Katie Noonan first came to our attention as the frontwoman of Brisbane band George. Now she’s captaining a new ship, stepping out as lead vocalist of The Captains. I had the pleasure of chatting with Katie recently about her new project, balancing motherhood and music, and her hopes for the planet.
You’re about to release your new album with The Captains, Emperor’s Box, which I believe is the album you’re most proud of. What do you love about it?
It’s basically a return to that organic band sound that I think I’m most in love with. I love collaborating and I’ve finally found the right collaborators to share my music with.
When I listened to it what struck me most is the beautiful lush instrumentation. What have The Captains been like to work with?
Well I guess you can hear how wonderful they are as musicians and the craftsmanship they’ve brought to my songs and to our sound. We really just wanted to work on making an organic band sound that sounded cohesive and sounded like people that really enjoyed making music together.
The lyrics are also so gorgeous. After recording the covers album Blackbird, what did it feel like to get back into writing original songs?
Well I never left it, because I’m always writing. And I was writing the songs for this record all through the making of that record as well, because my main motivation is always writing my own music and trying to find my own sound, as a singer and a keyboardist, and a co-producer on this record.
So some of these songs are really old, and some of them are really new. Some were freshly inspired by being with The Captains and writing with them. Some of them evolved really slowly, some of them are 11 or 12 years old and they finally found the right home with The Captains, and some are really new written specifically for this band. It’s a real mixed bag.
The Blackbird thing was a real sidestep for me. It was a jazz record, and as you say I wasn’t singing my own songs, so that’s kind of a real sidestep for me from my main trajectory as an artist. But it was just such an incredible opportunity to work with these amazing musicians, and I couldn’t possibly pass it up. It was just amazing to work with them.
You worked on the tracks for the new album with some amazing people as well, including Tim Finn, Sia, and Don Walker. Who else is on your wish list for collaborating?
It’s not like I had a wish list. It was just circumstance and fate that led to those meetings and those pairings. I mean, Tim has been on my wish list to co-write with for a while. It took a few years to get that one together. Basically I’ve always been a big fan, but when I heard his record Imaginary Kingdom I was blown away. It’s such a hot record. So that was kind of the main wish list person that I had.
And then of course to work with Don Walker was such an honor, because he’s such an incredible songwriter. And then the others, Josh [Pyke] and Sia, are more contemporaries of mine, and we just kind of found each other through a series of circumstances and enjoyed the collaborating process.
How does it feel to collaborate with someone else compared to writing by yourself?
It’s amazing how co-writing brings out strengths that you didn’t know you had, really. And it’s a really worthwhile experience because it helps you define what it is about your songwriting. You can’t really describe it in words but it brings out strengths that you didn’t know you had, certainly strengths that wouldn’t come out if you were just writing on your own. It’s challenging but also very rewarding.
You’re currently touring the album. How does it feel to perform these songs for a live audience?
It’s awesome. It’s really feeling good live, and the main thing is that it’s a back to basics music making approach with the record, it’s back to keeping things very organic and live. And with the touring it feels the same way. I’m enjoying having that feeling of touring again, kind of in a band way. It’s been really fun for us, but the main thing that’s been beautiful for us is that people are really connecting with the new songs and really giving us a beautiful kind of energy.
The Captains is the latest project in what’s been a really eclectic career. Are there are sounds or genres that you’d still love to experiment with?
I don’t really think about genres, you know? I just follow my muse and try to make music. I know I do end up going into different genres, but for me I don’t really think about it consciously as “Next I want to do a blah blah record.” Do you know what I mean? Life just leads me in these directions and I pretty much just go with the flow of following my muse.
It keeps things exciting.
Yeah, but at the moment I’m really inspired by this band, and I pretty much just want to stick to this now. I’m not really interested in doing a jazz album or anything like that. I feel like I’ve got that out of my system and that’s done.
I believe that you studied both opera and jazz. That seems to be a really interesting mix, with opera being rooted in tradition and jazz being much freer. What drew you to those two very different styles?
Well I started in opera, because my mum’s an opera singer. And I went to the Conservatorium of Music and studied opera and I found very stifling. I found it was pretty much the art of imitation, and I’m not really interested in that. I really just wanted to try and make new music and new sounds.
