Yi-Lynn has released a follow up to the album Spit Into Somebody’s Mouth, an EP called Foul Water. With the germination of the latest release arriving as a response to the 2017 Australian plebiscite on same-sex marriage.
First cuts from EP were ‘Pixelate’ and ‘Just The Feed‘. Hear Yi-Lynn’s chat with radionotes’ John Murch here…
Click ‘play’ to listen… may take few seconds to load:
IMAGE CREDIT: Luke Cafarella
Foul Water launch: 19th August 2022 at The Gasometer Hotel with guests Leo and Pomaa – tickets to the launch (OzTix)
SHOW NOTES: Yi-Lynn
To not miss future episodes follow us:
- PlayPodcast – directs you, to the Podcast app on your device
….or you can search “radionotes Podcast” in your favourite podcatcher/app.
We can also be found on… Instagram – Facebook – Twitter
Feature Guest: Yi-Lynn
- Official Site – Bandcamp
- Instagram – Facebook
- Foul Water (LinksTo)
- Spit Into Somebody’s Mouth (Bandcamp – including Vinyl available)
- Marriage Equality in Australia (Attorney-General’s Department)
- 3CR (Official Site)
- Get Out (IMDB)
- Run Stop Sound (Official Site)
- Francesca Chong – Lauren Mullarvey (Firebird)
- Twinings’ English Breakfast Extra Strong
- Yi-Lynn Reveals Her Enchanting New Single (AAA Backstage)
- Foul Water (EP) on Bandcamp – Apple Music – Spotify
Next Feature Guest: Broadcaster/Author – Melody Horrill
Yi-Lynn chat also available on Podbean:
and Spotify:
If you’ve not already ‘following’ radionotes Podcast – we can be found on:
and more…
CREDITS
Theme/Music: Martin Kennedy and All India Radio
Web-design/tech: Steve Davis
Voice: Tammy Weller
You can make direct contact with the podcast – on the Contact Page
TRANSCRIPT
First version provided by REV team member Adam T – check to audio before quoting wider
John Murch:
Yi-Lynn, welcome to radionotes.
Yi-Lynn:
Thanks so much for having me.
John Murch:
What was happening in your life in 2017?
Yi-Lynn:
2017 was an interesting year for me. I was, at the time, living with my partner, Elise, who I’ve now been with for about 10 years. I was working my guts out at my day job. I had a really full on day job working in public health. And that was sort of… I was there maybe 9, 10 hours a day most days a week. And at that time I think in 2017 I was in the process of reporting some of the songs that would go on to being Spit into Somebody’s Mouth. So yeah, I was sort of burning the candle at both ends a little bit.
John Murch:
Did you feel that this EP had to be exclusively about that period of time where the album may have lent into other areas? This EP, Foul Water, was very much focused on 2017?
Yi-Lynn:
Yeah, I do think so. So I started writing the songs for the EP probably in late 2017 through 2018. In that time I took some time off and I found myself, and my brain was kind of blank as to… I’d just been totally exhausted by recording the first LP and I took some time off from work and everything. And my mind was just kind of totally blank and it was a bit of a vacuum for the first time in my life. Whereas the first LP I felt like I was really kind of experimenting and seeing oh what happens if I follow down this path and think about family, or what happens if I think about past relationships, and so on and so forth.
Yi-Lynn:
There was a bit of a vacuum in my mind when I was writing in 2017 and 2018. The only thing that filled in that vacuum was this indignance and anger and resentment. I don’t say that in a way that it was consuming me and I became a bitter husk of a person or anything like that, but in the times that I would give myself to ruminate and to play and to write, really the thing that came rushing in to fill that vacuum was just a sense of real anger about everything that had occurred in the lead up to the plebiscite and the plebiscite itself. And that took me down a road of thinking about a range of other things related to homophobia and queerphobia. I didn’t go about trying to write concept EP or a collection of songs that were specifically about this political event or anything like that, but it’s just what happened.
