Recently on UCFM’s Australian music show, Local Lunch, I sat down with highly praised singer-songwriter Carla Geneve for a chat about what she’s been up to and her new album.
Coming from the Western Australian town of Albany, Carla has found fans all across the country with her captivating music.
She first hit the scene in 2018 with her song, ‘Greg’s Discount Chemist’. Since then, she has found success with her music and is celebrating the release of her third album currently.
Her music writing has changed a lot since the early days. I asked her about how she approaches songwriting today.
There’s a whole bunch of different things. The first thing is just having time and being bored.
She told me that she prefers having full days with nothing on to try to relax whilst finishing writing a song.
Carla also told me about things that get her inspired to write music.
I would say, documentaries at the moment, like history documentaries. – I was watching a documentary on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and they were talking about, Togo, which I think is a Hoodoo Gurus song. I was like, Oh, that’s a cool idea for a song.
Little words or phrases like that spark a storm of inspiration for Carla, and that’s where she gets her best ideas from.
Carla has been known to find inspiration in lots of different places, from books and other music.
Poet Seamus Heaney’s last words inspired the name of her new album “Don’t be afraid”. I asked her if she found similar inspiration for the music, but her answer surprised me.
I got super into horror movies, at the time of writing. I was feeling like, kind of quite deeply, unsettled within. I wanted to make music that made people feel, like, on edge, because that’s how I was feeling.
On top of that, Carla wanted to use the musical themes in horror movies to explore self-reflection in her songs and had an interesting take on modern music.
I hear a lot of songs at the moment that are like, very blame centered. I think that that can be totally valid, but also, I think songwriting can do so much more than that. When you’re telling a story, you can tell it from your own perspective, saying, like, Hey, this is what you’ve done bad. But to actually write a song where you reflect on yourself, that’s going to give a lot more back to people listening.
Her analysis of modern music stumped me, as I’d never thought or noticed this in music today.
During the interview, I took some time to step away from the upcoming album to talk about some things she does in her free time.
Part of releasing a new collection of music is now the game of social media, something that Carla has said is not really her thing.
She noticed all the negativity or ‘slop’ that got posted to social media, but she wanted to post positive things to help people.
As a solution, she has put out into the world videos of her teaching guitar. She told me about the videos and also about her experience being a teacher.
People liked it, but I think it’s because they were getting answers to questions they wanted and it made me feel nice. I was like if my reel makes someone go home and pick up their guitar, that’s pretty cool.
Then we shifted topics fully away from music.
Also part of this social media campaign, Carla has taken to live streaming. She is a massive fan of video games and particularly the game Skyrim.
She thought that instead of spending all the time playing it solo, she could share the experience with her fans and whoever wanted to watch.
I love Skyrim. I would say, from like October to the start of the year, like March, April, pretty much all I did was play Skyrim. I’ll let go of it, and then usually get way more into music again. But it feels like a bit of a cycle, I was living in.I was living in Skyrim for a while.
Carla’s new album came out on October 17th and is another collection of excellent Australian music.
If you haven’t listened already, her self-reflective, horror movie-esque themes create a beautiful clashing of melancholic and haunting music.
There is a particular focus on the exploration of the piano in this album. It is something new to Carla’s music, but her voice works especially well with it.