NOW IS THE TIME TO BEND RULES AND TIME SAYS RUTH HAZLETON
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A FEW DAYS out from a gig that still has the whiff of rule-breaking about it, how the hell are you Ruth Hazleton?
“I’m well, bordering on a bit bonkers,” she says as her partner, Bill, another musician in the house, passes her a morning coffee. “But, you know, that’s not unusual.”
Indeed, it would be unusual if Hazleton, a substantial figure in local music for decades now, wasn’t a bit bonkers. How does a musician, a folk musician, a historian and folk musician, survive this world without being a bit bonkers?
“I don’t know. What a time, what a time. It feels so heavy. How much do we panic, how serious is this situation in our cultural consciousness?” she wonders. “It’s funny, when you are a historian I find myself often asking my older mentors and peers and putting it in context in some way. My dad wasn’t called up for Vietnam but I’m so aware that this generation post-Vietnam, hasn’t known a world at war as much as previous generations.”
We may not have had war so in our faces in Australia since Vietnam, but there was a generation between who grew up anticipating imminent nuclear annihilation, and now we have a generation anticipating imminent climate annihilation. Plus ca change etc.
“I do remember the nuclear period, but most of my memories of that were as a kid being hauled out to protest with my mum,” says Hazleton. “So it was part of my psyche even though I don’t think at the time I understood quite the seriousness. And you find it repeatedly, doing oral history interviews, people who say I wish I had asked those questions when I was younger. But we don’t seem wired to ask those questions of our parents or our grandparents.”
Which is why maybe it’s a good thing we have folk songs.
“Exactly. And I think that’s part of the craft of it, really. For someone like me who has worked with folksongs for so long I will find a song and it will trigger something in my mind, usually to do with a current issue. I’ll head back to the folksong index and find as many versions of it as I can and then try – and I am by no means a purist – try and shape the words of previous versions to present the issue that I’m wanting to speak to.”
Why? “The topics are there because they have been there for so many generations,” she explains. “It’s the cultural threads I guess that surpass time.” And that’s the thing, the reason for being here today that we’re dancing around.
While traditional methods go on, whether it be practically ancient Scottish folk vocals or Eastern European tones or plain bush ballads, the songs that continue can talk to us about common truths, but they can also be the songs that adapt along the way, verses being added, context or emphasis morphing, instrumentation and arrangement reflecting new thinking or new instruments for those common truths. Much in the way that Hazleton brought the sound and style of ‘90s trip hop to her most recent recording of mostly traditional songs, 2025’s Heronbones, to both serious praise and occasional scepticism.
When people talk about traditional music, in the broad sense, whose traditions are they? For Hazleton, 1890s work songs and 1990s electronic songs serve equally as her traditions – she talks about how she and her brother would do hip-hop routines are blue light discos. For Australians generally, our traditions go back thousands of years, go forward to Europe and the UK, spread across cultures. Why shouldn’t the same be said of our music?
“Well that’s exactly it. Doing the work that I’ve done, using that kind of downbeat trip hop kinda influence is something that I’ve been talking about for 30 years,” she chuckles. “I remember panicking towards the end of the album, going this is nuts, people are going to freak. Those classic moments you have as you get close to the end of production. But I remember my dear friend and co-producer, Luke Plumb, saying, oh for heaven’s sake Ruth, you’ve been saying this for 30 years, just finish it.”
Once you get past any kind of fastidiousness about what’s “right” or “wrong” with Hazleton’s album there is nothing about the arrangements and the sounds of that record that deters listening or distracts from the story. On a very basic level, a drone is still a drone whether it’s being done by a squeezed bag and pipes or a looped electronic tone. Or to put it another way, a good idea is still a good idea.
“There’s something about that sort of music too that I just deeply was attracted to as a teen. I don’t know it if it was the soundscape or the beats, but it evoked this kind of atmosphere that for me was so attractive. For a long time I was thinking, gee this would go so beautifully with storytelling. How can sound itself enhance the lyrics of a storyteller, add those sort of punches to the story?”
For all that, it took Hazleton half a year to put together the best way of translating Heronbones into a live context, the blend of wheels of steel and banjo, drum stems and live vocals. In partnership with Melbourne sound designer and multi-instrumentalist Dan West, and Lostii, aka synth-and-vocalists Chloe Harrison, Hazleton debuted it at the National Folk Festival in Canberra earlier this month.
It’s what you might call a baptism of fire in the home of local folk’s traditions: would there be, as the myth telling has it from Dylan going electric at Newport, some Pete Seeger type running around behind the stage to unplug Hazleton’s electronics? Or some disgruntled audience member yelling out “traitor”?
But the baptism did not burn. Instead, it went down rather well, with a few people leaving of course, plenty perplexed but curious, and others engaging with it, getting it, and even loving it. Having come out of Canberra this year in better shape than, say, a certain traditional political party floundering right now as it gets caught between traditions and new moves, Hazleton brings the new look/new sound to hometown Melbourne this weekend.
It’s going to be different. It’s going to be the same.
“It’s something after a long career that I am so glad I attempted,” she says with relief now. Props to the folk music community in that there is still a culture of open listening. And I I did get some feedback from the [festival’s artistic director] that they saw there was going to be a whole heap of more DJ tables required for backline on stages [in the future].”
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Ruth Hazleton plays Heronbones at Brunswick Ballroom on April 26.
Tickets available from https://www.moshtix.com.au/v2/event/heronbones-album-launch-ruth-hazelton/186793
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BANDCAMP: Listen to Ruth Hazleton – Heronbones
