Holly Throsby: ‘I was proud to not make a breakup album’

Holly Throsby does not enjoy having her photo taken. There’s even a song on her new album about it. But you wouldn’t know it to see her gamely bush-bashing off the beaten track to pose in a cluster of supersized lomandra for the perfect portrait. After all, this is her happy place. Walking along various bush tracks is a daily ritual for Throsby. A sense of nature gently pervades her seventh album, Normal Magic. It is in the imagery of sparkling water and swims; gardens and birds; bushfires and wind and rain on the roof. The album itself feels like the breaking of a drought: her first solo record in nine years. In the intervening time, she moved to the New South Wales south coast, had her second child, wrote her third novel, and recorded and toured a second album with Seeker Lover Keeper, her collaborative project with Sarah Blasko and Sally Seltmann. She has hardly been idle. And yet, at 47, she says “there are a lot of things, particularly if you have children, that take you away from the work. I sometimes forget that I’m an artist altogether – for long periods, years. I forget that I’m a musician.” It’s a startling statement from someone who picked up a guitar at the age of eight. “When I was a teenager, I would get home from school and write songs all afternoon, every afternoon, obsessively,” she says. “It’s been nice to reconnect with that side of myself.” We detour off the track to a rocky perch overlooking the Illawarra escarpment and the vast stretch of coast on either side. It’s a breathtaking, improbably wide perspective. The new album was spurred by a conversation about moments of everyday magic, where the difference between something utterly normal and utterly wonderful is a matter of perspective shift. This everyday joy is what has been sustaining her in recent years. “I think it’s a very necessary way to live life in general at any age, but I think it becomes a bit more apparent as you age and as your responsibilities grow in various directions,” she says. Nature has been a massive part of this everyday magic – and the reason she moved away from Sydney. “I like to be in nature by myself a lot, I find it very restorative,” she says. I, battling a recent broken shoulder, am finding it less restorative, and we agree to head back along the track, shielded from the intense mid-morning sun by a dense canopy of eucalypts, and brushing past banksias and ferns. Throsby has called on the sustaining powers of nature more so in the past two years, in the aftermath of a “very difficult” breakup with the co-parent of her children; navigating “a tremendous amount of grief and hurt” while also “getting my head around single parenting and getting my head around a new way of relating to the other parent of my kids”. The breakup also led her back to music. “There’s a certain freedom in it for me, and a remembering of who I was before [the relationship] that was really important to come back to,” she says. “I’ve had new experiences [since the separation] and that was really inspiring. Things can be really beautiful – like making new connections in ways that you wouldn’t have previously, and even the way you relate to your friends is quite different.” It explains why Normal Magic feels like an album of endings and beginnings: melancholic about what’s happened, and hopeful about new tendrils of experience, connections, romance. “I was proud to not make a breakup album … there’s not really any songs about the separation specifically,” Throsby says. “I think it was very helpful to direct my creative energies towards different types of expression, and to process that separation in real life with my friends and loved ones and on my own.” The album was recorded on the south coast, with some old collaborators and friends, and many new ones. “I really wanted the sonic palette to be fresh for me, because I was a bit sick of myself,” Throsby says of the album’s synths-heavy sound, laced with banjo and unexpected sax. “The collaboration of music is really lovely, especially as a novelist, which is very solitary.” We arrive back at the start of the track and perch at a picnic table in too-bright sun, surrounded by bird song. Throsby is a warm but reserved conversationalist; you get the impression she’d rather be making art than talking about it. It’s not surprising to learn that the stage is not her comfort zone; she’s always preferred writing songs to performing them, and has experienced panic attacks on stage that left her “quite spooked”. She pivoted to writing novels around 13 years ago, during a period of extended burnout from touring. “I hit a wall and didn’t really feel like I had any songs left, and wanted to start writing something different,” she says. She wrote the first draft of her debut, Goodwood, while pregnant with her first child. Published in 2016, it was well received by readers and critics, and shortlisted for Indie, Abia and Ned Kelly awards. Two more novels set in the same set of fictional regional towns followed, to similar acclaim. Throsby is close to finishing the first draft of her fourth novel, set in the “real world” and inspired by her years working in an arthouse video store in Balmain, where she grew up with her mother, the pioneering broadcaster Margaret Throsby. Like her previous three novels, the next will be set in the 90s – pre-internet and smartphones. It’s handy for plotting crime novels but she’s also “very nostalgic” for that era and “old technologies”. She has used ChatGPT a handful of times – questions like “Will I die from drinking tainted water?” she says, laughing at herself – and, like most artists, is worried about AI. “It is a terrifying time to be an artist or a creative person in any field,” she says, “and it feels like the avalanche has started and it can’t be stopped. Much like when streaming services came in, and people stopped buying music.” With more than two decades in the music industry, Throsby has seen many threats to her artistic existence. “I can’t believe how lucky we were,” she says, thinking back to her early days as a musician. “You could play a show and then sell someone a CD for $30 cash; if you [played] a really good show, you could sell 20 CDs – you felt incredibly rich. And there was this direct relationship between your performance and seeing an economic benefit.” The economics of making music now are “an absolute disaster”, she says. “My upcoming tour had more shows pencilled in, and I pulled the plug; I realised I actually can’t afford to go to this many places.” Are the economics of being an author any easier? A decade in, the jury is out. “Book-writing is very demanding, it takes a long time … Songs can be started and finished within a day,” she says. “I feel like I’ve been really lucky with my books in terms of how they’ve sold, and being able to survive [financially] has been a combination of my solo music, Seeker Lover Keeper, writing novels, and the children’s album, which weirdly was quite financially successful.” With children of her own now, would she do another children’s album? “I honestly don’t think I could do a kids’ album better than that,” she says, shrugging into the sun. “So I’ll leave it at that.” There’s an easy confidence in this response that suggests Throsby has reached a clear sense, at this stage of life, of where she wants to spend her time and energy. “I have a sign that I’ve written and stuck above my bed that says ‘What matters most’,” she tells me. “Because I think it is very easy to coast along and become distracted, and feel dissatisfied, and wonder why … but if you’re not doing a meaningful activity on a daily basis, you’re probably going to regret that when you get to the end of your life.” Comments (…) Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion