radionotes podcast episodes

Janie Conway Herron has released Another Song About Love, a book with a full length album about Lillie Bloom and her friends who form a rock band while being a lover and mother to.

In an extended chat – over an hour in length – Janie spoke about the book, their life and more to radionotes

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IMAGE CREDIT: Peter Herron

Janie grew up with brothers Mic and Jim Conway, as well part of numerous bands of note in the 70s and 80s.

Her first novel – Beneath the Grace of Clouds was published in 2010.

Amazing academic career, not just as a Doctor of Creative Writing but also to then be the teacher of the next generations. While keeping passion for justice, strong and alive in their life.

Reportedly, one of the first women in Australia to play the electric guitar in a folk club. Did she? Listen in, to find out.

SHOW NOTES: Janie Conway Herron

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Feature Guest: Janie Conway Herron – Author/Performer of Another Song About Love

Next Episode: Bill Tolson

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CREDITS

Theme/Music: Martin Kennedy and All India Radio   

Web-design/tech: Steve Davis

Voice: Tammy Weller  

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TRANSCRIPT

First version provided by REV team member Sam M – check to audio before quoting wider

John Murch:
Dr. Janie Conway Herron, thanks very much for joining radionotes.

Janie Conway Herron:
Thank you, John.

John Murch:
Doctor of creative writing so when did you pen your first words? Do you remember what your first bit of creative writing was that was substantial?

Janie Conway Herron:
Oh my goodness. That goes back way before I got a piece of paper saying I could do it. I think I was writing poetry and song … Well, verse of poetry for a long time before … Probably as a teenager actually. Always loved writing and loved reading. I had a mother who loved reading too so there was a culture of reading and writing in my family. There are no published authors in that way but just a love of the written word as well as a love of music. I grew up around it.

Janie Conway Herron:
When I first wrote … I know. I wrote an essay. I thought I was so clever, an essay on nothing, whether there could actually be nothing because you couldn’t write about nothing. You had to be writing about something. I remember feeling deeply philosophical and I think I was probably about 10 or 11. Maybe that’s the first. Probably before that there was something else.

John Murch:
Did you hand up nothing or did you hand up something?

Janie Conway Herron:
I handed up something. I handed up the impossibility of nothing. I think. I don’t know where that essay is now but I remember writing it.

John Murch:
What was the teacher’s response at the time? Were you a bit of a teacher’s pet or were you quite the opposite in those days?

Janie Conway Herron:
God, I don’t remember the teacher’s response actually. I think I was mostly enamored with my own … I did very, very well in English all the way through school, which is so … To later in life, end up with a PHD in creative writing makes perfect sense in terms of my life trajectory. Though, if you had met me in my twenties, you probably … I would have said that would have been the last thing that would have happened.

John Murch:
There was a lot going on in your twenties, though. We will cover that as well. We’re going to fly now to 1982. You had two applications. One to the university and one to the housing commission. They both were accepted. Which one was more exciting?

Janie Conway Herron:
Oh, they went together perfectly. I have to say recently, Adam Bandt put out the radical green idea for the future sort of thing and I thought they’re all those things that Gough Whitlam did back in those days. I am a product of that because I had been a musician for a long time and I was really finding it hard, struggling to make ends meet and to keep my son in clothing and a place to live and all of those kinds of things. He was on the brink of becoming a teenager.

Janie Conway Herron:
I thought, “If I keep on with the music and keep on doing that music, I may end up being okay financially but I may not and it could be disastrous. I need something more in my life so I’ve got something more substantial. I need to get a proper job.”

Janie Conway Herron:
Now I used to tell my university prospective students this story as well because just to make them feel more comfortable about their choice. I decided to go to university. I didn’t think I’d get in because I didn’t really finish school properly really but I did and that was fantastic.

Janie Conway Herron:
At the same time, I applied for public housing because I was virtually on the streets. I was actually just living in a room of a friend’s house with my son and all our worldly belongings. I had a friend coach me and say to me, “Now, you mustn’t sound like you’re okay when you’re going for public housing. Don’t say, ‘Oh, it’s okay. I’ll be all right.’ You have to really make them know what the situation you are in.” I applied for that as well and got both. That provided me with a roof over my head, a kind of safety for study and a way to bring up my son as well.

Janie Conway Herron:
I sort of moved over into university work, which I was quite nervous about at first but absolutely loved once I realised what was going on. I was really enjoying it.

John Murch:
There’s quite a seesaw. As you’re saying, on one hand, you have to sort of not justify but be honest about the situation you were living in but at the same time the university want to know about your stability and that you would actually be committed to your education at the same time. That’s two different sides of a particular spectrum of life at that very point.

John Murch:
From that, as we said, you ended up getting a doctorate in creative writing and also getting the chance to teach others as well. At this point, can we talk about that? We’re in the university years at the moment and you’re now retired and that will be where we talk about the album and the latest music but at this particular point what were you getting at that time when you’re in the university structure from teaching?

Janie Conway Herron:
Well, first of all, I learned a lot. I didn’t even know how much I learned until I started teaching. I think I was so lucky to go to the university of technology at that time. The course was such a good course for me because it made sense of my previous life and everything that I wrote. I’d also come from being involved in Rock Against Racism, the organisation in Sydney that helped Indigenous bands get being known and seen in the world of music.

Janie Conway Herron:
It also gave me a platform to express my burgeoning interest in Indigenous issues, which became sort of lifelong, still with me now. That was sort of the background into which I went into teaching and teaching not only creative writing but post-colonial studies and cultural studies and all the units that we taught in creative writing were culturally embedded if you know what I mean. That was the way we taught. I was also lucky to arrive at Southern Cross Uni at that particular time when the units and everything were being fashioned in a particular way. I was able to provide a pretty good grounding for creative writing students to come in and write about what was important to them.

John Murch:
I join Janie today from the Lands of the Kaurna People. I’m wondering if you could tell us where you join us from and the cultural significance of the area for your particular community for which you live.

Janie Conway Herron:
I live on Widjabul country. I should have the knowledge that I’m on Widjabul country, acknowledge the elders past, present, and emerging on this country. It’s Widjabul country is part of the Bundjalung Nation so that’s the language, country that we’re on. It’s a beautiful country and I fell in love with this country a long, long time ago. It started coming up when my son was a small child and always wanted to live up here. It wasn’t really until I was doing my PHD, got a job at the university that I could move up and live here but that’s when I kind of left everything in Sydney and came up here.