John Murch:
There is a saying of the muddying of the waters, and here you’re talking about Foul Water. Is that the correlation?
Yi-Lynn:
For me, the correlation was I felt like in the time leading up to the plebiscite and afterwards, everybody was kind of trying to wash their hands of the process entirely. You have Malcolm patting himself on the back and saying, “I delivered marriage equality for the Australian people.” You had those who are against marriage equality kind of brushing it under the carpet pretending that nothing ever happened and certainly pretending that they hadn’t done any harm to anybody.
Yi-Lynn:
We sort of entered into this time where it felt like Australia at large wanted to declare themselves post-homophobia. Now same-sex marriage has happened, we’re all good, as you were. We’ll start incorporating you into the ads for our major corporate institutions and we’ll all be good, right?
Yi-Lynn:
It felt really like people were trying to wash their hands of the whole process. But as far as I’m concerned, there is no washing your hands of the process. Certainly there has been no clean water to… there’s no baptismal font available to wash away that kind of thing and the impact that it had on people. So I thought about Foul Water, to me is about this sort of poisoning of the well, as it were.
John Murch:
More than the fact that people in their arguments of the debate that it had to go through a particular process or we can’t do it at this stage because we’ve got to do this. This is what happened for our overseas listeners, put the Australia public through months of judgement about those that they worked alongside. And for those they worked alongside, in your case, sounds like 50 hour weeks, needing to explain if you wish to, explain who you were and why it was important for you. And that’s that level of activism, which we’ll get to a little later as well.
Yi-Lynn:
Certainly that reliance on process is really interesting to me. I mean marriage in and of itself is kind of an institution that’s about process, it’s like it’s putting a framework on top of a relationship between two people. And so it sort of rendered everybody into these strange political agents where you have the politicians who are fixated on process, has an excuse for not implementing something, which was ethically robust, saying oh no it’s about process, it’s about process, backing away.
Yi-Lynn:
And likewise, you had individual people. I mean, I certainly found that people in the queer communities that I’m in and that I’m part of felt like they had to kind of… Yeah, like you said, they had to explain themselves and they had to fit themselves to this rubric of marriage and acceptability and respectability in a really interesting and weird way.
Yi-Lynn:
During same sex marriage and the plebiscite and afterwards people asked me all the time, are you and your partner going to get married, are you and your partner going to get married? And you can now you know, we’ve handed you this gift on a silver platter. And my partner is stridently anti-marriage. Has no interest in it, thinks that it’s kind of one of the most appalling things that you can do to yourself and to each other, and why would you do that to someone you love, ask them to marry you? My god, is there anything worse?
Yi-Lynn:
And it’s interesting. At that time, I found myself… the people around me who had that kind of view really censoring themselves because they felt like they had to fit into a certain mould of respectability to get this across the line.
John Murch:
Yi-Lynn, were you an activist before the plebiscite or did this activate the activist in you?
Yi-Lynn:
I think it kind of actually exhausted the activist out of me more than anything else. I wouldn’t call myself a strident activist or anything like that. I was very involved in community radio, in 3CR here in Melbourne, which is probably the most politically active of all of our community radio stations, has a very kind of leftist progressive bent to it. And that’s been a really fertile ground for me socially and politically and creatively as well.
Yi-Lynn:
So I certainly was involved in kind of I guess probably the more radical queer elements of activism. And certainly involved particularly in the radical queer circles of people of colour in my city. And I have been professionally involved in activism as well. But I will say that seeing so much of my community put through the ringer during the plebiscite kind of made me step back a little bit in a way that I’m not particularly proud of. It made me I suppose focus more internally on my community and bolstering the people around me and the people that were important to me, rather than kind of going out there and shouting and I guess the capital A activism that we think of.
