Lo Carmen - Singer/songwriter, writer and actor

Lo Carmen is a singer/songwriter, writer and actor. Lo first came to public attention starring as Freya in the 1987 classic Australian film The Year My Voice Broke. She's just released a new album called 'Transatlantic Light', her first album since the Nashville recorded Lovers, Dreamers, Fighters in 2017. Her book, published in 2022 by HarperCollins (the book is also titled 'Lovers, Dreamers, Fighters'), with its accompanying playlist should be compulsory reading for anyone interested in the history of Australian music.

In this episode, Lo tells stories of the brutal reality of life as a singer and the sometimes disjointed process of songwriting. She talks about growing up in a creative community in Adelaide and why she doesn't care if other people take her work seriously - as long as she does.

Transcript

Are You Still Working?! 
Series 2, Episode 1 - Lo Carmen
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Courtney: [00:00:00] Hello, gorgeous listeners. Welcome to Are You Still Working?! How to take your creative ideas seriously. I'm Courtney Collins, and today I'm talking to Lo Carmen. Lo Carmen is a passionate and dedicated creator. As actor Noah Taylor says, if you don't know Lo, you don't know shit. Lo came to public attention early in life as Freya in the acclaimed Australian [00:00:30] film The Year My Voice Broke. It was a poignant and heart piercing portrayal of adolescence and it was decades ago.

But Lo has never stopped winning hearts and minds with her offerings. Whether it be her music or her popular weekly newsletter, Loose Connections on Substack. Lowe has just released a new album called Transatlantic Light and it's Lowe's first album since the Nashville recorded Lovers, Dreamers, Fighters in 2017.

Lo's memoir manifesto of the Same Name was published in [00:01:00] 2022 by HarperCollins. I have been a fan for such a long time. So it was such a thrill to sit down and discover what an infinite and cosmic well she draws from. We spoke on Gadigal and Wangal country in Sydney's inner west. 

Lo Carmen, it's such a treat to meet you in person. There's so many things I want to ask you, I think, to kind of anchor in the place you're at what are you working on now?

Lo: I'm deep in the midst of working on my podcast, it's been a [00:01:30] really long time coming.

I started working on it actually before I started writing my book and then I just did interviews, but didn't try and edit them or shape the episodes too much. 

Courtney: what is it called?

Lo: It's called Death Is Not The End. So I got it out, but then discovered that I had not understood something correctly to do with music licensing and I had to take it down.

So I've been in the process of trying to fix that up for the last few weeks, which has been really [00:02:00] awful, but it's getting there.

Courtney: So when could we access it? When can listeners

Lo: I'm hoping by the time this goes to air, there will be a whole season up there.

Courtney: So apart from the, drag of music publication rights. Mm-Hmm. What have you discovered in the process of making it about yourself? 

Lo: Hmmm. I guess that I have a bit of a fascination with death that I'd never realised that I had. Not in a kind of gothic or macabre way, just [00:02:30] in wanting to get to the bottom of, what holds us all together, I think. which is really very basic things like, life and death and community.

Courtney: just learning about this podcast now, it doesn't seem like a bizarre tangent for you to take having just read your amazing book. Lovers. Dreamers,

Lo: Fighters,

Courtney: that you are someone, it feels to me, who can take in all of the [00:03:00] cosmic potential of life, which is so exciting.

Lo: I do like the cosmic potential of life. I like cosmic things.

Courtney: Yeah. So in, in that there's a lot of inspiration everywhere. How did you learn to take your ideas seriously to know what ideas to back?

Lo: I do always have a lot of different things on the go and I have, for some reason, always taken my creative ideas seriously, even though other people [00:03:30] haven't. I don't really care. I just like making things and I always have and once I've made things, I am keen to get them out into the world and then I let go. I don't really know how to do life any differently to that now. I just make things.

Courtney: You make it sound simple and easy, but let's just think about the letting go part as just a part of it. How do you manage that in all of the letting go? 

Lo: Because I can only control The making, I [00:04:00] can't control how it's received. So all I can do is do my best within my limitations, which traditionally has been, money in order to access promotion or that kind of thing. So I just have to trust that the right people that will enjoy the work will somehow find it through word of mouth, through stumbling across it some way. I tend to somehow find people that like my work. [00:04:30] It's, you know, a very small, tiny niche crowd of people, but they're all people that I really respond to, and I think that's probably why they respond to what I've written about or sung about or created.

Yeah, I just feel like it's a bit of a back and forth. And so if I can't force people to like something that I make or to listen to it. All I can do is present it the best that I can and then leave it to the universe and move on and get back to making, which is the part that I love. 

Courtney: [00:05:00] Your mum is a maker and your father is a musician.

Is there something that you've taken from their process particularly that, that served you well? 

Lo: Ah well actually, now that you say it, that's exactly what they do. My mum worked in films as a seamstress, so sometimes she would toil for days on, sewing these insane beautiful curtains or dresses or whatever that go to set and the director would say, No, we want [00:05:30] orange ones, not blue.

She'd just have to let go, but they both have got a really incredible work ethic. And so I guess that I've learned that the joy is in the work and that the rest of it doesn't matter. Yeah. I'd never really realised that's where I got that from, but obviously, yes. 

Courtney: Learning that you spent the early part of your life in Adelaide was quite surprising to me in the way that I have apologies in advance to people in Adelaide. A sense of [00:06:00] that as an art loving, but fairly conventional place and your childhood seemed quite different to that.

Lo: Yeah well, I think that my parents were probably part of the first set of young people that declared themselves to be Bohemians and really leaned into that lifestyle of rejecting conservatism and chasing their dreams of, the greater art good.

They were all involved in various Angles of art making, [00:06:30] whether it was music or painting or performance. Many of my friends parents were also involved in similar pursuits, different kinds of things. My next door neighbor's dad was a photographer. My other best friend's dad was a photographer.

Her mum worked in like a lesbian performance space called The Bakery, where we spent a lot of time. So it felt like everywhere I went, everyone was involved in putting on a show or

making something or enjoying [00:07:00] music and I think that was definitely incredibly exciting and stimulating as a young person growing up around that.

Courtney: In terms of I guess the practice of making and the practice of performing, do you have any specific rituals that you set yourself up with before you begin? 

Lo: Not really. Like, I like to get a bit dressed up for a gig. I like to put on make up and sometimes a wig. Sometimes indulge my [00:07:30] passion for ridiculous dresses and really high heels. All of that stuff feels like part of getting ready to be on stage because, I kind of bum around most of the time in whatever. So it's fun to make an effort and to go, okay, it's a delineation between cooking dinner and doing the dishes to being on stage. And in fact, my husband is always saying to me, you should just wear jeans and a t shirt.

Like, why do you bother with that? Just get out there and [00:08:00] rock. I'm like, No! that just feels so wrong to me. Even though I love seeing people do that. For me personally, that doesn't feel right. I like a costume. I like a uniform. It's just a, just a mental preparation thing. 

Courtney: Your book celebrates women artists who have tested their metal encouraged you to dig deeper, but I think you also wrote about them encouraging you to dress better.

Courtney: where did that [00:08:30] come from?

Lo: I guess it's just a bit of a showbiz thing, you know, like, right now I'm wearing Wendy Saddington's necklace.

Courtney: Oh, wow. I've been staring at that.

Lo: I wore it for you because of your beautiful book Bird, but also because I was recently given it by her roommate I've been helping her with

Sorting out Wendy's things that she still has and trying to find good homes for them. For example, we just contacted Emma Donovan's management and asked if Emma [00:09:00] might like some of Wendy's t shirts because Wendy was a massive fan of Emma, but we think that the archives probably won't want the t shirts because they're not really stage wear.

But they were Wendy's favorites because they've got like Billie Holiday on them. And they're talismanic. That's not a word,

Courtney: I think it is the word. That's, yeah, I feel that is the word.

Lo: yeah, I guess it's like a thread, 

Singers, passing on things that inspire each other to greater musical heights or [00:09:30] something. I don't know.

Courtney: it's the blood, sweat and tears that have been soaked into those fibres and worn against the heart and, the courage required to do this.

Lo: That's right. Yeah. Cause it is, in some ways it's powerful, but in a lot of ways it's very vulnerable too, to, be raw and stand up on stage and sing about things that are, private and personal or that are from your imagination.

So I, do very strongly feel a [00:10:00] thread through our other musicians kind of lifting each other up. I like the sense that we're all connected.

Courtney: And Renee Geyer gave you some sage wisdom around, Around undies, knickers.

Yeah,

Lo: Yeah. Undies. Knickers. Rock and roll. And glitz. She said that you've always gotta wear a little bit of bling Loene. And she gave me a little bit of bling. She gave me a little bracelet and a broach but she said, you should always wear two pairs of undies and when [00:10:30] I asked her why, she just kind of raised her eyebrow and I wasn't really game to ask what that meant. But it's, it is very good advice and I do think about it before every gig now.

I don't always do it, but often you'll find I've got two pairs of knickers on.

Courtney: Depending on your desire for compression that day. That's

I love that.

what, is, the experience of being female in that world.

Lo: for many, [00:11:00] many years, every time , it was gig day, I'd get my period and I've got endometriosis. It was incredibly painful. And it's wow, why does it have to be today? And it would rain. Like any, career that you're in, where you just have to show up, you just do.

But I think that is one extra thing that women have to deal with. And that's something I loved in your book, that the characters had to deal with periods, like in difficult [00:11:30] circumstances. I think that's something that's incredibly relatable and something that really is never, never. spoken about and it is an awful feeling to be on stage wondering if anyone can tell what's happening. 

Courtney: You're 14 again and you're checking the back of your skirt. 

You know? 

When you have come off stage and you have shared. So deeply and bravely and vulnerably, do you have a vulnerability hangover? How do you feel?

Lo: No, I'm [00:12:00] generally just excited. Doing a gig's my favourite thing on earth. you know, if I could be on tour two thirds of the year, that would be my greatest joy. But it's not really practical for me. Yet. When I'm a bit older it will be. I'll, probably hit the road when I'm about 60. Yeah, and never turn back.

Courtney: Fantastic. 

in thinking about your career the character of Freya in The Year My Voice Broke 

This young woman who [00:12:30] felt so fully formed, she carried immense story from first sighting. does she still hold meaning for you in your present life? 

Lo: I guess, yeah, it was a very beautifully written film and all the characters in that were written, I think, from a very truthful place, which made them very easy for all of us to portray because they were really genuine. 

Courtney: Who was the writer?

Lo: writer? It was the director, John [00:13:00] Duigan. But that certainly feels a lifetime ago.

It's not something I really carry with me 

Courtney: What about Sallyanne Huckstep in Blue Murder in the way that you write about her very tenderly and intimately in your book? 

Lo: I do feel a bit more like I carry her with me, Something about her story I guess it triggered a maternal instinct in me. I hated that she was so easily discarded and not appreciated for what she did, for the [00:13:30] whistleblowing, the New South Wales police and, almost single handedly blowing open corruption in Australia which we presume got her killed. Her murder is still unsolved, which seems so awful to me when I'm sure that with a little bit of work, that murder could probably be solved. I'm not a detective, so that's probably a naive thing to say, but I just, I feel like she deserved a lot more. And if [00:14:00] I can help in any small way to see that happen, that's something that feels meaningful to me. 

Courtney: I'd love to talk about the relationship between writing and all kinds of writing that I know you're committed to and acting. Can you elaborate on that?

Lo: Yeah, as I've experimented with all kinds of different creative expression, for want of a better word, I've realised that they're pretty much all the same, they're just different ways of doing it.

[00:14:30] Acting is one way of telling a story, of getting inside the skin of whatever it is that you are trying to express. The different thing with acting too. Writing songs or writing a book is that you're generally not in charge of it. it's somebody else's script, story, tone. And you have to try and serve that.

Which I quite like actually. I quite like not being responsible for everything myself. Cause everything that I do is just, I'm in [00:15:00] charge of deciding if it's good or not. So it's quite nice to have somebody else go, yeah, that was good or no, that was terrible. Let's

and I do feel like writing books and making albums are also incredibly similar, in terms of chapters like putting an album together, working out where things go, how they feed into each other, even if it's just an instinctual

placing. you kind of have to spread it all around you and then try and make sense of the chaos, [00:15:30] whichever format you're doing, whether it's a book, a record, or even just writing a single song putting Verses in order or lines or choruses, bridges, whatever.

It's it's all just making sense of chaos.

Courtney: Yeah. So in your process of making sense of chaos, are there any tools or tricks that you use, or is it an instinctive feeling out process?

Lo: I think it's quite instinctive. I think very much I lean into chaos. I quite [00:16:00] enjoy it. I enjoy having no idea of how things are going to end up.

You know, with a song, it might take me years of writing a line here and a line there sometimes in a phone, sometimes on a bit of paper in different countries or whatever. And at some point it all coalesces in my head and I just go, Oh yeah, if I take that bit and rub them together,

that's a song! And that's, I find that really exciting. That moment when out of the mess and the chaos and the, bits and [00:16:30] pieces that all comes together into a a whole that makes some kind of beautiful sense.

Courtney: Yeah. 

do you consciously commit to something and to whatever time it takes or how do deadlines work in your life? I think is what I'm asking.

Lo: Well, They've changed. They've evolved. Like I used to very much have this strong idea that for an artist, it was important to put out a record every two years, that's makes sense for a personal cycle.

Like within that [00:17:00] period of time, you should have been able to write enough songs and record them and get it out. 

But my last album came out in 2017 

Okay. So that's seven years. Obviously we had a pandemic and my family moved countries from America back to here. Everything went haywire. And I also tried to create something that might actually be work that

I got paid for because I've always

not really made any money from what I do. [00:17:30] So naively I thought that book writing might be this really fancy job that you got really rich at. I don't know why I thought that.

I don't know where I got that idea.

Courtney: We all have fantasies and that's a lovely one.

Lo: I know. It was really fun to write a book

So I'm very excited to have just sent my album off for mastering. it feels like it's, yeah, a really long time coming and I just can't wait to have it out.

Courtney: what's it called?

Lo: Transatlantic light. 

Courtney: I love [00:18:00] it.

Do you feel transformed by each thing? How are you revealed to yourself,

let's say in this album that you've just sent off for mastering?

Lo: Hmmm. It is a kind of self portrait in a way, but it's also a kind of, it's like an auditory statement to the world of your philosophies, of your imagination, of the kind of world that you want to create, the kind of music I like to make is music that you can get [00:18:30] lost in. 

You know, I like my songs. I like listening to them. It makes me happy. I really love the musicians that I play with. The music just excites me beyond. So just getting to sit there and enjoy that. I guess it feels like making a present and then wrapping it up and giving it, in a way.

Courtney: Yeah 

Lo: There's something really fun in taking a long time to get an album out in that you have a bit of space to let it cogitate and [00:19:00] marinate.

You have to leave some space to be able to hear it clearly. To begin with, when you first get a mix, you got to listen, on iPhone headphones, on regular headphones, on home speaker, on car speaker.

I like just playing it out of my phone. Cause that sounds like a shitty radio in the distance. I like having it playing in the house while I'm outside so I can hear what it sounds like broken up and distant because you get different parts of it from listening in different [00:19:30] ways. And the longer you can do that for, the more the song reveals itself and anything that's not quite working becomes clear.

