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“There’s a lot of ‘quick fix’ music out there,” she says, “with dime a dozen lyrics. I don’t deliberately shy away from that, but I want to challenge myself a bit more, and I also don’t want to underestimate the general public’s intelligence. I think if there’s good music out there, it might take a little while to filter through but people will find it. Artists that I really love – Elliott Smith, Neil Young, Emmylou Harris and Patti Smith – these types of artists make music that makes you think about their lyrics rather than force-feeding you with cliches.”

As essentially a storyteller/songwriter, Monique lets the stories slowly bubble away rather than churning them out to fit someone’s marketing plan. That’s probably why, though her debut album, Thylacine, was released by a major label and won her two ARIA Awards for Best New Talent in 1996 and Best Female Artist in 1997, she and the label inevitably parted company when the requisite “product” wasn’t there “on demand” to capitalize on things. So her next album, Signal Hill, was released five years later and independently, as has her new album, Into The Blue, four years after that.

“The stories come from my own experiences and those of people that I’ve met over the years. I think being a storyteller and a songwriter, you have to be a good listener, so when I’m travelling around, I’m always meeting people coming from so many different walks of life, different religions, different backgrounds, and just interacting with people at shows, a big part of that is listening to their stories.

“When I was in New York a few years ago, and it’s there all around the world, I was so struck by the homeless situation. There have been times in my own life where, even though there’s somewhere to go, sometimes you feel desperate and lost. I really feel for people in that situation, and there was a man in New York who came up to me and said, ‘Today I cried like a baby, today has been the worst day of my life, if you could just spare a dime.’ You give the money but you go away and think about just how hard that situation is, so there’s a song on the album, Wild Seed, which is basically saying that even though people might be at different socio-economic levels in a society that places so much importance on material possession, that really goes against the grain of what I spiritually and fundamentally believe in. So I’m saying we’re all equal, the homeless, me, the people with high-power jobs in our humanity.”

Many of the songs on Into The Blue are about going back to reconnect, whether with a person or place or the land itself, as well as recalling times past or friends who have gone before.

“The first single off the album is Daisy Chain, when someone dies you want to remember all the things you can about them, and I suppose being a songwriter, I can remember all these things about my beautiful friend Madeleine through writing about it. Most of the time really, I just write for self-help! And whatever comes from that is hopefully going to be something that maybe other people will enjoy.

“Then there’s Melting, which Paul Kelly and I wrote a few years ago and he recorded it on his Words And Music album back in ’98, and he was always saying I should do a version of it, but it didn’t kind of fit on the last record, but this record is more about the landscape, the earth and connection with family and things like that, so the song fitted in really well with this group of songs. It’s a song about Paul and I being two young kids getting away from the family at holidays and getting into the bush and lighting fires, which my father did when he was a young man, with his brothers!”

WHO Monique Brumby
WHAT Into The Blue album (Rajon)
WHERE Tuesdays in May at the
& WHEN Sandringham Hotel in Newtown