JEN CLOHER gives us an insight into five of the nine songs that make up her “serious” second album 'Hidden Hands'.

Writing a track by track for Mess+Noise is daunting, particularly when you’ve written an album that deals with mortality. It’s not cool to take yourself too seriously and it’s not cool to be a female singer-songwriter in this country unless you go under a curious moniker and/or keep it quirky and relatively lighthearted. So before any of the comment vultures have a chance to tear me apart I am outing myself as an uncool outsider: a totally un-hip, old-fashioned songwriter going by her own name who makes the kind of music your parents would like.

There are nine songs in total on Hidden Hands, here are five of them.

‘Mother’s Desk’

At the beginning of 2007 I moved to Auckland to take care of my mother who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. I didn’t know much about the disease except that a person loses their memory. My mother was a celebrated academic in her day and I wrote most of the album at her old desk downstairs in her study. Sometimes she would sneak in while I was playing guitar and clap at the end of a song scaring the bejesus out of me.

‘Fear is Like a Forest’

We spent a week rehearsing the album at Adelphia studios in Collingwood. It’s run by brothers Kevin, Ange and Phil Andrianakis, three mild-mannered, merry, late 50s, Greek vegetarians. (Well, when was the last time you met an older Greek man who was a vegetarian?) Suffice to say they are complete legends, carpenters by trade, who love music so much they converted a warehouse into the finest rehearsal space in Melbourne. The best thing about Adelphia is the coffee machine that sits pride of place on a Copacabana-style cocktail bar. On the wall above is a photo of their now deceased mother meeting Johnny Farnham circa ‘Sadie (The Cleaning Lady)’. She is seated and Farnham is sort of being presented to her…

One day we were taking a break. Geoff Dunbar, Mic Hubbard and Tom Healy were out making coffee and myself, Jen Sholakis, Laura Jean and Biddy Connor were in the rehearsal room singing my song ‘Fear is like a Forest’ in a Toni Childs-esque voice. I’m not sure how it started but we were going hard out, singing through microphones LOUD and really getting into it. It wasn’t mean spirited - she just has one of those voices like Eddie Vedder or Cher - that distinctive quaaayyyy-like quality that is very satisfying to sing in. Soon the other’s came in and we started back into rehearsing. Perhaps two minutes into playing there was a knock at the door, I turned and saw one of the brother’s (Kevin) looking through the window, motioning to be let in. I got up and opened the door. Next to him stood a short, wholesome, tanned woman in her mid-40s. “Hi, I’m Toni Childs,” she announced. “I’m out touring in a couple of weeks. I’m flying my band over from Hawaii next week for rehearsals and I was wondering if I could take a look at the space?”

Later that day I tried singing in a Deborah Harry and a Kate Bush voice but it seems I was only able to manifest my mother’s favourite late 80s singer-songwriter.

‘I Am Going But I Am Not Gone’

I am a big fan of the Canadian actor/director Sarah Polley who was first noticed when she starred in a Disney Channel television series called the Road to Avonlea. At the age of 12 (around 1991) Polley attended an awards ceremony wearing a peace sign to protest the first Gulf War. Disney executives asked her to remove the sign but she refused. This soured her relationship with Disney and she left soon after to star in far more legendary flicks like Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

Polley directed her first feature in 2006 called Away From Her. It stars Julie Christie who plays a woman in her early 60s diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. It manages to avoid the sentimentality of a lot of “dying of a disease” movies by keeping a sense of humour and thankfully it hasn’t been all Hollywood-ed up with soft focus lenses and dream sequences. There is one scene where Christie turns to her husband (Gordon Pinsent) and says in a pissed off tone, “I am going but I am not gone.” I was moved by this simple sentence, it sums up the experience of living with Alzheimer’s. This song is written from the perspective of my mother talking to my father about their life together: “I am going but I am not gone/Bound to you by all that we have sown/The slowest disappearing act/Lost in fiction/Lost in fact/ My own private Idaho.”

‘Hidden Hands’

If you have never watched the last recorded interviews with the legendary Joseph Campbell do yourself a favour and go buy the Power of Myth. The guy has the most incredible knowledge of the history of mythology and is considered to be in the league of some of the great thinkers of the 20th century - file next to Carl Jung and James Joyce. Campbell had a profound effect on George Lucas who upon reading Campbell’s seminal work The Hero with a Thousand Faces went and wrote the Star Wars trilogy – the good one – with Mark Hamill playing Skywalker. Anyhow I wrote this song based on a Joseph Campbell quote, “When we follow our bliss, we are met by a thousand unseen helping hands.”

‘Watch Me Disappear’

I came up with this brilliant song title (Googled it to make sure it was mine) only to discover it was a novel by Jill Dawson about a marine biologist called Tina Humber.

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Jen Cloher’s Hidden Hands is out July 10 through Sandcastle Music.