THE ACHE, DESTRUCTION AND REBUILDING OF GRACE WOODROOFE
- 30 minutes ago
- 8 min read
SO, YEAH, HI GRACE. It’s been a long time since your last album, the one that came with celebrity endorsement (Heath Ledger, who pulled her into his orbit), serious backing (Ben Harper, who produced), and a beckoning future (the sort of career dreamt of but almost never seen). More than a decade actually. Had much on?
You could say that. Try an amour fou that became unrelenting emotional abuse, the loss of self which inevitably followed, a career derailment that threatened to be permanent, a slow rebuild of every part of life, and now, a two album set – one ready now, one coming later – canvassing the story of a decade’s destruction as that relationship is told in chronological order and psychological detail. An actual soundtrack of a life.
“It was so earth shattering I had to do something with that experience. I couldn’t just go on with my life, says Grace Woodroofe, once of Perth, now of Melbourne, as she contemplates Rotate On The Ache (part 1) and what this record says about her. And what it says about her life and her career and a lot more besides. But mostly, especially, what it says about her.
“I had to make something out of the devastation, make art out of it, make beauty out of it. I had listened to other records that had done that for me and I thought maybe I could that as well.”
As rich with melody and the appeal of her deep-reaching voice as the album is – Promise Of Everything is rush of pleasure; Say You Will dreampops its way into existence; I Keep Waiting is a grand, even soaring piece of rock – some people might have kept the very human destruction at its core off the table and avoided lines like “what do you do when the love is a love that could kill you?’. Some might bring it into a few songs, disguised in metaphor or deflected into characters and a so-called universal story, some might play down the effects, creating a kind of manageable love gone wrong, and some might have gone full exposure but played it as a triumph of the will, their role being innocent besmirched character.
But in the two parts of Rotate On The Ache – a title that literally and figuratively skewers the warped way some of us love, in songs that suck you into enjoyment before you get what’s really going on – Woodroofe isn’t playing, and she certainly isn’t playing small.
“It was two parts because I felt it was so important to put every detail of that timeline in because otherwise I don’t think you fully grasp how consuming the relationship was,” she says. “To fully understand the devastation you have to understand how in love and committed I was.”
How far gone was she in what looked like love? Look at some of the red flags in the songs describing the early part of this relationship. “Baby I could feed your hunger, maybe we could heal each other”, or “You control my universe”, and then towards the end of the first album: “I could make you happy, I could write a song.”
How did it happen? How it usually happens.
“I say this in the songs, it’s like a movie because it was so romantic and intense, and it was like that to the very end. I left him over the phone because I couldn’t be with him, and the last words he said to me was ‘I love you,I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you,I love you’. Treating me like dirt but he didn’t want to let me go,” says Woodroofe. “And that’s often why people stay in emotionally abusive relationships: it’s not all bad, and when it was good it was so intoxicating. So you’re always holding on wanting to get back there.
“It was everything to me and because my nervous system was so fucked by the end of it, when I woke up it was like what kind of mood is he going to be in because that would dictate what my day would be like. If he’s loving and attentive, I’m going to have the best day, I’m going to be really happy; but if he ignores me or I see him doing x-y-z, then my day is going to be horrible.”
Once this hellish decade had passed, or at least was ebbing away, and there was some clarity, did she look back at her actions and her thinking and despair at herself? Or did she have more forgiveness for the woman – the girl really, at the beginning, as she was only barely out of her teens – she had been?
“Hmm,” she says, initiating a long pause. “A bit of both, I think. I felt a lot of shame that it happened to me. A lot of shame that it took me so long to recover. And unfortunately I think that still lingers. Especially because I had such an amazing introduction into the industry, I had so much backing, superstars taking an interest, it’s like I let everyone down by chasing a boy, you know? But I purposely left those little nuggets through all the songs because they were always there.
“And after the relationship, when I learnt about emotional abuse, it was like he ticked every box. Every stage of the relationship ticked every box, and I thought it would be so interesting, but also important, to reveal how it happens because nine times out of ten you don’t know it’s happening to you until you’re out of it.”
You wouldn’t be alone in thinking that answer sounds like people who emerge from cults and wacked out religions, only seeing in retrospect that incremental progression from an interest in finding faith or building a career or maximising potential to involvement, to immersion, to loss of any sense of reasoning, to being a tool of others. That’s why it’s hard hearing someone like Woodroofe say they felt guilt or shame about how long it took them to realise what was happening and how long it took to recover, because it sounds like berating yourself for grief.
