Adelaide-hailing singer-songwriter Jen Lush has already impressed the music industry with her signature sound. Lush’s music takes the form of well-penned folk tunes that come with an aggressive musical edge and dynamic textures. From her decade with folk band Cat Dog Bird to her first solo album “The Night’s Insomnia,” she’s gathered an abundance of music industry experiences that she’s now funnelling into her solo project.
Jen Lush is returning with a track that will be sure to make an impression. Based on a poem by the Australian poet Kevin Brophy, “Lovers Parting, Dawn” is an irresistible new single from Lush. Merging well-penned poetry with an immersive instrumental, the track will be sure to pick you up and leave you wanting more. Lush’s vocals are as emotionally-penned as ever, and land perfectly on top of a vibrant musical canvas.
Brophy, who wrote the poem, explains: “I began writing this poem in Paris in 2019. The UNESCO City of Literature, Heidelberg, invited six Australian poets to respond to the traditional German form of the Tagelied or ‘Dawn Song’, a three-part poem relating the plight of lovers having to part at dawn under an onlooker’s eye. This beautiful music made by Jen Lush and her musicians takes up the lament of lovers parting. Its tone and feeling arose from my own distance from home; from my talks with asylum seekers and homeless people on the streets of Paris; and from my then still recent task of having to compose the words to be inscribed on my parents’ gravestone. They died within months of each other in 2017.”
With tones of accolades already, the future is looking incredibly bright for Jen Lush. “Lovers Parting, Dawn” has been released in anticipation of her album “Hum of the Mettle.” Speaking about the album, she says: “This record came out of a commissioned project to create new songs around contemporary Australian poetry. It features the words of five of Australia’s leading published poets and crosses through the urban and desert terrain of South Australia, Victoria and Western Australia with poems that speak of love and desolation, loss and memory, the resilience of the country and the stories held within it.
It’s a collaboration with poets Ali Cobby Eckermann, Maria Zajkowski, Kevin Brophy, Renee Pettitt-Schipp and Graham Kershaw, my band James Brown, Paul Angas, Sam Cagney, Mark Seddon and I. With poetry leading the song writing process, words conjure up the soundscapes and are the framework for the melodies to launch from, which takes the music into sometimes unconventional places.
As a collection they form a dynamic range from epic 70’s rock soundscapes, sudden storms of explosive pop, driving indie folk-rock and whispering, sparse ballads that build to cathartic crescendos. The record blends vocals stark and spacious over sonorous acoustic and electric guitars, keys, bass, drums and percussion, with storytelling always at its centre.”