So I left the opera degree after about a year or two and went to the jazz degree, probably because I was just feeling myself drawn to the freedom that is in jazz. Jazz musicians are into all sorts of stuff and interested in mixing things up and collaborations, it’s all about freedom basically. So that’s kind of why I was drawn to jazz.
But at the same time, I was touring with George so I was kind of playing in a pop-rock band, so I guess I’ve always been fairly eclectic. But for me, music is all about freedom. And I know some people get a bit annoyed. I’ve had some journalists be a little bit aggressive and say “You just do so many different things. Isn’t that being kind of …“ They see it as a negative. And I just say “Well it’s all just music to me. You’re the one that has to categorise it. I’m not interested in doing that.” For me it’s all the one big beautiful thing. It’s your problem if you have to categorise everything.
And if you look at someone’s CD collection, they probably don’t just have all of the one kind of music.
I also think, look at someone like Mike Patton and all the stuff he’s done between Faith No More and all his side projects. It seems to be that, I don’t know, I do believe a little that Australian media is a little fascinated by people just doing the one thing and that’s it, ticking that one box. And it’s a funny attitude. I don’t understand that attitude.
No, me neither. Anyway, you have a husband and two children. They say motherhood changes every part of your life. How has it influenced your music?
Basically motherhood makes you completely reprioritise your life. In order to be a good mother I need to be happy, and in order to be happy I need to do music. But it has to be music that I love, because otherwise I’m not going to leave my children for something that I don’t really believe in. It makes you really just prioritise stuff and get right to the crux of whether it’s special enough to you to leave the home or not. That’s it basically. But it also gives you a greater emotional well to draw from as a singer.
So they don’t come on tour with you?
They do sometimes, they did this week. It depends on a lot of things. What my husband’s plans are, my son’s just started at the Steiner school, two days a week so that’s his little routine, so we try to keep to his routine, and a million other factors. If we’re in a different city every day they don’t come, it’s too disruptive. For this week they’d just sit in the car the whole time, which just is not fun. I’ve driven from Gosford to Canberra, Canberra to Sydney, Sydney to Hunter Valley, Hunter Valley to Bowral, and then fly to the Yarra Valley. For kids that’s just not that much fun. Whereas if I’m in a city for a week and I’m doing multiple gigs just in the city and promo or something, then they’ll generally come with me because they can just be in the one space for a while.
Your songs have touched so many people. I know personally for me “Special Ones” was a song I latched onto when I was getting out of a toxic friendship. How does it feel to know that your music has that sort of impact on people you’ve never met?
It’s beautiful. It’s very overwhelming. I remember that song really was a particular song that people, particularly young women, did seem to connect with. It was so wonderful but at the same time quite frightening and overwhelming for me, because for some people it meant really heavy stuff like domestic violence and all of that kind of stuff. Thankfully for me it was not about that but for some people, this song, it was about that. So it was just quite incredible for people to tell me these stories that they kind of pulled themselves out of. It’s a huge honour and also a great responsibility that comes with songwriting.
It’s interesting the way the meaning can change once you let it out there and people take the songs into their hearts.
Well mine was pretty much similar to yours, it’s about a toxic friendship. And a lot of people thought it was a break-up song, but it wasn’t at all. I didn’t have any romantic relationship with this person whatsoever. But most people thought it was an angry break-up song, which it was on one level, but not on a romantic level.
It’s a new decade and we’re all thinking about the future. What do you hope the next ten years holds for you?
I hope that we all become more aware of our ecological footprint that we are leaving on the planet. We just can’t keep on pretending that it’s going to get better. The news at the moment, there’s an earthquake or a flood or some sort of natural disaster all the time. And the earth is telling us to try and look after our planet a bit more.
Emperor’s Box will hit music stores on April 9. You can still catch Katie and The Captains at the following shows.
12 March 2010 – Republic Bar, Hobart
13 & 14 March 2010 – Northcote Social Club, Melbourne
25 March 2010 – The Zoo, Brisbane
27 March 2010 – A and I Hall, Bangalow
8 April 2010 – Oxford Art Factory, Sydney
Image used with permission from Sony Music Australia.