But also if you do that and then don't listen for two or three months, when you listen again, it sounds completely different. And any notes that I've made don't necessarily mean the same thing anymore. It's like you're listening with a fresh set of ears and only then do I feel like you get this full vision of what it could and should be and [00:20:00] can adjust accordingly.

Courtney: I've been listening and loving your music these past weeks. I've listened to it in a few places in my home in the bush and just recently overseas. And for me, it seemed to transform the space I was in into a David Lynch film, wherever I was, as it turns out. There's something coming through, that's in a, what I would call like a middle place between dream life and

conscious [00:20:30] life. Is that a conscious thing for you or is that where you're creating from? 

Lo: It's not conscious, but it is, think that is what I chase. I very much like the idea of if you're going to make music, abandon yourself to it.

My favourite moments are when I'm playing with other people and I forget that I'm part of the band. I'm just, either looking around stage or the studio, carried away on their waves and then that moment of realising that I can [00:21:00] join in and be a part of it, it's really exhilarating and exciting.

Courtney: So you live in a two artist family with your partner, the actor and artist Aden Young. Can you tell me about that? How you manage each other's ebbs and flows?

Lo: yeah, I mean,

He's definitely an artist because he paints, he writes scripts, like we help each other with film scripts. 

I guess, like what I said before about being able to let go of things, I do think that is probably a [00:21:30] very lucky skill that I have, I've very much taught myself how To let go of, not of hope, but of expectation of particular targets to hit.

I just let go of imagining a future beyond what I'm living right now, whether that's in my work or in my day to day life,

we're constantly dealing with either distance or moving and if you approach [00:22:00] that with anything less than, yeah, okay, let's go, then it becomes really overwhelming and hard to deal with.

So for me, that's just the way that I've found to live is the best way, just very optimistically and without too much looking over my shoulder or into the sunset, just to be really present and to do what I can with the circumstances that I have.

Courtney: Just reinvent what you do. Just like that. 

Lo: So I guess I just try and keep myself portable. 

That's what I [00:22:30] do. I try and make sure that I can do whatever I do anywhere. So long as I've got a computer and a guitar, the world is my oyster. I can make albums. I can write a book. I can make a podcast. I can write a script. I can do my sub stack.

Like writing my sub stack has actually been the only thing I've ever done in my life that I've kept at consistently and I've done it through like the most torturous hangovers and lack of sleep and while [00:23:00] touring and traveling like in really awkward circumstances.

Not because anybody on the other side cares or expects it, but because it's the only kind of structure I have in my life. And it's an expectation that I've set for myself that I will get up on a Sunday morning and within a couple of hours, I'll have that sub stack out. And sometimes I, pre game it, work on it a bit through the week.

But I never have it ready to go. Cause I like the thrill of living on the edge of will I be able to get it [00:23:30] done? And it goes against all of the sub stack advice, which is, make sure that you've finished it and you've got a few days to go through it and make sure there's no mistakes and get somebody else's advice,

Courtney: they're so rich with research and beautifully written.

Lo: Thank you

Courtney: And perhaps it's like that iceberg effect of you've been doing this research your whole life.

Lo: That is exactly what I feel like. I feel like finally I've found a place, you know, generally the kind of stuff I'm interested in, they're full of weird, esoteric information about Loretta Lynn or, somebody's guitar or something that is probably not going to be of much interest to most of the people that I chat with, but somehow through Substack,

I've found people around the world that are interested that do think it's amazing that I kept a sequin that I found on the floor you know, I guess you just find like minded people that [00:24:30] are, interested in the genesis of a song, like that's the kind of thing that I'm always fascinated in.

Courtney: Do you have a conscious moment in your life where you committed to yourself and your creative life for the long haul? 

Lo: I don't think I ever thought about it.

I've just been doing it for so long that it's just what I do. 

I started in bands about the same time I had my daughter, but prior to that, I [00:25:00] was always making things with my friends. They just weren't professional, it was just messing around. And I guess after I did The Year My Voice Broke, I just presumed that I would keep doing acting stuff, but I wasn't really right for the industry at that time. So that didn't really go that well. But

music just felt like something I could generate. By myself. And once I started doing it, it just became what I did.

So, Any other work that I've done has always just been to pay [00:25:30] rent or, I don't really think about it too much. I just try and get jobs that allow me to think.

Courtney: You are such a skilled and evocative writer, Lo, and reading your book, I had to wonder, would you write fiction?

Lo: Yeah, I would really love to actually. I've been tinkering with a kind of noir crime novel for a few years. But, when I say tinkering, I've written a little bit, but it's more mental [00:26:00] tinkering.

Courtney: So what would it take for that to be in the world?

Lo: Probably a little bit of time. Just, I've got so many projects that I'm juggling right now that I feel like I really need to finish some of them up before I start something new. But it's the kind of thing I can imagine would be just really great to focus on that and nothing else for a month, I feel like it would be written quite fast and what I'm envisaging is [00:26:30] a very slim little noir novel.

Courtney: How wonderful. I can't wait to read that. I can already hear the soundtrack.

Lo: It's a good soundtrack. I might have to make it as well. 

Courtney: Lo,how you respond when someone says stay in your own lane? 

Lo: It's a funny thing. I did used to be very self conscious of being a singer who was also an actor, because there did used to be. Kylie Minogue, that kind of era, [00:27:00] it seemed a bit embarrassing to be both, that you had to pick one thing 

Courtney: And be taken seriously.

Lo: to be taken seriously. And I never wanted to have to pick one thing. I've also been the same with my music. Like I had my kind of loud punk noise band, and then I'd do jazzy kind of lounge standards. And I kept them very separate.

And at one point I realized that the thing that kept them all together was [00:27:30] me and that I could do anything in any style because it all was going to really sound like me.

And then when I was researching for the book, Etta James is one of my, total idols. And if I can sing at all in tune, it's because of hours and hours spent desperately trying to sing along with Etta James, which is, an impossibility, but I discovered that she felt like that, which really surprised me because I always thought of her as, very multi talented [00:28:00] blues jazz soul, but I discovered that 

she wanted to be a country singer it was her absolute passion.

And she wanted to perform at the Grand Ole Opry, and she just couldn't make that happen because everyone kept telling her to stay in her lane. And when she was, inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame She told a story about receiving a phone call from the head of Atlantic Records, Jerry Wexler, who said to her, you know what your problem is, Etta?

You're neither fish nor fowl. And she went [00:28:30] you know what I am? I'm rock and roll. And I found that pretty inspiring.

Courtney: Are you rock and roll?

Lo: Oh yeah. I mean, you know, My kids laugh at me cause that's such an old fashioned word, but to me, rock and roll is a very pure and beautiful thing. Like, that's what I call the music that I make. It's rock and roll.

Courtney: So Lovers, Dreamers and Fighters is a collection of personal stories about [00:29:00] amazing performers. It's painful that they're not more celebrated and there aren't billboards and statues and all of those things in their honour. 

I found myself putting the book down only to discover a new and amazing song that I feel like I should have known. What is the ideal way to read this book and discover these women?

Lo: I did actually sit there with the book and Spotify and create a playlist that goes with it that's in order from [00:29:30] the first song that's mentioned to the last. I think it's over a hundred songs - 17 hours of listening.

Courtney: Wonderful and perfect. We'll put a link to it on our Insta site.

Lo: Not all of the songs are great because some of them are just mentioned, but, there is a lot of treasure in there.

Courtney: A lot of treasure in there is how I would describe Lo Carmen and getting to meet you in person and have this conversation and giving so generously. Thank you.

Lo: Thanks so much for having me on. I love your podcast [00:30:00] so much. I've listened to every single one.

Are You Still Working?! is an independently produced podcast by me, Courtney Collins and producer Lisa Madden. If You want to stay connected to creative prompts and highlights from our episodes, follow us on Instagram @areyoustillworkingpodcast. Till next time.