Amanda Roff - Musician

Musician and creative research scholar Dr Amanda Roff lives on the traditional lands of the Taungurung people in Nagambie, Central Victoria, and the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation in Naarm/Melbourne. She completed her Honours at the University of California Berkeley, and she holds a PhD in English and Creative Writing from La Trobe University. Her thesis focused on metaphysical aspects of music and performance through re-interpretation of Greek myth.

Amanda is a member of post-punk outfit Harmony and is principal lyricist and vocalist for shadowy pop group Time for Dreams. Both bands have been long listed for the Australian Music Prize. She has sung backing vocals for bands including The Drones and Don Walker.

In this conversation, Amanda talks about being plagued by self-doubt and how she bolsters herself through an interior process to arrive at a place of confidence and integrity. 

She shares her own investigations into the mystery of singing and how it is possible for anyone to access its magic and power.

We HEART Amanda Roff.

Transcript

Amanda Roff - Are You Still Working?!
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[00:00:00] Hello, gorgeous listeners. Welcome to Are You Still Working? How to take your creative ideas seriously. I'm Courtney Collins, and this is episode five, an interview with musician Amanda Roff. If you've listened to other episodes, you'll be familiar by now with our theme song. It's called Operator and it's by Amanda Roff and Tom Carlyon.

Who make Time for Dreams. You can listen to it on their album called In Time. Amanda is a songwriter and a musician, and she does so many other cool things. She completed her honours at the University of California, Berkeley, and she holds a PhD in English and Creative Writing from La Trobe University.

She's also a committed bohemian and a very dear friend. We spoke on Awabakal Country in Newcastle, a place we knocked around together in our twenties.

Courtney: So we've been [00:01:00] friends for a long time, for maybe 30 years, and reading your bio, I know it's just t he tip of the iceberg of what you do. Mm-hmm. So what are you, what are you doing now? What's consuming you?

Amanda: I feel like my life has been j ust crazed there just has been too much life, life events. you know, I had a couple of years of recovering from cancer and a couple of years of covid that really slowed down my output. But at the moment I am studying Greek, which is. Really challenging and really fascinating and a great way to think about history and language and the way that language shapes cultures. I've been writing a little bit of poetry and some short stories. I did a collaboration with a.

Local musician in Melbourne called Simon Grounds. And I performed a [00:02:00] story live and he played along on a a series of really small toy pianos with some effects pedals on them. So it was a sort of a unrehearsed live collaboration at a show where he sort of reacted to what I was reading 

I did my, my very first ever improvisational vocal session in a recording with some other musicians in Melbourne. I was invited to collaborate As an improviser, which is not something I ever do with music. I hate jamming. I can't jam. I'm an absolutely rudimentary musician.

I need to learn what I'm doing and know what I'm doing. So did some improvised language, making up a kind of fake language and singing in that which I presume would sound like it had some sort of Greek, Latin and somewhat you know, tolkin elvish type sound [00:03:00] to it, which was really interesting and fun.

Courtney: where did the 

improvisation experience or process leave you

Amanda: I felt very proud of myself.

Courtney: I have to say

Amanda: I felt 

it was a great mark of respect by a fellow musician to be asked to do it. And the other musicians in the improvisation room were, you know, some of them are virtuosic and they're a lot younger than me, very confident and in a different world of, of music than the one that I came up in. It's interesting to me to feel confident about music. It takes me a long time to feel confident about things and yeah, I felt absolutely delighted. I felt invigorated just the sort of free form nature of it. 

you don't kind of stick with any idea for long. You, flip around and you 

are 

responding to other people. So 

it's immediate. which is very satisfying. the opposite of writing, [00:04:00] I suppose.

Courtney: in terms of your 

confidence Yeah. 

What has to be present or what are the elements of that that you need to feel 

Amanda: Well, in that situation I needed to, Feel, respect for my own position as an artist and musician, which is always a huge struggle for me. I am plagued constantly with self-doubt and. Having been out of the game for a little bit, just the last couple of years, like Covid, you know cancer, not playing shows, not performing, just having to kind of get my self worth from the density of my artistic experience As opposed to saying, well, I've got a great new album out, or I've played this amazing gig recently and people know who I am, 

I don't have anything like that to draw from at the moment. 