John Murch:
Quite a slog, the plebiscite, getting the nation behind to actually have a view on one topic where I’m sensing some of those other areas of activism you had, you could be proactive in but in a more… not minor, but a more targeted way. And to actually achieve goals on the board to say, “Yes, we were able to inform this debate by doing this,” where the only informing really at the debate at the end of the day was to get people to say yes or no to something that only affected maybe 5 or 10% of the population.
Yi-Lynn:
Yeah, that’s right. It’s interesting, isn’t it? It became the kind of behemoth that took over the scene entirely. It wasn’t like you could really have conversations among queer activists without talking about same sex marriage, when in fact a lot of people in that scene had been talking about things that many of us would argue are much more urgent than the issue of marriage. Like transgender suicide rates, legislative discrimination in other forums, racism, prison abolition. All this sort of stuff was much… That was kind of the bread and butter of what most of us were talking about day in day out. It wasn’t like any of us were really fixated on the topic of marriage in particular, but yeah, it kind of swallowed everything up for a little bit.
John Murch:
This is your quote, “I wanted to document elements of the queer life that were glossed over.” Can you give us a sense of what some of those elements were and I guess some of those that have raised across the Foul Water EP?
Yi-Lynn:
Part of it… I mean certainly there was an element of wanting to write a queer kind-of revenge fantasy. I was thinking at the time, I think around that time, maybe a few years prior I had seen Get Out by Jordan Peele, the fantastic horror movie, which is really incredible. And I thought to myself… and explores a lot of issues around race and around anti-black racism in the US in particular. And I was thinking to myself, we have kind of… God knows we’ve got queer tragedies all over the place. You can’t watch a queer movie without somebody committing suicide or getting murdered or any of that sort of thing, or dying of AIDS or HIV. And we have the queer comedies and the token comedic gay characters.
Yi-Lynn:
But where’s our horror movie? Where’s our revenge fantasy? Where is our kind of like picking up the knife and going out and tearing off? So I really wanted to write some songs from that perspective. This one song in particular, Cut it Loose, which is the narrator of the song is telling the listener you’re never going to be acceptable, you’re never going to please them no matter what you do. This feeling that you have is never going to go away. So why not burn the town down? Why not wage a war against this straight community and against all of the forces? Stop trying to please them.
Yi-Lynn:
So there was certainly that element of it. Cast, which is the last song on the EP and is one of my favourite songs on the EP. It’s really about queer desire, it’s about… One of the things about the same sex marriage plebiscite that was so interesting to me was that it was completely devoid of any sex. It was like queer people, all they want to do is go down the aisle together, kiss each other chastely in front of their loved ones, and then hold hands and then bid each other goodnight with a firm handshake and then that’s it. End scene. Won’t you let them have that? And for me, I was just like where’s… It’s this totally weird celibate take on what it means to be a queer person. So I really wanted to write a song about queer desire. And I’m really glad that I did.
John Murch:
It’s as if that marriage debate was very much about the marriage years of where she’s just at home, you get married and you go back to the wife and you might have some kids in the first few years.
Yi-Lynn:
Yeah. It was really kind of returning to this concept of a nuclear family.
John Murch:
Yeah, absolute picket fence kind of feel.
Yi-Lynn:
Yeah. Real picket fence kind of feel. And in addition to everything else, it’s a very ethnically, culturally specific idea. Like I grew up in a family where my dad lived overseas for most of my childhood and my mum and her mother raised me and we grew up in a household with my cousin, also lived in our house along with my sister and I.
Yi-Lynn:
So our house was like an intergenerational all to one side lopsided family unit but it was so interesting to me that when we were looking at the same sex marriage debate you just kept seeing like two adults sensibly raising a child. Maybe a dog if the idea of two adults raising a child together puts you off too much. It was very strange.
John Murch:
Another element that seemed to be glossed over or is part of the EP, is that of bitterness. Can you explain what kind of bitterness? Are we talking dark chocolate or the kind where secrets are kept between the pages of a dirty book?
