Songs for girls who love girls

By MIKE HOULAHAN

Sometimes the most beautiful music can come from the most banal beginnings. Take Throwaway, for example, the pivotal song on Plainsong, the new album by Wellington singer-songwriter Charlotte Yates. A haunting yet simple tale of love gone wrong, its simple metaphor of cleaning out a closet came straight from the compost heap.

"It seems autobiographical, but in fact I made it up," Yates says. "The feeling is definitely that one of being completely overwhelmed by memory, but it was inspired by a Composing Women's Festival T-shirt that I chucked in my worm farm.

"I thought 'Well, that's the end, it's when my clothes die' - either in the compost or in my worm farm. It was a tie-up of two events with one very strong feeling."

The song is a standout track from Yates' fourth album - arguably her strongest release to date.

Always a busy artist, for years she has balanced side projects such as theatre work (Babes In The Mood), a band (When The Cat's Been Spayed) and production (co-ordinating the successful Baxter concerts and CD for the 2000 International Festival of the Arts) with her solo musical career.

Plainsong comes at the end of an extended period of performing and songwriting for Yates.

Her musical partnership with Mahinarangi Tocker has seen Yates trek the country for the past couple of years, road-testing many of the songs which would make it on to Plainsong.

"The tours with Mahina paid some wages, but they were far more important than that," Yates says.

"When we put a set list together she picks my songs and I pick her songs ... You wind up critiquing each other in a totally positive kind of way.

"There are four songs on the album we did on tour, and when you play something 20 times in a row in front of a live audience, they were the easiest songs to record because I knew people already liked them."

Those tours also saw each singer offered a stint as artist in residence at the Christchurch Arts Centre. Yates' turn came in April last year, and much of the album was written during her southern sojourn.

"It was the first time in 10 years I've had a wage: I rather liked that," Yates says.

"Your life is reduced to one key, to the apartment. You sit at your table and write songs, listen to a lot of music, go out to shows ... I came away with a fist full of material."

The remaining songs were written in January after Yates had a meeting to clear up paperwork with James Moss, boss of her record label Jayrem.

"He said, 'I've got 11 projects on for next year and your new album is one of them. When can you get that done by'?" Yates says.

With that incentive, a final burst of songwriting saw Plainsong finished. Yates then brought several well-known Wellington musicians together in the studio and went through a rigorous quality-control process.

Yates speaks plainly and personally on Plainsong. She's never hidden her lesbianism, but the girl-meets-girl and-girl-loses-girl songs on Plainsong are lyrically more direct than similar songs on earlier Yates albums.

"For She Went Straight I started with the line, 'I was worrying about money, I was dreaming all night about sex' - I was worrying about these things. I had had that little guitar riff for some time, and sometimes you sit on those ideas and something always comes along to tie into it.

"Once I've got the basic idea I will be very conscious of polishing and crafting, of taking it somewhere.

"She Went Straight is kind of an opposite song: usually one has coming-out songs, but this is kind of the reverse.

"I don't know if I sit down to write a lesbian song, but it is who I am, so your stuff comes to the fore. In the same way that you chuck out a shirt, I go out with girls."


- NZPA

Performance


* Who: Charlotte Yates

* Where: Temple Queen St

* When: Tonight

* Also: In-store, Real Groovy Records, 6.30pm