“The first release was Honey, and I feel like some of the tracks are more accessible,” she says. “I think Honey is that sort of track that artists might like, where Smoke Signals is more instantly accessible and fast and bright. I do my writing in a very deconstructed way where I’ll rave for a while, a topic will come up, and then I’ll look at how other artists have responded. From there I’ll look at imagery and really feed it around – and we made the album in exactly the same way. I didn’t take any finished concepts into the studio; it was made musically exactly how I wrote the songs.
“I think any good artist – whatever they produce – is always going to be reflected by who they are, it’s going to be part of their own voice. Growing up in Wollongong I saw some pretty rough things happen. And in some ways it was just a country town, but it gave me a lot of confidence. The community there is part of who I am. And it’s definitely given me a sense of humour.”
Having grown up in Wollongong myself I know exactly what she means. Though it may be drawing a long bow, the journey from a coastal NSW city to the capital of Victoria entails some significant environmental and cultural shifts, and listening to the depth of Self Talk, there are certainly many influences at work. In the past Olympia has spoken of her literary influences – such as Dorothy Porter and Peter Carey – but throughout her debut, I am more reminded of the colour and complexity of magical realists like Murakami and Marquez.
“You should definitely relate me to Gabriel Garcia Marquez in an interview,” she laughs. “I don’t actually know how much [other writers] influenced me. I think it just felt like I was at a party and there are other people in the room and you’re just kicking around other ideas. I’ve never tried to copy anyone.
“But see now and again, like when I was writing Honey, I remember thinking, ‘Well, how did other writers respond to what I’m trying to say?’ I came across some of Dorothy Porter’s work about a creek, and I don’t know if influence is the word for it … I sort of feel like poets have written songs better than songwriters have. They can say so much more than we can in so little form, and it’s such a dirty form these days. But while I was writing this, I really looked at poetry just to kick myself in the arse and make it better.”
While she may feel some expressive limitations, the lyrics on Self Talk have an inherent ambiguity. “I think sometimes bad things happen to good people as well as good things, and so there are a lot of observations on the record that are not necessarily saying this is bad or it should change and should be more like this,” she says. “It’s more a set of observations.”
In the lead-up to the album tour, Olympia has released a music video for Smoke Signals. It’s an impressionistic and non-linear affair, like the kind of dream you’d have after falling asleep at dawn after a disco in 1979. One wonders if this odd collage of images translates across into the actual lyrics; if Olympia’s writing isn’t so much grounding us in a narrative as it is conjuring impressions?
“That’s an interesting perspective. I think the songs are kind of about someone’s internal and external pay-off, where sometimes what we tell ourselves is different to what really is. [Like] someone’s fantasises becoming confused with reality. I did talk to Alex [Orlando], the filmmaker, about this story that I really love, which is about a Japanese contestant in a game show where he is locked in an apartment that is completely empty, but there’s a coffee table with magazines and he’s completely naked and he has to live on the supplement prizes of food and clothing. And they told him, ‘It’s not going go live, it’s just a pilot, we don’t know what’s going to happen with it.’ And of course it goes live immediately, and he is an absolute national sensation and they put an animated eggplant over his, you know, genitals. You just watch him go crazy. He’s emancipated, he’s starving, but that’s kind of Alex’s inspiration for the clip as well.
“I absolutely adore and respect Alex the director; it’s completely nuts that he made this clip for us. Any ideas he had, I gave him the freedom to do them, and I think what we have here is amazing. This whole thing is really just so exciting.”
BY ADAM NORRIS