Courtney: Is there something that you do to [00:05:00] call that in, or a way that you physically remind yourself so you can really inhabit that?

Amanda: I really have to bolst myself in an interior process, and it's constantly reminding yourself that. Most of what you see and hear around you is complete bullshit. You have to sort of comb through the pollution, the spiritual pollution that we are constantly bombarded with everywhere you look.

Finding that place of integrity within yourself and recognizing it and saying that is real and it means something, it means something that when I look inside myself, I can be confident about one thing in this world, and that is my own ideas, and it's the only thing that I have to give.

And. It's a life's work. And just don't think about. The [00:06:00] fact that you've got no money or job or property or standing in society and, the constant, having to not base your self-esteem in you know, societal expectations, which sounds so simple.

Courtney: simple.

Amanda: You know, and if you are a punk, you grew up a punk, you're just like, you know, fuck society. I, I have no, no truck with any of their values. 

Why 

would I judge myself according to them? But you do constantly do. So really having to get in there and just go, no, this is, you don't agree with any of this, so why judge yourself,

Courtney: Hmm. How would you describe the Amanda Roff aesthetic? In the sense of, when I think of you in the world and the things you make and the things you do, there's absolutely a punk vein. mm-hmm.

there's also this incredible refinement and really choosing [00:07:00] and curating the best that life has to offer, I 

think. Mm-hmm. 

you're 

very good at finding. I guess the, the top shelf elements of everything, which I've clearly benefited 

from . 

Thank 

you. 

Yeah. How would you describe it?

Amanda: I think it's, I'm very much a product of the reading that I've done and the worlds that I've been fascinated by and immersed myself in through literature and. 

that would extend to music as well.

But it's been so influenced by my financial status and my class status. So being a middle class person withan educated family, even though I, was, a rat bag and never went to school, I.

read 

constantly

the whole time,

every [00:08:00] book and record that I had until the last 10 years, I would say has been secondhand and foraged for, I

read a lot of modernist books, but a lot of early 20th century and late 19th century books because they were just so accessible.

They were on your grandparents' shelves or your parents' shelves, and that was very much their world

the shelves were full of

like

all my parents and almost every one of their friends had sexist nexus and

Plexus by he, 

Henry Miller so saw that trio of colors stuck together on everybody's bookshelves.

But I'm pretty sure my parents hadn't read any of it. and what was the other one?

Herman Hess JP Don Levy, all these kind of brutish masculine modernist thinkers I just sucked up their work. But [00:09:00] I sucked it up as a 12 year old girl or a 14 year old girl.

And I sort of went through life acting like I was some sort of, classy European Bohemian, like a kind of 55 year old man who

Courtney: I can totally see the Henry 

Miller

Amanda: Yeah. who had, who had, you know, wanted to have the best food and the, and the best booze.

And, you know, same thing with op shopping, you know, like just wearing Harris tweed around. Newcastle in the early nineties considering myself to be incredibly refined and better than everybody else. 

I developed an epicurean approach to life through my parents' lack of money. and they had that same, attitude.

We don't have any money, but we are classy people we are educated and we know about the best things in life 

Courtney: What about the universal basic income? And will you be standing for Parliament 

on that

Amanda: I'd love to. Yeah, it's just something that I've read a bit about,

It makes sense. You know, the first thing they'll say, well, how [00:10:00] will we pay for the basic universal income? And there are so many things that could be instantly dissolved to provide initial years and years of income for people. For example, the entire government welfare system and all of the job seeking kind of organizations.

to really pay for it, eventually you would have to start saying, well, huge corporations are not allowed to have savings. They can work, they can make money, but they can't hoard this money. It belongs to everybody and has to be equally distributed.

And once you get into that territory, that's when the ears close up and.

you know,

fear of communism and shift to the non individualist society. And I don't think it's gonna happen. Mm-hmm. , but I would, I would love to run for parliament on it, on the basis of it, just to sort of raise awareness about what our attitude is to work and our [00:11:00] attitude to productivity and, you know, western industrialized modernity, which is just this horrible place to be. 

It's so dehumanizing. I was just talking to a young person yesterday who can't afford to stay home and look after his own kid.

