hurt” and “She Has To Be Loved” as well as being handed – and making a fabulous fist of – such fare as Paul Kelly’s “Street of Love” and Neil Finn’s “You I Know.”

In 1992, she released a best of compilation (The Story So Far), and in 1993 was the support act on Paul McCartney’s Australian tour. Then suddenly things went quiet. There were reasons for the long drought, not least some music industry shenanigans. However, as Morris curls up on the sofa of a Cockle Bay cafe, she isn’t straying one bit from the reasons given in the press release.

It has taken seven years for her to release the album Hit & Myth. Finally, she says, “the timing is now righ. She had needed to “stop, take stock” and wait for “a coming together of the right people and a body of songs I was really happy with.”

The album is released on the label Yep!, a new venture from Warren Fahey, who founded Larrikin Records.

“It’s great to be back. It almost feels like my first CD,” says Morris, who insists she spent almost the entire album singing “out of the safety zone.”

Stretching that clear and mighty voice certainly hasn’t broken it and Hit & Myth also contains some of her most adventurous musical arrangements. It is light, bright and cheery in parts, dreamy in others, funky and folky elsewhere. There’s even a Middle Eastern-influenced song (“The Sculptor”), for which Morris attributes inspiration to the 13th-century Islamic poet Jalaluddin Rumi.

“We really went for a different set of instruments right across the album. We’ve got Renaissance instruments, antique 'analoguey' keyboards. Nick Wales [the album’s producer] is a viola player, so he had access to string players who have worked together a lot, so I am really pleased with the strings. There’s so many layers. That’s what I like – an album that you don’t necessarily get the first time.”

Morris talks about the album-making process as a need to “purge myself of certain songs.” She has written or co-written nine of the 11 tracks. The odd two out are “Guiding Star,” an unreleased Neil Finn song (a slight one, it should be said, though nonetheless well delivered), and “The Blacksmith,” a traditional folk song.

The homely album notes, something of a Morris hallmark, explain that “The Blacksmith” was the first song she learnt on the guitar and “an integral part of my writing influences ever since.”

The co-writer of several of Morris’s biggest hits, INXS keyboardist/guitarist Andrew Farriss, gets just one songwriting guernsey (and one-third credit at that) on the lively “Killer Man,” described by Morris as “my James Bond theme song.”

Although optimistic about the album, Morris is very aware she is now on a small label and money for promotion, or “buying favours” as she puts it, is tight.

For the previous album, Morris wrote several tracks in a castle in Bordeaux. This time she wrote most of the songs “in a room out the back” and recorded two of her vocals in the toilet [the Australian word for what Americans politely call the bathroom].

“It’s the best sounding toilet I’ve ever sung in. Coming from a family of seven, you don’t get precious about that stuff.”

– Author unknown

To listen to Hit & Myth in its entirety, click here.

Related Off-site Links:
Why Kiwi Hitmaker Jenny Morris Can't Sing Anymore – Kim Knight (New Zealand Herald, August 31, 2018).
Six Questions With Jenny Morris, APRA Chair and ARIA Award-Winning Artist – Lars Brandle (Billboard, July 17, 2017).

The Wild Reed

Friday, August 16, 2024

The Sculptor

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