Cash Savage stands at the water's edge looking out at the darkening horizon, a baby sleeping peacefully in her arms. As violins swirl like incoming shrapnel, she barks a discomforting lullaby into the storm.
"All I can hear/ All I can hear/ Machines humming/ Drones buzzing/ The collapse is coming/ All I can feel is water rising/ And all I see on the horizon/ Are rich men climbing/ Rich white men."
It's not Twinkle Twinkle because life hasn't been the stuff of fairytales lately. Collapse is the grim finale on Savage's new album, Good Citizens: a stocktake of a brutal year for the Melbourne songwriter and her new family.
Cash Savage says ‘change is happening and it’s musicians who are enlisting that change’.
“My wife got pregnant around the same time as the [same-sex marriage] plebiscite was starting to happen," she explains. "The idea of bringing a child into a same-sex family at the same time as the validity of same-sex relationships was being debated… that really kicked this album into gear.
“I never thought I'd be political," she shrugs. Growing up in the '80s, she thought rock and politics went together like Bono and Bob Geldof: "kind of absurd… [but] I feel like my hand was forced," she says. "I feel like if I was to sing about anything else, I'd be lying."
From the opening tracks, Human, I Am, Better Than That and Pack Animals, the honesty of Good Citizens is confronting. Alternately raging and weary, the conversation from her corner is a distillation of years of weathering ignorance and "otherness".
“With people I talk to who identify as queer or LGBTQ, I guess I have more freedom talking to them because we sit in the same minority and so the questions that hurt don't necessarily get asked," she says.
“The whole idea of ‘the other’ is the big one. When you ‘other’ someone then that's problematic. Asking an individual how they feel isn't necessarily a loaded question, but … I'm a firm believer that if you've got a question that can be asked across the whole minority, then the answer is probably there for you to find yourself."
For all the chafing and bruising of its bookends, the album comes with a deliberately soft heart. The singer's wife, writer and publisher Amy Middleton, looms into focus in a series of songs wrapped like a precious cocoon against the outside world.
“A lot of the album is written for us; the three of us," Savage says. "I wanted to show that right at this moment it's awful, politically. But I'm also incredibly in love and there's a wonderful story in our relationship that I wanted to put into an album.
"We have this really passionate connection. We just tumble through life together, supporting each other at different times, and I wanted to express the joy in being tangled up in that.”
Family and music are tightly wound in the extended Savage household. Cash's parents, Frank and Jane, have long tendrils of their own in this city's blues-rock family tree. As we speak, the tragic losses of longstanding comrade Spencer P. Jones and Frank's brother Conway, of Bad Seeds fame, are painfully raw.
"Con actually asked for the album because he knew he probably wasn't gonna make release day," Cash says. "He didn't say much about it but every time I'd come over, it would always be on. So I guess in a very Conway fashion, he didn't necessarily give me any props… but he wouldn't have been listening to it if he didn't like it."
Comforting in a different way is the fact that Good Citizens feels so in tune with a turning tide in Australian rock: part of a new wave of confessional albums that claw for truths beyond polite conversation. Jen Cloher's self-titled watershed of last year leaps to mind.
“I'm certainly not standing up here by myself," Savage agrees. "It wasn't really a consideration, but I do feel a bit of safety in numbers because there is a lot of really raw truth there right now. I feel an unofficial camaraderie in what's going on in Australia right now.
“The truth is that change is happening and it's musicians who are enlisting that change and I guess I never thought that could happen."
Against the odds, maybe the brightest spark the new album strikes is in the ear of the aforementioned newborn. That grim lullaby, Collapse, turns out to be one of her favourites.
"She loves it!" Savage says. "She really loves it. You would think the way it goes in and out from the acoustic part into the heavy part, that a baby wouldn't be into it, but she really digs that. If she's crying, she stops."
Sounds like progress.
Good Citizens is out today.
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