You know? It's all he wants to do, but he can't afford it. It's just like, so far from the 

evolutionary 

purpose of being a mammal on this earth, you know, like you have babies. You make a little nest and you hang out with them and feed them and stuff surely there's nothing more basic than that.

It's so outrageous that people can't afford to do it.

Courtney: h how do you think it would affect creative production 

Amanda: it

would be a revelation. It would just take so much stress off so many people

and they would just be able to complete the projects that they want to complete. 

I couldn't say what it would do for creative production in the, larger community, except [00:12:00] that people who use all their spare time to make money at the moment.

Could afford to do things that they love. 

as Laura Jean points out so beautifully in, her new album Amateurs where she's really sort of gone deep into you know, what is an artist, what is an amateur artist, what's a professional artist, and the ideas that we have around that.

But she. Great song

about

commodifying. Like

going to a little market where people are selling jams and being able to identify that whoever made this jam is also a graphic designer because the labels are so next level. And so apart from working full-time, they make jams for fun on the weekend to try and do something nice, but then of course they end up.

Having to sell them or seeing them as a potential second income stream.

Yeah. Side hustles, Like a side hustle

shouldn't

exist. And if you're passionate about making jam, you [00:13:00] should do it, it's such a natural thing for humans to do, just to make things for the sake of it, for the sake of the, the process

the aesthetic joy in the object.

It shouldn't ever be a side hustle. It should just be a part of living and everybody should have that.

right?

It's not a privilege to be an artist. It's, it's a, human right, and it's part of human nature.

Courtney: Let's talk about operator.

The time for Dream Song.

Amanda: Yes. 

the way I related to the song, it does relate to what 

Courtney: we're 

talking about and 

this Yeah. It's about you. This impulse. Yeah. Yeah. The impulse 

and the impulse, you know, 

what is it for you?

Amanda: Yeah. Well, in the song it's very much about that mysterious Impulse. And I suppose exploring it as an inner rhythm

it keeps kind of beating away regardless of what situation you're in. And being open,[00:14:00] to hearing it, to listening to it all the time. You

know, being able to screen out 

and see those colors and keep your dream life

your portals open

in your waking life as well as in your, in your dream life and being able to tune in to that.

Courtney: do you have a daily practice that supports you to keep those portals open or to keep that relationship with your operator?

Amanda: Just constant daydreaming. It's just,running all the time. I have to block it out in order to, you know

feed myself and clothe myself.

But I can turn the volume up

Courtney: on my own in the bush or on my own in the car. I seem to need solitude to do it. I certainly get it with other people when we are, you know, like in a conversation with you

Amanda: when we

are cooking or eating together or making music discussing.

Concerts you know, there's definitely a juicy sort of substance there that's going on [00:15:00] with other people. But for me to keep 

my own individual portal open, it's a constant solitude, daydreaming state

Courtney: Mm. 

Amanda: That is really my default position in life, and I'm trying to always be in it or be in it as much as I can.

Courtney: Do you still practice transcendental meditation?

Amanda: I've been so slack lately, but

there are lots of other ways that I meditate. I would say certainly yoga, certainly nature, communing with nature. You know, being in the water,

Courtney: Mm-hmm.

Amanda: being in the bath

pruning trees. Pruning pruning olive

Courtney: trees. Mm.

Amanda: like a, a, a saying for how you need to prune the trees. It should be so that a bird can fly through it.

So you can't have any sort of clumps or walls in there. You have to make sure that every little branch of the tree has plenty of air around [00:16:00] it and can breathe and get sunlight. So, Whenever I'm pruning the olive trees, I see birds flying through them.

Courtney: Mm-hmm.

Amanda: Just imaginary birds and that's a very lovely meditative space to be in.

Courtney: tell me about poetic inquiry.

it is the, the way to pay very, very close attention to something. writing about something is. Paying attention. So it's a great research tool.

Amanda: And if you extend it to physical and emotional responses, to a place or a thing or an idea? 

in some ways it could be seen as lazy because you're not doing sort of traditional research crawling around in archives in libraries.

I mean, I did do a little bit of that as well, but it's more about getting your cues [00:17:00] from an idea or an environment and then setting.

your

Personal intuitive dreaming process in action and

using

that as your method of research.

Courtney: And is that what you are using the commonplace book to capture or is that something else?