John Murch:
You’ve done that throughout the years, this transporting yourself from one part of the east coast of Australia to the other. I don’t think you’ve had the pleasures of being here amongst the Adelaide Plains as well as the Adelaide Hills.

Janie Conway Herron:
I have. I haven’t lived but I lived it. I love the Adelaide Hills. When I was in Stiletto, we often came across the south Australia and did shows. It’s been a while since I’ve been there. The last time I went there was to travel with a friend up to Broome, a friend from south Australia, another academic involved in Indigenous issues. That was some time ago. I haven’t been for a while but I do like south Australia very much.

John Murch:
Let’s talk about academic and Indigenous issues, how important the university academic structure can be on the education of Indigenous issues and how it’s important for Indigenous people to be engaged with the university sector.

Janie Conway Herron:
It’s totally important. For me, it was inextricable, you know? I had to. It had to be there. I couldn’t not have taught the subjects that I was teaching without being involved in Indigenous literature. I’ve got a pretty extensive collection of Indigenous literature on my bookshelves and elsewhere. It really influenced me. It also influenced me in the writing of Beneath the Grace of Clouds. That whole book came out of my experience with Indigenous people, particularly the people in Rock Against Racism, who were musicians but who were saying to me, “You need to find out about your background. You need to find out who you are.” Many of them thought I was Indigenous. I thought I was Indigenous.

Janie Conway Herron:
Look, I explore that in Beneath the Grace of Clouds. I explore the idea of what it means to grow up non-Indigenous, become aware of what has happened to Indigenous people and then have Indigenous people themselves say, “We think you’re Indigenous. You should find that out” because I had a mysterious grandmother who hid her whole identity.

Janie Conway Herron:
That’s what that book centered on and it was part of my PHD. The PHD involved writing a novel and then writing a theoretical thesis on the novel. You know? Kind of framing it theoretically and culturally. I called it Belongings, plural, deliberately, because of this kind of idea that people think their belonging comes from only one place. I wanted to extend it out to that.

John Murch:
That’s the debut novel from 2010. The other thing I was thinking in terms of Indigenous issues or Indigenous culture, particularly, in that of creative writing is that there is over 100 languages across Australia.

Janie Conway Herron:
250, I think.

John Murch:
Thank you. Let’s say hundreds of Indigenous languages across the country. How through the academic prism you’re able to communicate each of their own through their own understanding of who they are and how they feed into the land, the culture, and who they themselves think they are.

Janie Conway Herron:
I think they do it extremely well under great difficulty. For an example, when I first moved up … My first trip to the North Coast when my son was about three, I think we came together on the train. I’ve written about that, like the feeling of arriving in the North Coast and what it was like and then coming to this place, which had landmarks like Mount Warning. What’s Mount Warning? You know? It was actually Mount Morning in the sense that drew me to the place because I put my finger on a map and it landed there.

Janie Conway Herron:
It’s actually called Wollumbin and I kept thinking, “What are the Indigenous stories of this place?” Almost everywhere I was walking, everywhere you walk in Australia, there are Indigenous stories. You are walking on Indigenous country and you’re walking in amongst those stories. A lot of the time we don’t know what they are and those stories are tragic and wonderful as well and magic and otherwise.

Janie Conway Herron:
I had some wonderful teachers, Indigenous teachers, people like poet Maureen Watson, the whole of the Watson Bayles family who many people know. Rock Against Racism was my introduction to them but before that people like the people in No Fixed Address, Bart Willobough, who is basically from South Australia and that college of music in South Australia. I began to see things and know things.

Janie Conway Herron:
Nowadays, people are much more aware of where they are in general, non-Indigenous people, Indigenous people, those who have been taken away from their country have to find all that out again but there’s a lot of awareness about that. Not enough being done about Closing The Gap or anything like that. The recent Black Lives Matter marches are really, really important to making sure … I think there’s a kind of post-colonial voice happening globally. I’m really happy about that but I’m sad that it has to be still voiced in such a way that can’t be turned around and made very different. I’m hoping we’re in the process of that.

John Murch:
The reason why I raise where we started on that bit of conversation is that of stories through song, for which is I think new for that of the Indigenous populations, how you see song as being the vehicle for the story. Where do you fit those two?

Janie Conway Herron:
Well, I can answer that in a lot of ways because I’ve written a lot of different songs. I’ll start with a song that I wrote called The Eddie Murray Song, which is not in that collection that goes with the novel.

Janie Conway Herron:
With The Eddie Murray song, I wrote that after I’d been to Wee Waa to cotton country and just after Eddie had been found dead in a police cell. I spent a lot of time, along with other people in Rock Against Racism, with the Murray family to begin the court cases that ended up in two inquests in which the final proclamation was that he was killed by personal persons unknown in a police cell. I mean, how do I write about that in a song? I sat and sat and sat with it and with the words until the story came and told the story as best I could using, of course, a sort of reggae song background.

Janie Conway Herron:
In that, the music and the song and the story go together but I was absolutely horrified by what was going on. It was another eye-opening moment. I thought it was important to tell that story through song.

Janie Conway Herron:
I think that time I was in Wee Waa was the only time in my life I’ve been really afraid, afraid for my own life because of the racism that was in that country and in that town around what was going down. It was quite frightening but I wrote about that in Beneath the Grace of Clouds as well.

Janie Conway Herron:
The story is longer but what songs do is distill the moments and the thoughts in the same way as poetry does I think. You often develop a chorus that will have a line like that one had about the rights about the family and it has this repeated thing about now they’re crying out for justice, hearts are filled with sorrow.

John Murch:
Then if we move to the current book, which has its own album with it, the songs within that album are I guess takeaway reminders that you don’t have to be reading the chapter at the time but once you’ve read it you’ll be reminded through the song.

Janie Conway Herron:
That’s right. It takes an essence of each chapter and uses a song to tell … It’s not always telling you the story of the chapter. In fact, it very rarely does. It’s just taking up a scene and exploring the theme in a different way because song and poetry is a different model together to novel and story writing. It can be similar but, for me, usually it’s more distilled than that.

John Murch:
The album itself, a bit of a family affair. Let’s walk through that. You’ve got your brother involved.

Janie Conway Herron:
Yes. My brother Jim Conway, who is a renowned harmonica player. How lucky am I right to have him playing with us? I mean, it’s lucky in more ways than one.

John Murch:
You can’t choose your family allegedly but if you’re going to choose them you might as well have Jim Conway onboard.

Janie Conway Herron:
Yeah. That’s right. That’s right. We’ve played together over the years a lot and when Jim plays with me I feel like he’s totally in tune with my way of thinking melodically. He always does exactly what I would … I can’t play harmonica but if I could play, I would play what Jim plays. That’s really good. It was really fantastic to be able to have him at this stage of his having an MS actually playing in the studio with us. It was wonderful. I’m really pleased to be able to do that.

John Murch:
Can you talk to us about that studio environment and working alongside your brother? How the tracks were I guess laid down or what the interaction was between you and your brother during the recording of these tracks?

Janie Conway Herron:
It wasn’t just me and my brother. It was my son as well. Tamlin, he was a producer. Going back a little bit to how I ended up with these 15 songs, I was in the middle of writing the book. The novel came … Well, some of the songs were already there but the novel came first. Originally, what I had was well known ’80s songs in this kind of like top 10 kind of list. You know? It would read like that. That was my idea. It was a sort of bit of an out there framing of it.

Janie Conway Herron:
Then I was looking and this thought came to me one day while I was writing, what if my own songs fit in there?

John Murch:
Janie, you don’t have any experience in playing musical instruments or songwriting. Why would you think that?

Janie Conway Herron:
That’s exactly what I did. I went, “Oh, I’ve got all these songs” and sure enough, of course, they did fit. They fitted very well. The next thing I thought was … My son, who is a really good producer and a fantastic musician as well, “I’ll record with him.”

Janie Conway Herron:
Firstly, what happened was that Tamlin and I went into then-studio in Marrickville, which is a rehearsal studio that has recording facilities there. We put down the basic tracks, the two of us. Just the two of us. My son played drums, bass, guitar. I played guitar and sang. We put down the basic tracks. The next person that we called in was my brother.

John Murch:
To be sitting there and being creative with your son, one of the closest people in your life, what was that like?

Janie Conway Herron:
Wonderful. Wonderful. He knew quite a lot of those songs. Some of the songs were old songs, he remembers from his childhood and from growing up. In fact, The Eagles Song, which is the last track on the collection and the last chapter in the book because it’s a theme of eagles and watching eagles, which I won’t tell too much about without giving it away but I wrote the Eagles song quite a long time ago and when my son had wanted to learn guitar, he asked me to teach him and I taught him a few simple chords, not wanting to be too complicated. He goes, “No, Mum. I want to learn The Eagles Song. I really want to learn the Eagles song.” I thought, “Oh, no. It’s quite complicated musically” but I taught him anyhow and within two days he was playing it. You can imagine there’s that history with that song. He’d heard it. He knew what he wanted to do with it. He did wonderful things with all the songs.

Janie Conway Herron:
He also had connections with fantastic studio musicians. You know? Like Stuart Vandergraff and Jess Ciampa. Just wonderful. Jim Pennell. The atmosphere in the studio for this project was the best I have ever experienced because I’m fairly nervous about performance and things like that. In the past, my experience in studios has been quite traumatic in some ways. Just because of … I did explore that in the novel, the kind of psychology of being in the studio. This was a really good experience and a really great thing to do actually.

John Murch:
Then the brother comes to the studio, that’s another layer. As you said, the son is still there. I guess uncle, is that how it works?

Janie Conway Herron:
Yes.

John Murch:
The son’s recording the uncle together.

Janie Conway Herron:
They had already done that in the last CD Jim Conway’s Big Wheel. He did a lot of work on that with Jim. They had worked together before so that was kind of … They knew each other musically as well.

John Murch:
For our international listener, this is no small fry. Jim Conway is like quite a major star. Having said that, Janie, who joins us today, is a bit of a legend in her own lunchbox. I hope that comes across as a compliment.

Janie Conway Herron:
That’s something my brother Mic would say. He always used to say that phrase.

John Murch:
Yeah. John Vincent, various other broadcasters of the time. History would have you as the first female in Australia to play the electric guitar and the first to be kicked out of a folk center for doing so. Fact or fiction?

Janie Conway Herron:
Fact. The Victoria Museum did this exhibition called Rock Chicks, which I was offended by, being a really good feminist. I wouldn’t have used that. They insisted. I thought that was very ironic. They put it in that I had but I always have this sneaky, “Surely, I couldn’t have been the first woman to play electric guitar. That can’t be right.” You know?

John Murch:
In Australia, though. You know?

Janie Conway Herron:
Wouldn’t there have been women playing in jazz bands back in the ’30s? I did look. I haven’t found anything.

John Murch:
But electric guitar in jazz?

Janie Conway Herron:
Yeah. There’s all Epiphone, jazz guitar, I can see it. I can’t see it. You know? Yeah. That’s fact. I didn’t get thrown out of Freight Trainers for playing electric guitar but for playing electric dulcimer. Appalachian Dulcimer comes from the Appalachian Mountains in America and there’s films of me playing. I played it a lot. When you put it up against guitar, it’s hard to get the volume so we thought, idea, we’d put a violin … This is with my first husband Carrl, Carrl Myriad. We had this band Myriad, which Carrl was Tamlin’s father.

John Murch:
Sorry to interrupt. I wasn’t going to mention it but since you have, I will. I actually have your record.

Janie Conway Herron:
Really?

John Murch:
I saw the cover and I just went, “That looks familiar.” I just can’t remember if I put it under M for Myriad as in the band or under C for … My record collection … Yeah. I’ve got it somewhere.

Janie Conway Herron:
Oh, boy. That’s good because it was apparently groundbreaking. You don’t know that you are groundbreaking when you’re doing it.

John Murch:
Why was it groundbreaking?

Janie Conway Herron:
Because the way we electrified instruments. Remember Harvest? That album Harvest?

John Murch:
Neil Young one.

Janie Conway Herron:
Yeah. The Neil Young one. We just went, “We want to do that. We’re folk singers. We want to do that. We want to play electric” and so I just got a guitar and plugged it in. I got an electric guitar and plugged it in. I just played it like an acoustic guitar to start off with. Then when I was really … Really, when I was in Stiletto I learned how to play electric guitar and it’s very different. It’s a completely different way of playing.

John Murch:
We’ll be very clear. History has you as the first woman to play electric guitar, not just in rock but ever in Australia. Then, obviously, you getting kicked out was for the instrument that you played or the style, I should say, of music that you’re playing at the folk club.

Janie Conway Herron:
It was during the controversy when Bob Dylan was controversial because he went electric and stuff. It was around that time. I really couldn’t put all of the dates … Looking back sometimes, they just concertina up. It was around that time. Yeah. It was a bit controversial what we did.

John Murch:
Bob Dylan has a brand new record out. Emma Swift has covered one of the songs off it and I’ll put details in the show notes regarding that side note. Your granddaughter has done the cover for the book.

Janie Conway Herron:
The image. Yeah. Yeah.

John Murch:
This is an amazing visual artist. I know I say a lot of the times, check out the show notes but there’s a link there. Her representation of the female form is so intuitive. How do you feel about the book cover and what she has to offer? Obviously, you’re biased as a grandma but.

Janie Conway Herron:
I went to visit her in Sydney and she was doing some new work and she took me into her studio to have a look at her work and I went … Oh, in the back of my head, what I thought immediately is, “Oh my God. She’s expressing in image what I am trying to say in words.” It was a no brainer. Like, “Can I have one of these images for the cover? Will you do it?” Ben Ellis, who worked on the actual design of the cover.

John Murch:
He’s from Tall Story.

Janie Conway Herron:
He’s up here. He’s somebody I was working with up here, worked with Vashti and we got that cover. It’s beautiful. I actually got the proof copies and it feels beautiful too. It’s like, “Ooh, this is nice.”

John Murch:
You’ve obviously been in her studio. I’ve seen works where there’s a very defined circle representing the head of a female form, which I found very striking. Maybe it’s just my taste in that kind of art but what kind of studio space does she keep?

Janie Conway Herron:
She lives in a house with her friend. It’s a house that’s owned by her friends parents and one of them is an artist and so there’s a studio space in the front area so she’s got a big room that she can do her artwork in. She’s able to do that. She’s landed on her feet. It’s wonderful actually. I’m really, really glad for her. At the age of 23, she’s now.

John Murch:
What was Janie doing at the age of 23? You were into the rock and roll by that stage?

Janie Conway Herron:
I was touring with Myriad and very pregnant, about to give birth to my son. We had the album Of All The Wounded People coming out as well. That’s what was happening for us then.

John Murch:
The Second World War, growing up just after that particular time and the world is trying to refine and redefine what its all about. What were those younger, not necessarily teenage years, what were those younger years like?

Janie Conway Herron:
When I was born I was born Janie Aarons. My father worked for … He was a wool buyer and he managed a wool buying firm but at that stage he worked for a German company. Someone came out from Germany who was an ex-Nazi and said to the people out here, “What are you doing with a Jew in the firm?” This is in the 1950s. Suddenly, my father was ostracized. He was a very hard worker. There’s no way … He was suddenly taken from being in the centre of things to being on the periphery. He was very upset about it.

Janie Conway Herron:
My mother, being very pragmatic, said, “You’re not a practicing Jew. You don’t practice the Jewish religion. Why don’t you change my name?” My father who refused to change his name during the war, even though my grandmother wanted him to, and his brother had been killed in the war, all of that, he changed his name.

Janie Conway Herron:
His name was Conway Norman Aarons but everyone always called him Jim so he just put his first name as his last name and that’s how we ended up being Conways. I was five when that happened so I was old enough to kind of know something serious was going on about names and about identity and it struck me.

Janie Conway Herron:
Then around about 10, I read The Diary of Anne Frank, which she was writing when she was about 10. I remember thinking, “If I’d have been in Europe during that time I would have been her. That could have been me.” Those sorts of things really made me really involved in the idea of human rights and things, which I think has been really important to me all the long while, my whole life really.

John Murch:
Very much a thread from that point onwards. Obviously, as you just said, in your life and also the communities for which you’ve decided to dedicate parts of your life to. What’s been the reward giving your time and your heart to those issues?

Janie Conway Herron:
Immense reward. You know, really I have met the most amazing people through my interest in those sorts of things. If I hadn’t have been interested, through music and Rock Against Racism, I got to meet all these Indigenous people. I got to really understand something that I don’t think it would have been easy to understand so viscerally had I not done that.

Janie Conway Herron:
Something we haven’t touched on, since 2004, I’ve been going and teaching creative writing, helping Burmese refugees, mainly women refugees, tell their stories. That’s expanded now a bit to being LGBTQI people as well. It’s been an extraordinary to know and the people I’ve met have just been amazing. That’s a reward for me. I’m just totally curious about people. It’s the same with teaching. Meeting amazing people, hearing extraordinary stories.

Janie Conway Herron:
In the beginning of Beneath the Grace of Clouds, the narrator says, “I’m a collector of stories” so my reward is that. Definitely.

John Murch:
There’s definitely that crossroad of identity storytelling so that of what someone may be or classed as to the deeper meaning of their own story being expressed. How have you seen that enlightened through the writing process? Maybe for yourself or for others that you’ve been able to teach?

Janie Conway Herron:
The hardest thing for me has been telling the story of Lily Bloom in this because it centers around my own experience of the music industry. It came off an earlier work that was an experimental work with memory that I’d done for my masters. I thought I would just develop that into a novel.

Janie Conway Herron:
My problem with it is feeling like the concerns that concern me in writing Another Song About Love, are they still concerns or should I be writing something much more serious? When you’re working with people who have been through life-threatening situations, it makes me feel like … Well, I feel like, and I do, a white privileged life. Even the education I’ve had was available to me because of who I was. Life in the music industry, as a woman, was a battle and I might have played electric guitar before other women did and that kind of thing … I didn’t consciously do it that way but now like writing about that difficulty when people are fighting for their lives and Black Lives Matter is happening and all those things, it feels a little bit strange. It’s very easy to discount the importance of your own story I think.

Janie Conway Herron:
Another Story About Love is actually really an exploration of self-doubt in a way. Lily Bloom goes through a whole thing where she wants to do all these things but time and time again, the sense of not being good enough, whether it’s as a woman or as a mother or as a whatever, things are undone. That is a limitation. It’s an inner limitation on things.

Janie Conway Herron:
I just feel absolutely compelled to tell stories. I’m already thinking about what I’m going to do next, even though I found this whole process of getting this all out here, out into the world stressful and sometimes I think I am 72, why do I want all this stress? You know? I just want to share stories.

John Murch:
Dr. Janie Conway Herron is our very special guest on radionotes. Let’s head to the 1970s. Born in ’48 but the 1970s seems like a good rocking old time. Stiletto and Scarlett were on the horizon for you. Fun fact, I found that Stiletto had a promo seven inch with Red Symons of …

Janie Conway Herron:
That’s right.

John Murch:
Now he would have been either about to go into the Skyhooks or had just left the Skyhooks. What’s your relationship with former ABC broadcaster Red Symons?

Janie Conway Herron:
A close one or was once. As a friend and a fellow Gemini. We shared a birthday party once. That was good. I had a Gemini birthday party at my place. There were all these luminary Geminis. He was actually a great mentor for me. As somebody wanting to play electric guitar, as a woman wanting to play electric guitar and wanting to play complex chords and wanting to do that kind of thing, he was somebody who was always there to give me hints.

Janie Conway Herron:
Some of the things he told me were really helpful. He was the first person who told me to learn to play to a click track. I thought that was crazy. I was a folk singer. Folk singers slow down to emote and speed up. They don’t have a click track and play exactly in time. He told me to do that. He also said about performance like, “Don’t … You can’t be a performer unless you’re willing to make a fool of yourself.” I remember him saying that.

Janie Conway Herron:
Stiletto was also like a female … Well, we weren’t all women but it was a band modeled on Skyhooks with lots of women in it. We were all in Pram Factory, that wonderful theatre group thing when Jane Clifton and I started Stiletto. How it happened was supper in the back theater of the Pram Factory and it was the two nights were sold out and so we went, “Ooh, maybe we better make a band out of this.” We were very influenced and Andrew Bell, who was the guitarist in Stiletto was very close to Red Symons. We’re all very in each other’s pockets a lot. Jenny Keath, bless her, she’s since passed away but she was Red’s partner at the time. He became a very close friend of mine up here.

John Murch:
Clifton I think from Prisoner.

Janie Conway Herron:
Jane Clifton had just been not longer before that been in Prisoner. Yeah. Jane, she sang with us and toured with Myriad. That’s how we kind of … In my band with Carrl and then we just started to do duet things together in the supper shows at the Pram Factory. You know, do a little sort of comedy skit, which then … And sing songs, which then became a kind of front piece of Stiletto.

John Murch:
To be clear, what were they called? Suffer shows?

Janie Conway Herron:
The Supper shows. They were like Sunday night.

John Murch:
Okay. My head was hearing suffragette.

Janie Conway Herron:
We were meant to be a feminist band. We were. I’d write a song called Premenstrual Blues that was actually for a film called Seeing Red, Feeling Blue. Jane Eyre was the director. She said to me one day, “What I want is a kind of blues song about having the premenstrual blues.” I did it. I still do it. I still sing it. It’s like a walking blues kind of thing.

John Murch:
There was another song you did back then but I don’t have it in my notes along those lines.

Janie Conway Herron:
Woman in Trouble? Goodbye Johnny? Woman in A Man’s World. That was another one of mine. That song, Woman in a Man’s World probably tells the story of Another Song About Love in a song. It was written all that time back then. It was about how it was because Marni Sheenan who was the bass player then and myself we had kids. We had to get to the gig on time and there was no childcare. There’s not much now. There was none then. You couldn’t not turn up to the gig or go a bit late or something. You had to be there and rehearsals as well and get all dressed up and that kind of thing.

John Murch:
Do you think that influenced your son’s interest in music?

Janie Conway Herron:
No. I think it was a deterrent. I think he resisted the music for quite a long time. People would say to him, “Oh, yes, Tamlin, are you going to be a musician too?” “Nup, no, no.” Then he succumbed and once he succumbed to the beautiful side of what music is. He had the same problems. He’s got five children. It’s really difficult to have five children and make a living out of music so he has to do other things besides that. It’s hard. I mean, he’s worked around the clock.

John Murch:
What was the turnover between Stiletto and Scarlet? What was the difference between the two?

Janie Conway Herron:
Stiletto was a band where most people in the band contributed songs and we co-wrote songs and so the whole songwriting aspect of it was a group affair. Also, while I was the first woman to play electric guitar I didn’t play or want to play the kind of electric guitar that Andrew wanted to have. He wanted to have someone that he could do guitar duels with and that kind of thing. I wasn’t good at that. Still not. Didn’t want to. I didn’t pursue that part of it and in the end, I was virtually asked to leave Stiletto.

Janie Conway Herron:
Then what I did was get together with the original bass player in Stiletto, Marni, and we started another band called Scarlet, which had various incarnations. Then I moved up to Sydney, started another version of Scarlet up there that became another band called Face Dancers. I had a lot of … Once I left Stiletto, I had a lot of bands but they weren’t very high profile bands. That’s that history. Scarlet really was my songs and Marnie’s songs.

John Murch:
Whilst doing my research I noticed for $770 in a place in Sydney you can buy the Newsstand Splash for Jane Conway and one of the bands from Strewth Magazine. They did a splash for one of your outings.

Janie Conway Herron:
Say that again. What?

John Murch:
For $770, and I’ll put the link in the show notes because I rang up to make sure it’s real and there’s so many great posters, in the old days outside of news agencies that have a splash …

Janie Conway Herron:
Oh, I know what you’re talking about. My God. Is that for sale? For $770.

John Murch:
$770 and there’s also one for your other band as well.

Janie Conway Herron:
The artist who did that poster is still a really good friend of mine. He is so poor.

John Murch:
I understand where that’s coming from because, obviously, it’s a piece of history. Let’s give credit there. The selling of a piece of history.

Janie Conway Herron:
Oh, yeah. Sure.

John Murch:
Good on them. The flip side of that very coin, literally, that coin, is that the artist who did it for Strewth I guess …

Janie Conway Herron:
No, it’s not Strewth. Strewth was a play on Truth magazine. Strewth, Scarlet Fever Hits Town? That’s the own?

John Murch:
Yeah. Yeah. I was on the Dog and Bone with the seller today. He was saying it was outside the news agent because, of course, he doesn’t know. He thought there was a newspaper called Strewth. Now I was thinking truth and so I started talking to him about page three girls in Truth and how Strewth would have had to be a parody of that magazine and he lost me at that point. Let’s get the truth on Strewth.

Janie Conway Herron:
Sorry (laughter), once I recover. I can’t wait to tell Alan that. That is so funny. That is really funny. Sorry. That’s hysterical. Yeah. Nah. It was an ad for a gig. It had the gigs underneath.

