ART SCHOOL DROP-IN: SALLY SELTMANN’S HEAD KNOCK LIFE
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“A FEW WEEKS AGO I was walking my huge dog and I got pulled really hard on the lead and flew up in the air and fell flat on my head,” Sally Seltmann says almost matter-of-factly, and unprompted, as if potentially fatal injuries are a regular part of an album release schedule, two days before said album is released.
“I had a head injury and was in hospital for a week. It was like concussion, vertigo, all that sort of stuff. I’m totally fine, but still kind of recovering.”
But wait, there’s more.
“I’ve never had that happen, even when I was younger playing sports, so now I know what it feels like to have a mild head injury,” she laughs, before remembering something else. “It was really really intense vertigo, so I had to go back to Emergency.”
There were no other injuries, amazingly, not even bruises or scratches. Only what was going on in her head. In the run up to – did I mention this? – her album release today. And a run of interviews. And all the attendant stress for an independent artist with her self-produced sixth album. Oh, no biggie. But there’s an upside.
“Part of my damage, short-term damage and recovery, is I am just a little slower and I don’t have as much energy for nervous energy, so I think I’m easier to live with and easier to be around [laughing] because I am more chilled.”
So she is not normally someone easy to live with and be around?
“I am up and down. I have bipolar so I am 100% up and down,” she says. “But I’m pretty good: I manage it with my doctors.”
Ah. That was unexpected.
“I’ve gotten to the point now where I’m quite open about stuff like that and I think that it helps other people.”
That it does. It also changes the context and maybe perspective of questions that arise out of Seltmann’s album which is both inspired by and set in the incredibly formative years for her when straight out of high school she dived into creative life in Sydney’s College Of Fine Arts.
Art School Reverie is full of songs of uncertainty and questioning, great loves and big decisions, and most clearly, the formation of the Sally Seltmann – once New Buffalo, regularly one of Seeker Lover Keeper, on occasion songwriting partner for hire for the likes of Feist and Susanna Hoffs – we now know.
To begin with, she boldly declares on the album that “it doesn’t take long to become someone”. Oh yes? How long? And how long when you are simultaneously learning about the complexities of your mental alignments and health? Especially when you consider that, as is unfortunately common with women, she was not diagnosed until later in adulthood.
“I feel like it does take a long time to become someone, but I wrote that song thinking that I was singing to my younger self, saying keep going, it doesn’t take long, it doesn’t take long to become someone,” she says.
But that’s a lie, and Seltmann knows it. So she would be lying to her younger self? That’s a great start.
“I know, I know,” she laughs. “But I definitely wanted that type of assurance [at that age] because I’ve always been a bit of a dreamer and a bit lost in my head. I chose to study art but I was always in a band at the same time, didn’t know whether to do music or art. And I didn’t know whether to tell anyone that I wanted to do music because I didn’t know if I could ever make something of it. I didn’t want to jinx myself.
“It definitely did take me quite a long time; I was always all over the place.”
She clearly was someone who had not only a facility but an interest in visual art as well as music, but at that age choosing what to do is as much about choosing who you are.
“Your identity, I guess,” Seltmann agrees. “I have a very clear memory of having finished art school and moving to Melbourne and I had this little exhibition in a clothing store. I was proud of it, and it was good, and after the opening night I just thought I think I’m better at music. And that was the clear cut: I stopped exhibiting and I just focused on music.”
That may sound clear cut, rational, but emotionally and intellectually that could not have been at all straightforward to decide yes, this is who I am.
“For me with art and music, I just thought I want all of my creative energy to go into music now. I’m often not good at deciding things, but that felt very clear to me at that point. I could express myself in a better way or in a more satisfying way through music,” she explains now. “I say that on this album too, I’m drawn to express myself creatively and that’s what brings me happiness and purpose in the world.”
It’s becoming clearer that there is a connection here from what was happening in her head then to how this album sounds, not just what it says. Art School Reverie – which she produced and, apart from her daughter Judy, another singer/songwriter in the family, plays on her own – exists in permanent reverie: hazy and not fixed, rhythmically or visually, Sounds are almost diffused, the total absence of drums helping that, but the Mellotron and guitars are, to borrow a line from the record, “wrapped inside the sheets”. Yet lyrically it is clear and direct, using simple language and names and facts of her life.
“The whole sound came easy for me because it’s just what I naturally like, for one, but also I got a Mellotron, and I recorded this like a bedroom studio, made it all myself, and I guess I’m just drawn to that fake strings, old Hollywood hazy sound,” says Seltmann. “And you’re right with the lyrics. I guess I wanted to make people see those sorts of things I was singing about.”
Sonically it feels like someone in an unclear world where aspirations and dreams, like personalities and behaviour, have fluid shapes. Unformed dimensions. Like being 18, 19, 20 years old, in other words. So who was the Sally Russell who started at the college of fine arts?
“She was very shy and quiet and didn’t really want to be noticed. Always observing people. I felt like no one knew who I was.”
Was she, like so many of us who think we’re outsiders or strangers, feeling things real deeply and yet unable or unwilling to express them?
“I was feeling things really deeply but I wasn’t really choosing to make art about that; I was more finding people’s life stories and creating something based on that, whereas other people knew their problems and knew themselves and they were making these works that were intensely emotional.”
That is a description which would be familiar to many people, creative or otherwise: not sure who you were and not wanting other people to know, at least not while you were still working it out, but assuming that everybody else was more confident and capable, knew who they were and what they wanted and where they belonged.
“I think of the other people I was with and I had the feeling that they really knew who they were, had things sorted, what they wore was their look, while I was just hanging on the edges of life, trying to observe but not make too much noise.”
Kinda look at me but not too long, notice me but not too much?
“Yeah! That’s a good T-shirt,” says the former art school student who starts the album with a line which we might question now that she would have actually said back in the day: “Come to the gallery and try to pay attention to what I’ve made”.
But in another track, Shirt With Pussy Bow, there is a question that is believably one she might put to herself before every release and before every interview. “Should I choose to sell my soul, or hang on to my secrets?”
“I definitely think with my art I chose to hang onto my secrets, and with my music I sold my soul,” Seltmann laughs. “I am quite honest with my music compared with my art, and I’m not really that afraid of that.”
Hanging onto her secrets with her art, resisting honesty, was that why she was never going to be as good with it as she was with her music?
“Yeah, I think that’s exactly right.”
Except of course even, or maybe especially, when you think you’re hiding within your art, you end up revealing much more than you know.
“It’s like my mum when she hears what my songs for the first time,” Seltmann says. “She will go, ‘oh this song is about Darren [her musician/producer husband]’, and I’ll be like no it’s not! And she’s like, ‘yes it is’. And she always knows.”
Mothers eh? And songs. And reveries.
“In time you look back and you’re like, that was me and what I was going through.”
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SEE MORE
Sally Seltmann plays:
Sooki Lounge, Belgrave, March 5
Northcote Social Club, Melbourne, March 6
Brunswick Picture House, Brunswick Heads, March 12
Mary’s Underground, Sydney, March 13
The Servo, Port Kembla, March 14
HEAR MORE
Sally Seltmann’s Art School Reverie is out now
