THE PERFECT IMPERFECTIONS OF A MEL PARSONS SONG … AND SHOE
- 8 hours ago
- 4 min read
THERE ARE, I TELL Mel Parsons, two disappointments which must be addressed before we get into her work, her new album, or indeed anything to do with being one of the unassuming (of course unassuming, she is a Kiwi) but high quality songwriters from one of Aotearoa’s most musically fecund regions. She assumes brace position, politely (of course).
One, it was such a shame to discover that Mel is not short for Imelda, thereby ruining my chance to interview someone named after the shoe-collecting, Beatles-hating, karaoke-loving wife of a former Philippines president – and mother of the current president. That’s two pages of questions out the window!
Two, living as I do in Sydney’s northwest bland-o suburbs, a moment of excitement was extinguished when I realised that Parson’s latest long player, Castle Hill, was not named after the nearby home of Castle Towers shopping centre, Castle Hill RSL, and a newish Metro station, but rather one of those allegedly beautiful parts of the South Island.
“I apologise on both of those counts and I’ll feed that back to the team, for sure,” says Parsons, self-described as a lover of “sad songs” despite being “an upbeat, optimistic person”, who nonetheless can’t help but rub it in by telling me exactly why her Castle Hill might inspire a record while mine doesn’t even sell them anymore.
“It’s very beautiful, about an hour and a half west of Christchurch, in the southern alps basically, between the east and west coasts. It’s right up there in the mountains and it is stunning.”
Oh yes, one more thing: “I think up there, there was some filming for the Lord Of The Rings and those kind of things. If you google Castle Hill New Zealand you’ll probably come up with some pretty stunning images.”
Honestly, is there any part of New Zealand that can’t claim some LOTR connection though? Or for that matter any part of New Zealand that doesn’t have “pretty stunning images”? Bastards.
Is that why Parsons took her band from her home in Lyttleton – also home of Marlon Williams and Aldous Harding and much closer to Christchurch – to the alps? A chance to isolate them to get exactly the right feel for Castle Hill, a record with low-key intensity in its electric folk-rock, made live in the one room with few overdubs? To get something that somehow feels spare but not empty, enclosed but not claustrophobic?
“The why is I guess seven albums in for me now, I’ve done it a few times and I feel like one of the key parts to making a nice sounding record is the vibe,” she says. “We’ve been playing together for a long time and know and trust each other on the musical side but on the other side all of us have got kids now, so if we just recorded it in a studio here, we’d be going home to the chaos of the day whereas I wanted to go full immersion and be all-in for a week.”
Having moved from a (possibly annoying) perfectionist early in her career to someone who learnt from storied producer, and current member of Crowded House, Mitchell Froom, that “it’s the imperfections that is the rub that connects with people’s ears”, there’s something quite appropriate in the realisation that perfection is very much absent from the characters in her songs.
Indeed sometimes, maybe because of the intimacy of the sounds – even though this is anything but some hushed acoustic singer/songwriter record – and because Parsons is unsparing of herself and others in tales of modern life, their stories can become disturbing. Don’t Leave The Light On for example, in its exactitude of truth will bring home to many of us that experience of a certain type of partner or father captured in the song’s controlling, gaslighting-to-borderline-abusive male.
“Sometimes when I look back on those lyrics, I think wow, the stuff I took out, that was the heavy stuff. But it’s been an interesting one with this,” says Parsons. “It’s not that I’m guarded normally but I don’t normally explicitly talk about what songs are about and when this came out I made the decision to speak about it publicly because enough time has passed for me [and] I’m quite happy talking about for the sole purpose that I feel like if there’s a single person out there who connects with the story and who can get themselves to get out earlier than I did, then it’s worth that loss of [my] privacy or anonymity.
“I feel like the thing with that song is I got massive response to it, and of course that’s what you want, it’s really gratifying to get a lot of feedback on it. But the thing that just made me feel so gutted was that there were so many people that wrote to me who have been through that or are still in those situations.”
If any of that suggests something grim about Castle Hill, it would be giving the wrong impression for a record as attractive to the ear as much as the heart. Nonetheless, it’s timely for Parsons to remind me that despite the sound and style of her songs, she loves a club banger as much as anyone. OK then, name one.
She cracks up laughing. “So many, so many. Where do I start?” But she is serious about not always being serious.
“The way that you use music in your life, dancing or feeling sad or feeling happy, there are so many different parts to us. I’m not just a sad singer/songwriter all the time,” Parsons says. “I still have a hankering to be – I think this is going to be one my projects going forward – a DJ. Just moonlighting, but I love house music … watch this space.”
Here’s a thought, Imelda could be her DJ name.
“Oh. Not bad, not bad,” says the artist formerly known as Mel.
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Castle Hill is out now.
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