Shelley Harland has itchy feet. No, it’s not a bad case of tinea, but rather her inner globetrotter getting restless for being in the same place for too long. You see, Harland is used to moving around. Not lots, but in significant ways, in ways that shapes an individual subtly. In the kind of ways that if you stand still for too long, you get itchy feet…
The last couple of months have been spent in Bondi working on her debut record, Red Leaf. It’s a beautifully sparse album, one imbued with fragility and a vulnerability that is sometimes rare in pop artists today. Her music has a much needed sensitivity, one informed by the places she has lived: primarily England and New York. No, make that predominantly New York. After all, it was in New York that Harland learnt how to play music.
‘I was in New York and James, my husband, was off on tour with his band,’ Harland explained of the moment, almost a decade ago, that music literally came into her life. I was literally in our apartment with a four track and a guitar he had left behind and I picked it up and started writing songs.
‘It was one of those cheesy moments, but the songs happened to be what people wanted to hear. And then really quickly I had a publishing deal and management and became one of those moments that was meant to be. It was so natural I couldn’t remember not doing it. I think it was something laying dormant in me. It was one of those things that was meant to be.’
The cities in which she lives seem to inform her sound, more than she originally thought. ‘New York is so noisy, all the time,’ Harland explained of that city so many seem to heart. ‘Every moment is filled up with the noise. While I was there I was writing lots of electronic music with lots of gadgets and sounds and samples that when I came here there was just so much space, and I think that’s just reflected in this record.
‘As a result the song production is really simple. It’s just about the song and the song being strong on its own, which allows me to be a bit more vulnerable. I’m not hiding behind anything. Having been somewhere like New York, where you can grab on to all these crazy ideas, activity and art, and then being able to come here so you can digest all of that is great. You are able to have the time to think in this environment. It’s been really good, and I think it’s reflected in my album quite a lot. There’s quite a lot of space in the production of this album.’
Shelley Harland’s Red Leaf is out now through Sony Music.
Scott-Patrick Mitchell