John Murch:
Stiletto was a good time, though? Being in that band?

Janie Conway Herron:
Oh, yeah. No. Well, Jane and I started it and we just got other musos. Yeah. It was great. We were really popular from the word go. You know? My experience is sometimes you ride the wave. You know? You ride on the top of the wave and you’re riding it certainly with that band. We did.

Janie Conway Herron:
It actually got a bit … I guess really the difference is we got a bit sort of complicated with one another about feminism, about where that might go. I mean, we were incredibly popular all up and down the east coast for the songs that we sang about women like Premenstrual Blues and Goodbye Johnny and Women in Trouble. Women in Trouble had this performed thing in the middle that Jane and I did. I won’t repeat what we used to say in that but we used all the phrases that had been said to us as women by men as we walked by. When we asked the guys in the band to do it so we can act out being the women either reacting or not reacting to it, they wouldn’t do it so we used to do it.

Janie Conway Herron:
We had this particular line that I won’t say that ws like to go back into the instrumental and things. You know, we were performing concerns for women in second-wave feminist era. We did a lot of gigs where that was necessary.

John Murch:
How do you feel about some of these leading lights of the 1970s feminist movement and where they are today? Do you feel like with some good bands that maybe they should just stick with their hit singles?

Janie Conway Herron:
Oh, yes. Yes, I do. I get annoyed with this idea of being elders and having this respect and not looking to where young people are coming from and the way in which that younger women’s voices can be a bit stifled by older women. At the same time, the notion of respecting your elders, things have changed, life has changed. You know?

Janie Conway Herron:
I would want to know that there were women coming up that were following on and changing and having their own way of dealing with it. I certainly find that with my granddaughters. They’re all very aware of things.

John Murch:
Because you’ve had –

Janie Conway Herron:
It’s a very different world.

John Murch:
Because you had that time at a mature age within the university sector to the heights of being a doctor, I guess you also have the understanding of the reference point of that material but also just saying as someone who is a proponent of blended education, looking at different methods of actually providing education, you need to listen to the new ways of doing things whilst you’re going through that process to have a reference but understand how it fits into a modern context.

Janie Conway Herron:
Well, I hope that as a teacher I was the reference. That I could be an eyewitness, give younger people an eyewitness account of what happened but sometimes that might backfire a bit on me because I would assume knowledge that younger people might not have. I can remember talking about 1988, the bicentennial and the walk up across the bridge and looking around at my class and there was this look almost to their faces. It seemed to say, “What? What was that?”

Janie Conway Herron:
I was using that phrase interpolation, I don’t know if you know that as a term but it’s about inserting yourself into the mainstream. Black Lives Matter is an interpolation of people, of Black voices, into the mainstream white sort of narrative. I was trying to explain that term for the students. I used the bicentennial walk across the … I suddenly realised, “Oh, yeah, that seems very recent to me” but for them they were probably five or 10 or something at the most. It might not have influenced them in the same way. I’m very proud of the young people at the moment, the ones who are coming up and talking. They’re just wonderful and they’re fresh and they remind me of myself with not all my ideals back then.

Janie Conway Herron:
I think the hardest thing for me now is to have had all that hope for change for so long and now realize that where are we? What’s happening? You know? That can get me down a fair bit actually.

John Murch:
As a songwriter, you have an outlet for expressing some of that emotion. Are you finding that easier to do over the years or have things become more complex? That it’s getting a little bit harder to do that?

Janie Conway Herron:
Finding the songs aren’t coming through. When I was working as an academic, I think I was so … I used to work like 50 or 60 hours a week and that’s pretty normal for most academics. I don’t think many of them work much less than that. The time for just letting things come through didn’t happen. I have more time for that now but the writing of the novel and the recording all the songs took up all the space in my head and now what I’m finding is songs are coming through and so I’ve been reading a lot about the Murray-Darling basin and what’s happening there, strangely enough, being a south Australian, that would interest you I would imagine.

John Murch:
Top of my reading pile is from 1990, a whole academic book about the Murray-Darling basin so yup. My head’s right there.

Janie Conway Herron:
Because, there’s that Quarterly Essay that was Margaret Simmons wrote Cry Me A River: The Tragedy of the Murray-Darling basin. Because I was up there with Wee Waa and the deaths in custody and, for me, the picture is coming together. I started playing the guitar and this song is coming. It’s coming. It might take a while. It takes a lot longer these days.

John Murch:
Talk me through, Janie, if you don’t mind, one of the important organisations of my student politics days was NOWSA. What was your involvement?

Janie Conway Herron:
Oh, yeah. NOWSA, it was an amazing organisation and I was at the very first conference and I wasn’t in the organizing committee but I was fairly much at the forefront, being the women’s office at UTS at that time along with my friend Debbie Stoddard, who I work with now out in Burman. She’s the head of that NGO in Burma. I was women’s officer. She was the overseas student’s officer around the time when student fees were being introduced for overseas students. We were very much against that.

Janie Conway Herron:
I remember going to that very first NOWSA conference and it was amazing. They made decisions by consensus, which was a fairly difficult thing to do with hundreds and hundreds but they did it. It was really well organized in that way. It was a very important time. Does NOWSA still exist? I’m not sure.

John Murch:
Not sure but …

Janie Conway Herron:
It did for a long time.

John Murch:
What was your reasoning for doing student politics at that time?

Janie Conway Herron:
I think I got asked. I was always into it. Wherever there was change to be made or help to be given, coming also from the Rock Against Racism era as well. [inaudible 00:50:12], I don’t know. I ended up being women’s officer and if you ask me to do something, I’ll do it well. I got really involved with it and that’s how I came to know Debbie Stoddard who was the overseas student’s officer.

Janie Conway Herron:
It was at the time when Dawkins was bringing in those reforms and so there was a lot of action to be done around bringing in fees and things and, first of all, for overseas students and then for everyone but as women students that was a really important thing.

Janie Conway Herron:
I started a women’s room at UTS, which was extremely controversial, strangely enough. A lot of the male students didn’t seem to like there being a place for women to go. The student association was a little bit more left of centre and they appointed the women’s officer.

Janie Conway Herron:
But somehow they decided to elect a new women’s officer after a couple of years or something and I went for the position and then there was this other young woman who got up around the women’s room thing and said, “If I was women’s officer, I wouldn’t have a women’s room because I think spaces should be open to everyone.” All this kind of thing. She got voted on to be the women’s officer. She was very young and I was voted out by the student association but then all the women … I felt really sorry for her because all the women in the university at UTS kind of ganged up on her. They called a meeting and I sat in the back of the room while those women grilled her. It was quite sad. She resigned her position and I went up again.