Yi-Lynn:
Oh, interesting. Look, I would say more bitter than dark chocolate. Probably secrets. I reckon secrets between the pages of a book. Maybe a little black book of enemies, that kind of bitterness.
John Murch:
Yeah, that’s what I meant, sorry.
Yi-Lynn:
That’s definitely the kind.
John Murch:
Because you were talking about revenge and I was wondering, with the album Spit into Somebody’s Mouth, there was a lot of gothic type themes throughout that very record. What inspires you to play in that pool of water?
Yi-Lynn:
Oh, very interesting question. God, I’m a goth from way back. I was a gothy little kid and I loved Joy Division and Sisters of Mercy and that kind of thing, and I loved watching… I loved spooky stuff. One thing I love about the gothic kind of aesthetic, including the literary aesthetic, is that there’s something really camp about it. It’s about pushing something to its extreme, to the point where it’s almost a little bit funny. Talking about blood and gore and cannibalism and stuff as a metaphor for a failed relationship in your early 20s, which everybody has. To me, there’s something quite funny about that. It’s about taking yourself so seriously that it kind of goes full circle and you’re sort of laughing at yourself a little bit. But I think also… I mean, you can tell me whether this is true or not but I think I’m a pretty upbeat and affable person in conversation and in my social life.
John Murch:
We’ve had happy goths though.
Yi-Lynn:
I would identify as a happy goth. And I think that probably music, for me, is a way to explore some of the not so happy bits. But I like blood and guts and stuff, and I like the visceral stuff. What I never want to do musically is to try to play it cool. There’s nothing chill about me. I’ve never been chill one time in my entire life. Like, I feel things, I really want to always stop myself from censoring myself when I’m writing or from trying to deliver people what I think they’ll want to hear. Because as far as I’m concerned, then you’re in the customer service business. You’re not in the music or art making business. So part of that is about always trying to get into it up to my elbows, like really take things apart. And yeah, look at the gory stuff.
John Murch:
Well that also brings us back to that storyline of revenge fantasies and actually allowing that music to be that playground for those feelings. Because clearly those feelings don’t belong in your everyday but they are very much part of you.
Yi-Lynn:
Totally. It’s very difficult to have a conversation with your coworkers at the water cooler about how you take everything that they have done very, very personally and you will never forgive them for something that they said three years ago, offhand. A gay joke they made or whatever. Or that you believe that this country is overwhelmingly populated by homophobes or queerphobes, transphobes, racists. It’s very hard. You can’t live your life having those conversations day in and day out or you won’t make a living and it’s emotionally unsustainable having that kind of concept of people all the time. So the music is an opportunity for me to exercise some of those feelings.
John Murch:
We’re currently in conversation with Yi-Lynn, the EP is called Foul Water, and it is based upon the 2017 marriage plebiscite. We were talking about activism in the first part of our conversation. As a musician, how do you think you get your activism across?
Yi-Lynn:
I don’t know if I successfully do as a musician, to be honest with you. I kind of see them as very separate things. For me, music is about expressing my own personal feeling. It’s not about achieving some kind of change of mind for the listener. I kind of don’t care too much whether the listener listens to this and has a change of heart and suddenly decides to talk to their child about why they’ve been wrong in all those dinner table conversations in the past.
Yi-Lynn:
Activism is very different to that. For me, when it comes to activism or advocacy or whatever you want to call it, I’d much rather be useful than be right. I am very, very willing to do whatever it takes in a conversation in that setting to convince somebody of what I think is the ethically strong standpoint.
Yi-Lynn:
I can be a little sycophantic, I can be a little… I can concede certain points that I don’t really believe. I can do whatever it takes to get that persona across the line. I feel very willing to do that. I mean, to a point. I’m not going to compromise all of my ethics and say like, “Oh actually you’re right, racism is totally acceptable. Now what do you think about drug law reform?” I’m not saying that, but certainly like I said, I’d much rather be useful than I’d rather be right. But with music, that’s an opportunity for me to say this is what I would really be saying. This is the closest expression to my own position that I can give somebody. Without the end goal of bringing about political change.