Amanda: No, no, that's definitely a tool for just writing down things that occur to me or books that I wanna search out, or albums It's a sort of, you know, like building up of the layers of compost that you need to grow something, grow an idea

Talking I really talk things out to other people and halfway through the conversation will go, oh, is that what I think? 

But you need to have certain companions, you being the prime example of someone who's interested in the same process and you kind of egg each other [00:18:00] on. so yeah, discussing, collaborating. Writing down feelings and then

asking, 

asking the universe 

through

say the I Ching or through any sort of simultaneous connections that are happening. you know that feeling that you just sort of pick up a book that you're interested in it for 

whatever 

reason, but then at some point in the book, you realize that the book is totally relating perfectly to something else that you're thinking about making those connections and sort of synthesizing everything part of your life into the research process. And that way you sort of get very strange or unusual or unexpected perspectives on the thing that 

you're researching and that can sort of take you in interesting directions. 

Courtney: It was over 20 years ago and I had a [00:19:00] dream that was my inner life. I'm traipsing around some Sandhills of my inner life. And, and you popped up and you were just traipsing around the Sandhills as well. And in the dream, I registered. You know,

there's Amanda traipsing through my inner life because in conversations like this over many, many years, you've helped me articulate it.

So you've always had this incredible not just line to it, but actually a presence in it. And I think in many people's inner, inner lives, because you. Undertake your every day with such an intense poetic inquiry that it's not a language everyone can speak. It's, you know, it's a bit 

like ancient Greek, you know, It's,

Amanda: it's definitely the, you know, that is the work of my life [00:20:00] and I have been doing it since I was a child, And it's just this kind of escapist, I feel like my, my desire to escape reality or find reality more beautiful or more interesting.

than 

it

appears on the surface has been 

the generative power.

You know, my wish for life to be more interesting than it really is that was what made me a, a drug addict when I was a teenager, 

You know, another thing that people accuse me of all the time is mythologizing, self mythologizing and 

Courtney: and mythologizing others. 

And

Amanda: mythologizing others. Absolutely. But that, I mean, you, you have it, you have this as well in spades. It's

a, it's a it's urge 

to, to narrativise things. And you know, seeing. symbolism in actions and events in your life

you can just see every day as a a stage play waiting to happen or a,

a,[00:21:00] 

a symbolic scene in a film or a you know, like a trigger for a song or a story.

Courtney: I wanna circle back to, town of Origin.

Amanda: Mm-hmm.

Courtney: And with this idea of how you grew yourself up in Newcastle to hold onto that particular and vital sensitivity in a place that you know, can be culturally at odds with say, sensitivity. . Yeah. How did you do that?

Amanda: I don't know. I honestly don't even know how I got out of here alive

now 

Courtney: back here having this conversation.

Amanda: Yeah, it's, it's certainly um, less brutal than it used to be. It was incredibly violent place when I was growing up. But I think I was young enough to be somewhat exhilarated by that.

because I was like a sort of animal.

I was just padding around town, like a little ferocious beast. And you [00:22:00] know, we

Courtney: spent bare barefoot Yeah. In a leather jacket.

Amanda: Yeah. but you know, we spent so much time engaged in literal survival, like predators were everywhere.

death, violence was a part of our lives. that was pure primal bluster, which has worn off recently in my middle age. I don't have that energy anymore and I'm still unpeeling the trauma of living here.

and experiencing huge, shocking violence, you know, around me.

it's not like something that happened to me and I'm separate from it. It is me. 

Courtney: Mm-hmm. 

Amanda: I tried to explain to my therapist like how intense it is coming to Newcastle for me, and I was like, if you just imagine your heart was a map of a city. My heart is a map of this place. And every single street I go down,

there's a, a vision or a a [00:23:00] person or an experience linked to it. And it's even more strange and interior now, because it's been so gentrified that so many of the places that we grew up in and made art in just literally don't exist.

They've been bulldozed. They're, either an empty space or a building that you don't recognize usually a very ugly building that you don't recognize. So yeah, it's, it's like, it's a bit like being a ghost, being around here.

So I think I think that really helped me cope.

I had primal energy to spareAlso my parents were communists and members of the Trade Union Cultural Workers Action Committee. 