And it is grief: for a way of life, for a way of being, for who they were, and grief doesn’t have a mandated schedule.
“I pulled lines from journals [in these songs], especially towards the end. The song I Keep Waiting was very much my journals towards the end of my relationship, such bargaining, ‘what can I do to make him stay? What can I do to make him happy?’. [The line] ‘waiting for a crumb’ that was very much the end stages of the relationship. I did write love songs about him when I was with him but they weren’t these songs.”
These aren’t love songs, these are songs about the idea of love, the way love is “meant to be like”. The passion and intensity are there but at no point in any of these songs does it feel like love between them, at most love happening to them.
“I feel like that’s what you think love is when you’re maybe young and naïve. I still have girlfriends today that say I went on a date but I didn’t feel that spark, or like I’m with him but it’s never exciting – that kind of stuff is the danger. You want someone safe and steady and available to you and wants to hang out with you but so many women are used to that following a guy or wanting that drama.”
Can she still tap into the person she was at the depths of this relationship?
“I remember it really well, particularly when I listen to music from that time, that I was listening to at that time. But mainly when we wrote the music for these songs, even though I always have journals and lyrics and things I pull from everywhere, that took me back to those moments. That’s how I knew the music was right because it conjured the images in my mind of what we did. Even today, if I smell something an image will pop through my mind. I guess that’s common, but I say it in that first song, ‘I remember everything’.”
That’s trauma. That’s trauma triggering and clearly all of who she was, all of what she was feeling, is in these songs, not just in words.
“I wanted them, sonically, each song to mark a point in the relationship and sound like how it felt, Woodroofe says. “Again it goes into the soundtrack idea, it was such a visual thing for me. The movie plays out in my head, and this goes back to the title of the album, it was relentless imagery: I’d put my head down on the pillow and the relationship would play through my mind like a movie trailer. And I was like, what does that sound like? What do these emotions sound like?”
Structuring the work so the first album would finish on a kind of cliffhanger, a point where she’s realised the state of (destructive) play but is not necessarily able to change things yet is a fascinating place to put and leave a listener. We don’t know if this is the lowest point. It probably isn’t the lowest point, but there’s no binging this story; you have to wait for the second series for its denouement.
“The relationship didn’t race to a finale. It didn’t race to a conclusion of ‘right, I’m better now!’. It was a long, drawn-out up and down process and a gradual loss of self. So the end of part one is when I recognise that terrible things are happening but I’m still so in love that I’m like how do I go back to the beginning? How do I ignore this, justify it? In that process, while I’m thinking all these things, I become smaller and smaller. Because when you’re thinking about all of that you’re not thinking about yourself, or how you feel in this situation, it’s like if I keep my head above water, keep him happy … And in that process you completely lose your identity.
“By that point in the story I had just pushed everything else away; I was just focused on the relationship. I was losing gigs, cancelling shows, and I lost friends. I was constantly defending him to people, and he had a hand over my music career as well because he was a musician. [The album] ends on this hanging, bargaining, waiting feeling because I was in that spot for so long. And I wanted to leave the listener in that spot too – you feel stuck, that’s how the relationship felt.”
The relationship lasted six years, the rebuild afterwards took almost as long, the result is a decade lost. Or if you want to put the best spin possible on it, 10 years of creating fodder for two albums and a new career, and giving her the strength to reclaim that creative voice and that creative life. Now many people, not surprisingly principally women, approach her after shows to say they went through the same thing, they didn’t have a name for it, didn’t know of emotional abuse in this context, didn’t know this wasn’t how relationships should go, but now they did through her songs.
It helps, but did it have to come this late for them, we sometimes can’t stop ourselves asking, though it may be arrogance for anyone outside it to think it could be done otherwise or at a different pace. How do you save someone who doesn’t know they need to be saved?
“I don’t know,” Woodroofe says sotto voce. “I don’t know if I had heard this when I was in it if it would have made me think because the nature of that abuse is you don’t care what anyone else says. My family were saying things about him and stuff and I would push my family aside. You’re not really ready to hear it, until you are.”
So, how did she see it, hear it, and do it in the end? Ah, we’re just going to have to wait for Rotate On The Ache (part two).
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Grace Woodroofe – Rotate On The Ache (part 1) is out now.
