March 2006
Warwick McFadyen, The Age/Sydney Morning Herald

“What [Chloe] has done is create an album as warm as a summer’s night and as earthily woody as the deep roots of an oak… Hall writes with insight of the everyday life and the events and emotions that transcend their surroundings.”

Pretension stripped bare

A late night epiphany has transformed a marketing executive into a stylish product of her own, writes Warwick McFadyen.

THE child looking out from the CD cover has piercing, intelligent eyes. Her hair is windblown. She has the air of someone just about to tell a joke or say something profound. Flip the CD over and it’s the same person almost 30 years down the track. Her eyes still have that flame of life, but she’s wearing a broad smile. And so she should. The person is Chloe Hall and her album, White Street, has 11 good reasons to be happy. They’re her songs and, she says, they reflect who and what she is. “It’s the first album that feels really honest,” the Melbourne singer-songwriter says. “It represents what I’m doing.”

What she has done is create an album as warm as a summer’s night and as earthily woody as the deep roots of an oak. It may take people familiar with her earlier work by surprise.

Her debut White Sky in 2000 was praised, but the songs mutated from acoustic to electronica, which felt right at the time for her, but now seems wrong. Hall, 32, while not regretting the work, sees that album as “trying on some other things. Electronica seemed right at the time, and being someone else”. Since then she has discarded the electronics for the acoustic guitar and piano. Whereas she felt like someone else on Sky, on White Street she feels herself, and stays true to her craft. There is no mask. “The line between me as a person and me as a performer is pretty fine,” she says. “I don’t really have a stage persona.”

White Street is pretension stripped bare, though without the anxiety of then parading her soul in public. The songs, created on guitar and piano, are filled with the intimate sounds of the cello, violin, viola, bass and percussion. Hall writes with insight of the everyday life and the events and emotions that transcend their surroundings.

An Irish melancholy drifts through the songs, which is not surprising. Although she was born and raised in Melbourne, before that her parents had lived in Kenmare, County Kerry, an area of Ireland known for its beauty. She grew up surrounded by the music of the Chieftains, Planxty, Andy Irvine and Mary Black. When she went to Ireland as an adult “it felt so much as where I had come from. The first pub I went into a lot of the women looked like me”. She speaks of the “beautiful ache” of Irish music, which can stir her when she listens to it, especially the sound of the uilleann pipes. She also speaks admiringly of the voice of Dolores Burton, of the Cranberries.

A life in music, however, has not been a surety for Hall. First, there was the paralysed arm with which she was born, but which came good with treatment. Then, there was the money trap. Although she says music has been her passion, there was a time as an adult when she entered the corporate world thinking, “I could quickly get enough money together to do an album and put a website together”. To her consternation, she found she was actually good at what she was doing — media marketing — and began to climb the ladder of ambition. The music started to become a hobby rather than her life. Her epiphany came late one night working back to meet a deadline. She saw a businessman in a suit carrying a trophy of a businessman in a suit. She realised, “This is so far away from what I want to do”. With it came the thought that “everything I was doing somebody else could do, but with music I’m the only one who can do what I’m doing. And I do have something to say and something to offer”.

After high school Hall enrolled in music at the University of Melbourne, specifically to study composition, but that subject was in the course’s second year. To get there she had to study an instrument in her first year and she took on the voice — an operatic voice, no less. She freely admits she is the world’s worst opera singer, but she got through to the second year only to find that the composition course wasn’t what she was after. She dropped out and went on the folk circuit, where she found her real voice.

Her determination can also be measured in that she has set up her own record label, One Tree Hill Records, on which White Street was recorded. Shock Records handles the distribution. Shock also helped introduce Hall to writing as a discipline. It came in the unlikely form of the Saddle Club series. She has written songs for four Saddle Club albums, three of which have gone gold. It’s an exercise she takes seriously. “I feel really responsible about it because it’s for kids,” she says.”I wanted to make sure they were strong words that would make you feel good about yourself.”

Hall has enough material to record a new album, which she hopes to have completed this year. She also hopes to tour Canada after a national Australian tour. She knows that as a performer on the folk circuit, she is ploughing a very small field in a very small market. But “if I wanted to make money, I wouldn’t be doing music. As it is, I’m doing it because I love it”.

Chloe Hall performs at the Brunswick Music Festival on March 31. The festival runs from today until April 9. More than 80 artists from Australia and overseas will take part, including, from overseas Dick Gaughan, Donal Lunny, Andy Irvine, Harry Manx and David Francey; and, from these shores, the Pigram Brothers, Dave Graney, the Band Who Knew Too Much, Fiona Boyes and Stephen Cummings. Full festival details: brunswickmusicfestival.com.au