So there was very much a

working class or left-leaning politics view of culture there were poetry readings at the pub where sailors would come and recite [00:24:00] extremely obscene poetry and touring. Cuban salsa bands would come through, or Chilean exiles, and they were all part of the, political scene. And at the same time, there was also a kind of burgeoning like the Castanet Club was around when I was a kid and we were good friends and lived with one of the, members Angela Moore, who was a big influence on me when I was young, and they were starting to see,

the funny side of the cultural poverty that we were all sort of subject to. And they started to really celebrate it So I had people who were paving the way for finding culture in a place that didn't traditionally value culture and. . I mean, I don't really think it does still.

And then, you know, punk music or underground sort of music fit perfectly [00:25:00] into that because it's an underdog.

culture. And the more fiercely independent you are, the more integrity you have, the better. So that went along with all of the sort of ways that I'd been shown that you could make art

as a sort of subversive political act. Before we finish, I would 

Courtney: love to hear you describe what it is to sing. 

Amanda: Singing is magic. It is a magic, magical

process. And I mean that so sincerely. Nobody knows what it is. No one can tell you.

everybody has access to it as an experience Anyone can say something and then sing the exact same words and feel how the way that you have produced those words changes their meaning.

and

what you have put into those words to change their meaning [00:26:00] is breath is rhythm is, a blossoming and organic blooming that is centered in the breath, but It sort of explodes and ventilates the heaviness of language and makes it into broad enigmatic brush strokes of sound as opposed to say a printed word. 

So, you know when I was writing,

was writing 

my PhD, I'd sometimes like wake up in the middle of the night with this feeling of like, almost fear, like, but what is it?

And, you know, tried to sort of break down the process. you asked me about the physical thing. You know, like all the different parts of you that are vibrating the different way that you, you use your breath, which slows down your heart rate or speeds it up. The,

resonance inside your head. the, the way that you hear the vibration through the osseo tympanic, [00:27:00] bone conduction from the inside of your ear to your jaw, your teeth everything that vibrates. You can sing without making sound. You know, literally any type of vocalization can be singing.

You don't have to know whatthe sound is that you're making means. it is totally metaphysical. The experience of singing is metaphysical. And it's generated from physicality and it is God's own mystery. I haven't read any.

convincing explanation of how it works. But it's a mystery that any single one of us regardless of whether you think you can sing or not, every person has access to it.

And when you hear people who are using it for mystical purposes shamanistic purposes or spiritual purposes? I don't think there's anything really [00:28:00] more moving for me at least.

Courtney: I'm so glad I asked

who do you reach to or what do you reach? when, when you are seeking, inspiration around your process?

Amanda: There's lots of places, but I do really like to hear people talk about their work and their process.

It's very comforting to hear people talk about it because it just reiterates how. Unique, every single person's process is, and there, there's no right or wrong way of doing it. 

you know, for years I have been.

Absolutely treasuring every single interview in the Paris Review

they have a very long tradition of that style of interview. You know, some people wrote a novel that took them 18 years and some people wrote a novel that took [00:29:00] them six months.

And they're equally as interesting and instructive to listen to. 

they have collections of them. And the women at work, one is one that I always have close to hand for inspiration,

Courtney: is there any particular singular interview that stands out in that?

Amanda: Marguerite Duras, actually, talking about writing is probably the most supported I've felt by somebody's opinion it's not necessarily her process, it's just her kind of unshakeable confidence in her own method that I find so fascinating to read.

Courtney: her writing about writing is a work of art in

itself is her confidence the key?

Amanda: that's what I get from it, but her singularity of vision she doesn't doubt her experience, and it's a lot about her sort of brutal honesty. She's sort of famously says I [00:30:00] never, I never lie.

I never lie except to men. 

Courtney: men. 

Amanda: of course, but I never, I never lie her, extreme honesty in her experience and confidence of things that I find super inspirational.

Courtney: I find you super inspirational. Oh darling. I find 

super 

inspirational. Thank you.

We have listened to this song Operator over and over and our love for it only grows.Are You Still Working is an independently produced podcast 

by me, Courtney Collins, and produced by Lisa Madden. If you enjoyed listening, you can support us by reviewing it.

And telling all your friends. And if you want to stay connected to creative prompts and highlights from our episodes, do follow us on Instagram at are you still working till next time. [00:31:00]