Freya Hollick has that rarely-bestowed gift of transporting her listener to another world entirely.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The 27-year-old performer has played her life and loves out on stage, and has a new album due to be released shortly. Titled The Unceremonious Junking of Me, it draws as much from her life-love of music as from her pain.
Here she talks about her inspirations: musical, literary and visual.
“I was raised in a family that loved all kinds of music,” says Freya.
“I was raised on all kinds of different music, from jazz to rock to country – a bit of everything.
“Growing up in Ballarat we had Black Swan Records, now L’Espresso, and we discovered lots of music from around the world from being in there. My brother also plays music. He started playing guitar before me and I was playing flute and I thought, ‘stuff playing flute, I’ll learn guitar as well.’
“When I first started playing music I was listening to the Velvet Underground and Syd Barrett and that kind of stuff. My style has changed with what I like. What I’m playing now comes probably from hearing the Carter family. I think they were the first country musicians that I heard that I wanted to be able emulate.
“It’s gospel music, the blend between French and American and Irish and English culture. And you have Cajun music, that fiddle music, and the stuff that happened up in the hills. A lot of it is spiritual and I write a lot of stuff that has biblical themes; not that I’m really in any way religious, but the iconography of religion is really interesting to me.
“I like sci-fi novels: Aldous Huxley and Kurt Vonnegut are probably my two favourite authors, and John Wyndham. That sort of thing inspires me, the other-wordly, end-of-days, apocalyptic stuff. Those sorts of themes feature a lot in my music as well.
“My dad is a painter and artist. At the moment I’m obsessed with something called luminism, the late 1800s realistic landscape painting. I really like that kind of painting. That imagery comes out in my writing. A lot of my lyrics centre around travelling through fields and over mountains and in the ocean. I try and put that imagery into my music.”