John Murch:
Did you meet with her after that meeting to console. Yeah. To console where she was coming from and on that, did you implement any of the other ideas that she had?

Janie Conway Herron:
She didn’t have them, though. That was the main one. I wasn’t going to stop their being a women’s room. I notice with your podcast that you have non-gendered language. That’s very, very difficult to do. I absolutely adore Tash Sultana and Tash Sultana prefers to be non-gendered but like my first time I saw Tash was in Melbourne busking and my whole thing was, “Wow. Look at that little woman there playing guitar like she does” sort of thing. It was all in my mind totally gendered.

Janie Conway Herron:
Then I discovered on YouTube, some YouTube clip of Tash doing it and I put it up on Facebook and got told that I was not to refer to Tash as a woman because of non-gender specific kind of things, which I’m all for. Maybe this is one of the things of being my age, I just find it really difficult to not use the gendered pronoun. I find it hard. Also, because, for me, a lot of the battle was about being a woman, being a woman who played guitar.

John Murch:
The new book and CD will be available together, one would think from your website?

Janie Conway Herron:
From my website but also from other sources. I haven’t quite worked out how I’m going to do that apart from my website. I know the books will be distributed through Lightning Source and that’s where all the book shops will be able to get it from. How to actually do the book and the CD and the downloads together, I’ve got also download cards that people will be able to buy from the shops. I’m still working on the best way to do that.

Janie Conway Herron:
It actually is much more difficult than I thought it would be in the end because what I wanted to do in the first place was have a book with the CD on the inside, which is very 1980s. You know? That’s such a hugely expensive thing to do. In the end, I just went no.

John Murch:
Swinging down, there was that poetry collection that used to have a CD inserted in the front. That was perfect but you’re absolutely right. Not the cheapest thing to do.

Janie Conway Herron:
Very, very expensive and then a lot of people started … They’re not using CDs now. People are going back to tape. Another Song About Love is written at the change, at the technological change from tape and record to CD and now CDs aren’t used.

John Murch:
When you look back over those years as a female in the music industry, how much of a percent do you think that was reliant on your decisions you made within the music industry and, second to that, your experience thereof? As much as I don’t want to gender it, especially after our Tash Sultana conversation, you were going through the music industry as a woman fighting hard for what you believed women should have the right to do and now there are members of our community that are like totally don’t want gender to be anything to do with it.

Janie Conway Herron:
That’s why I told that story about Tash because, for me, it was disappointing. Even though I’m all for Tash, for them doing that, I get it. I get it totally. I had a PHD student wanting to write a novel, a non-gendered novel and I retired before that student who actually did call herself a she but she wanted to do a whole novel … I just couldn’t imagine it but I was interested in how it would work grammatically and was looking for that other word that could be used.

Janie Conway Herron:
For me, someone called me a XXX female. Didn’t even have any of the Y-ness in there.

John Murch:
I’m sorry. You said XXX female and they’re going, “Yeah. I know a couple that work in the porn industry and they’re doing …”

Janie Conway Herron:
No.

John Murch:
If you’re a XXXX then you work as a bar girl in Brisbane. “I just bought a couple of XXXX, mate.”

Janie Conway Herron:
No. I didn’t mean that. I meant like not having the Y chromosome.

John Murch:
I had to blush on page three of your book.

Janie Conway Herron:
Did you? A bit hot. No, that’s what I wanted. I wanted to express that the inner workings of being women. That was so important to me. Also, the lack of confidence. Yeah, maybe I did pick up the electric guitar and start playing it and then all of a sudden I become the first woman to play electric guitar? I was just a person trying to do something but at the same time I was constantly being reminded of my womanhood.

Janie Conway Herron:
When Clinton Walker was saying, “You were one of the first women in the 1960s and ’70s in commercial music to be writing songs” I wasn’t. I mean, Carole King was doing it and people like that but when you’re this person that’s the first woman that’s done this or there was women in the band that were just singing, there’s so much focus on you as a woman. It was very front and centre of my world was being a woman doing things that women didn’t normally do and that’s really at the very centre of Another Song About Love. I didn’t want it to be a star is torn book and I didn’t want the heights of it to sort of read like that. There’s so many of those stories. I just wanted it to be really down home, at home. You know? Do rehearsals around kids’ nappies and stuff. That sense of the banal. You know? She’s sexually active. Lily is sexually active and she likes sex.

John Murch:
There’s also that level of vulnerability, which is outlaid in the first chapter as well. What I picked up straight away with is the vulnerability of monogamy but within two pages you’re reminded of the other dangers within not being within.

Janie Conway Herron:
Yes, that’s definitely a trope too, which is where all the songs come from. They work around all of that too. The title Another Song About Love and the lyrics of that song is all about being a musician singing songs about love and not being able to find it in your own world.

John Murch:
72 years on the planet. Do you think you’ve been able to discover what love actually is apart from a gesture, apart from a platitude?

Janie Conway Herron:
I wouldn’t say I’ve discovered a singular notion of what love is. I think love takes many forms. I know what the feeling is. I don’t think that it necessarily means one thing or another but I am a child of the ’60s so I see love as being revolutionary actually.

John Murch:
You’d also be aware when it’s been taken away from you as well at those times throughout your life.

Janie Conway Herron:
Oh, yes. Definitely. Definitely. It plays a part, negatively, and positively in everything that all of us do in our lives all the time.

John Murch:
How do you then musically interpret that friction and fraction of that very feeling through to the songs that you release?

Janie Conway Herron:
Well, it’s a combination. The music is very important to me. There’s a lot of … I don’t know if you’ve listened to them all but there’s quite a lot of musical difference in it. The softer, more gentler songs are about that aspect of love whereas Another Song About Love is very riff-y and more …

John Murch:
Very much in the bathrooms of the pub.

Janie Conway Herron:
Yes.

John Murch:
So to speak.

Janie Conway Herron:
Just like it’s got … I learned how to write a song with a good riff, being in Stiletto. That is one of the very positive things I got. I learned so much from being in that band about playing, how to play a riff, how to write a song around a riff. Stoned was another one. Stoned is another form of love. Really, some people have said to me they’re a bit worried about the title being Stoned and that it might be read as some kind of moral stand on drug takers or something. It’s not. It’s really just an exploration about how people use drugs to communicate, to be able to communicate but also don’t and that’s what that chapter also was about.

John Murch:
Focusing now on the novel and how it fits in. In terms of how you said it was about the sense of community and connection having your five bushy plants that were yours and when other people were taking advantage of your crops, those kind of metaphors as well, which I’m sure happened in communal housing.

Janie Conway Herron:
Oh, yeah. There’s a thing that runs through the whole novel that comes out of my need, my political opinion that drugs should be legalised and that is like not because … I’m really these days pretty much a teetotaler. I hardly ever drink alcohol or do anything but I believe the way in which drugs, in general but marijuana, in particular, have been framed as it’s being criminal. Like Johann Hari’s Chasing the Screamer. I don’t know if you’ve read that book but it’s an amazing book about the politics behind marijuana and how it’s been demonised since the early 20th Century by America. That’s one half and it really … He just does a really good case.

Janie Conway Herron:
I’m one of those people who believes that if we were able to legalise drug taking then we could get down to treating people for addiction because there’s no doubt that the War on Drugs has failed. I suppose what I’ve given to Lily, the main protagonist, is somebody who’s got this sort of ethics about not selling, not putting a value, not putting a monetary value on her plants but people keep bargaining with her about it all the way along to her detriment and to the point where she loses it all.

John Murch:
One of the other themes of the book, of your life, maybe still in your heart, is that of the ocean. When were you first connected with the ocean? What’s some of those fond memories that have stuck with you over the decades?

Janie Conway Herron:
That’s probably the most autobiographical aspect of the book because I grew up in the early years by the ocean. I love the ocean. I’m not so much a swimmer in the ocean as loving to be by the ocean and feel the ocean. I use that kind of return to the ocean as a theme around the connectedness of us all with community and with each other.

Janie Conway Herron:
The ocean played a big part in my early childhood. My happiest times I think. I did, as what happens in the book, move to Melbourne at a young age and hankered for the ocean for most of my life. One of the reasons I came up here was to be by the ocean again but I’m not. I’m actually inland because it costs a lot of money to live by the ocean.

John Murch:
The other thing about the ocean in comparisons to rivers, they’re very musical in their own right compared to rivers. Rivers do have their songs. I’m not saying they don’t but oceans have a very rhythmic and louder song to tell.

Janie Conway Herron:
Oh, they do. Interestingly enough, because my son Tamlin has the same love of ocean or maybe I instilled it in him, and we wrote the second song The Ocean In Me together. He wrote the music and I wrote the words of that song.

Janie Conway Herron:
What I said to him, I sent him the words and I said, “What I want is the sound of the ocean, how it pulls you to it, the feeling of water running over rocks and the sound of the waves coming into shore.” I actually think that’s exactly what he managed to get in that song.

John Murch:
What was the first record that you bought with your own money? Very much a Rockwiz question. I am quite aware. How good is Rockwiz? What a fine television program that is.

Janie Conway Herron:
I love that show. I always watch it. I do know this and it’s just suddenly gone out of my head. The Diamonds and I forget the name of the album but it’s got *sings*. It’s Silhouettes in the Shade. That’s the name of that track. I’m not sure if that’s what it’s called but that was my first record. Beautiful album. Very ’50s, ’60s sort of bluesy and rock and roll, which is an underpinning of my whole … As a young girl, I used to put together my own prediction for the top 10 hits. I was absolutely obsessed with the radio and the music on the radio and would write out my own lists. I had a transistor that my father gave me and I listened to it.

John Murch:
Let’s talk about the radio briefly and your listening of 3UZ as a child.

Janie Conway Herron:
The songs of those times … I used to make up … Always in those songs, I was the main protagonist.

John Murch:
By being the protagonist of these songs, was that the seed, the germination of you becoming a songwriter yourself? That you could put yourself in them.

Janie Conway Herron:
Could have been. I wanted to write my own stories I suppose. I was just trying to think of the song that really did it for me. Yeah. All of those and all the ’60s girls groups with all the harmonies. That was the other side, for me, musically. I loved harmonies. The Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, that kind of thing with people singing harmonies. I had a girlfriend that we used to sing all of Buddy Holly’s songs and things together. Two gals playing, learning to play guitar.

John Murch:
Let’s talk about harmony and all-girl harmony. What are you doing with it on a Tuesday these days?

Janie Conway Herron:
I’ve got this band … It’s not my band. It’s the three women, Janie, Timi and Karen – JATIKA – two letters from names and we sing songs most of them in three part harmony. Not necessarily lead singer with backup vocals. We do do that a little bit but all three part harmony songs, British ballads too, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, do our own things and some unaccompained songs as well. Yeah. It’s harmonies.

Janie Conway Herron:
I was in the Magicals at school so that’s when I first started to really like harmony and then the ’50s and ’60s commercial music, if there were women singing there was mostly harmonies. They played a big part in my life that way.

John Murch:
What music are you now listening to? What tunes or artists are ticking the boxes from Janie now?

Janie Conway Herron:
I still listen to a lot of reggae, mainly from the 1980s and so I was listening to Rita Marley the other day. I just love that woman and the way she thinks and her songs. I don’t know. I listen to a lot of music. I can’t say that there’s anything really influencing me so much as just music in general.

John Murch:
Coming from such a musical family as you have, have you ever considered to get the whole family together for a massive band or is this as close as we’ll get to that?

Janie Conway Herron:
We’ve done it quite a few times. I don’t know about now because of my brother Jim. His ability to play is really limited and it’s very hard for him. I’m wondering if we are able to go back onstage and have live music, I want to do a launch in Sydney with all the musicians that played on the CD and do something. I’d just love to have the chance to play with them all together again. How we actually organise Jim to be able to do that might be quite difficult.

Janie Conway Herron:
I played with Mick quite a few times in various situations, particularly, when he comes up here. We had an anniversary of the Aquarius Festival, 40 year one, and I sang with Mick for that. Over the years, I’ve done a lot but it’s mostly sitting in with them and Mick’s got a very specific kind of music that he does so he’s not going to necessarily sit in on my music in the way that Jim can.

John Murch:
Is there a little bit of acapella from one of the songs of the album you’d like to share with us as we round out today?

Janie Conway Herron:
*singing*

John Murch:
Dr. Janie Conway Herron, thank you very much for joining radionotes.

Janie Conway Herron:
Thank you.