John Murch:
Because that’s what I was wondering whether or not you can be more honest through the music because it’s hey, it’s what I say, where the activism is more of a collective idea of what something is about?
Yi-Lynn:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I have no doubt that if I was having a conversation with somebody in 2017 and I said, “Hey, one of the amazing things about queer people is that they express their emotions quite freely through sex.” Not everybody, some people. That’s something that’s encouraged in some queer communities, and I think that the act of BDSM can be a very tender and wonderful, intimate connection between two queer people. It’s not something that I’m going to say to somebody in that time, but it is something that I can say through my music and it’s something that I can write about and feel like that’s a very true expression of my beliefs and my truth and I don’t have to worry about the political consequences.
John Murch:
Which means music is a safer space than that of on the street or at a political level?
Yi-Lynn:
Yes, it’s safer in some respects because I’ve created that kind of safe space for myself. But it’s very, very vulnerable. It feels terrifying the entire time. I’ve given myself permission to write freely but as soon as I play it to the first person or have a conversation about it or get up on stage and see people that I don’t know or somebody from my day job’s in the crowd, I think like oh my god, what have I done? Why have I let somebody in to see my dark sicko little brain? So on the page and in my room it’s a safer space but it becomes terrifying when it starts to interact with the public.
John Murch:
The answer will be soon, Yi-Lynn, they paid for it. They paid to know and you’ll be doing such a thing on August the 19th at the Gasometer. How are you feeling right now about that very thing that we’ve just spoken about?
Yi-Lynn:
I’m feeling more okay than I thought I would be. I was really, really terrified when the first LP, Spit into Somebody’s Mouth, came out. That was really my first foray into recorded music. And it was completely solo. I mean I produced with my wonderful producer and mentor, Neil Kelly, and he certainly creates a really lovely space to work with. But in terms of performing, it was just me on stage and all of the parts, other than the bass, all over that record, entirely just me on my own.
Yi-Lynn:
This year I’ve started playing with a band, which has been really lovely. It’s just been so nice. I really underestimated how nice it would be to have other people up on the stage with me who are just as motivated as I am for something to go right. That we’re all on the same side. And that’s just been the most amazing, lovely thing, and I think that that’s made a huge difference.
John Murch:
Let’s talk about the recorded work and who’s on that, who produced it?
Yi-Lynn:
So it’s a pretty tight family affair. There still weren’t a huge number of players on it. I worked, again, with Neil, who taught me how to play guitar.
John Murch:
Firstly, what’s the story behind that? Was it a drunken Saturday night at some seedy dive bar or… How did it happen?
Yi-Lynn:
No, something much, much less glamorous than that.
John Murch:
Oh no!
Yi-Lynn:
100 times less glamorous than that. I looked him up on Google and I found him and I sent him an email. That’s the story. So I grew up a classical musician, a flautist, and I had great aspirations of marching off to Austria and playing in orchestras or becoming a conductor or becoming an avant garde composer through my childhood and teen years. And that plan kind of went awry in my teens, one nervous breakdown and that kind of put an end to that.
Yi-Lynn:
So after I finished high school I kind of was like… I kind of spent a couple of years in the wilderness not playing any music at all and not really thinking of myself as a musician at all. Then I decided I’d really like to learn how to play the guitar, because you can play them on your own and you don’t need to… you can just take a guitar wherever you need to take one and I really liked that.
Yi-Lynn:
So I found Neil and he was relatively close to where I lived and I sent him an email, and he replied saying, “What kind of thing do you want to learn and what kind of thing do you like? Do you want to play folk and country, do you like Gillian Welch?” And I love Gillian Welch. So that was when I was like ding ding ding, I’m definitely going to go pay this guy a visit.
Yi-Lynn:
And yeah, that began kind of bog standard weekly guitar lessons for a great number of years, and it took him a really long time to convince me to start writing and then an even longer time to convince me to start performing. And he co-owns a studio in Melbourne called Run Stop Sound, has a beautiful space, and he said, “Why don’t you come down and just see what it’s like in the studio, play a few covers if that’s what you want to do, let’s go from there.” And I did. And it was real thrill and it was really lovely and I kept doing it.
Yi-Lynn:
So Neil and I are kind of like joined at the hip musically. W have many, many, many disagreements, but we kind of share enough of a history together and he also has a background in classical guitar and in modern contemporary capital C composition as well. So we have enough of an overlap and enough of a shared history and a shared vocabulary that we can work really well together creatively.
John Murch:
Welch’s songwriting, it has inspired your own songwriting in some way?
Yi-Lynn:
Yeah. And Dave Rawlings as well. I mean, firstly I guess the most obvious connection is her kind of enthusiasm for Gothic Country, for the morbid country tail of a woman who’s attacked by a man and she pierces the throat with a broken bottle, and that kind of thing. She has that real reverence for the traditional and a way of really drawing out the dangerous in that.
Yi-Lynn:
And that also comes through a lot in the music that they play, that Gillian and David Rawlings play together. Have this wonderful way… I don’t know, if anybody has listened to them they’ll know what I mean, but this wonderful way of putting together very, very simple, very traditional chord sequences together.
Yi-Lynn:
And then Dave Rawlings will play these solos over the top that are all so weird and so outside of the realm of country, they’re all sort of dissonances and tense and jazz chords and wonderful things. So again, that’s that kind of taking the traditional and perverting it slightly, just enough to really hook its fingers into your brain. And I love that about their music, I love it so very much.
John Murch:
Lyrically as well, because of that gore, because of that darker side appeals to maybe a younger Yi-Lynn goth at the time and through to now?
Yi-Lynn:
Totally, yeah. Like if you had asked me when I was 15 whether I would really love country music, I’d be like what do you mean? I’m a suburban goth, I’m a suburban Asian goth, I’ve never listened to country music in my life. But it is, there’s something really to it, that sort of exploration of dark stuff. And I think that a lot of country musicians will be the first to admit that it does, again, kind of push into that territory of camp.
Yi-Lynn:
There’s something about country music that can push into the camp really, really easily. And that fine line between something that’s really dark and something that’s really ridiculous is walked all the time by Gillian Welch and I think that’s really wonderful.
John Murch:
Let’s go back to the production team. Neil and?
Yi-Lynn:
Francesca Chong played drums on this, and Fran sort of drummed for every great Melbourne artist of our generation. She gets around heaps and is really, very beloved in the Melbourne music scene. And she’s my cousin and she’s nine months younger than me or something similar to that. When we were growing up she used to always say, “I’m going to be a rock musician,” and I used to always say, “I’m going to be a classical musician.” And it’s been such a delight playing with her, because much like Neil, we have enough of a shared history that we have a shared vocabulary, but enough distance between us that we can introduce new ideas to each other and she can tell me, “That is a terrible idea, why the hell would we do that?” And I’d be like, “Just try it.” And then conceded defeat afterwards. So she played drums on that and just brought an incredible kind of energy to the record.
Yi-Lynn:
Then we had Lauren Mullarvey, who plays clarinets on the record. Which is a really special part of the sound of the EP to me. And she, again, was such a champion. Neil and I spent a long time pouring over various clarinet arrangements and stuff, and she knocked it out of the park. Such a special sound to me.
John Murch:
And someone who was a flautist, you would have understood the importance of the clarinet and that symmetry that the two instruments, and in this case your voice, and the clarinet can have?
Yi-Lynn:
Totally. Like they often say that the flute is the closet to the human voice, particularly the regular C flute that people play, and the female voice or the kind of alto and soprano voice. So clarinets are kind of a perfect marriage to that because they don’t take up the same space that a flute might and that my voice does, but they provide that warmth, that really rich tambour to things. And they just sound so good when they’re slightly dissonant. That kind of wonderful, warm vibration that reeded woodwinds have that you don’t get with flutes, is just brilliant.
Yi-Lynn:
And to me, I’m always boggled that people choose strings over… I’m like reeded woodwinds are right here. They’re so good. And so many people, if you want to fill out a space, there’s nothing better than a clarinet and a bass clarinet in particular, as far as I’m concerned. So yeah, I’m very passionate, it’s the hill that I’ll die on that reeded woodwinds are very much, they’re slept on in music.
John Murch:
Who else have we got on that lineup there? So we’re up to clarinet.
Yi-Lynn:
Everything else is me. Neil played bass but otherwise the guitars and the voices and keys, the little bits of keys here and there, those are me. And so Neil did the sound engineering, Michael Hughes who co-runs Run Stop Sound did the mastering. The loveliest person in the world to work with as well. Not that I understand a single thing about mastering. But he’s very generous and lets me sit in the back on the couch and watch him do what he does, and yeah. It’s always a great experience.
John Murch:
It might seem trivial, what’s your favourite tea?
Yi-Lynn:
Not trivial at all. Different tea for different occasion, I would say. In the studio, normally green of some description. Because if I need to sing then a black is way too much for the voice, dries everything out. But I would say my standard black, what I’ve got in the mug next to me now is Twinings English Breakfast. Can’t stand Lipton. Twinings English Breakfast. Yorkshire Tea also very good for a black tea. But yeah, there’s a different tea for every occasion.
John Murch:
Black or do you mind there’s a little bit of milk in there?
Yi-Lynn:
So I take it black but I do do something which is a bit sicko, which is when I want a milky tea-
John Murch:
Sugar?
Yi-Lynn:
Almost. So I grew up on Malaysian teh I guess you would call it, which is with condensed milk. So I do kind of like the sweetness. Okay, this is really letting you into, this is a deep dark thing of the process of how I kind of wake myself up. Two bags of Twinings English Breakfast extra strong, brewed really, really black, only filling the mug up halfway with water. So it’s like tar made of tea at that point. And then soymilk up to the top, the vitamin enriched slightly sweet soymilk, not any fancy kind that baristas use. Then I microwave it so that it warms back up. It’s not good, I’m not proud of it, but that is what I drink most mornings.
John Murch:
I have, at the top of my page, that quote of queer rage. We spoke a little bit about that. But I am pondering whether or not the process of making this EP has quelled or strengthened or what has it done for your inner queer rage?
Yi-Lynn:
Good question. Has it quelled it? No, I’m still really mad all the time. I think it strengthened it, to be honest with you. I think that being able to write things out and make them make sense to me has really strengthened my resolve. Of course now we’re in a completely different context, I mean we’re in 2017 culturally. But all of that still remains I think. And I think that for me I’ll often write something and be like oh yeah, I 75% believe in that. That rings pretty true for me. And then I’ll play a lot of times and sometimes even after I’ve recorded it and listened to it a million times in the mastering sessions or played it live, a few years later I’ll come back to it and think oh, that’s truer than I realised.
Yi-Lynn:
Or I’ll find myself returning to an earn issue or a conflict in my life and I’ll be like oh yeah, didn’t I write a lyric about that? Maybe there’s something to learn from that, maybe I was on to something. And in that way I’m kind of in constant conversation with songs that I’ve written in the musical process well after it’s been recorded and written. Which is a really lovely thing to have, I think.
Yi-Lynn:
So yes, I still feel as angry as ever. And maybe more angry too because the political context has changed such that it seems like the 2017 plebiscite was a really long time ago but it really wasn’t. And that act of cultural erasure I think is something that makes me particularly annoyed.
John Murch:
Do you find any joy in the fact that those that did want to get married in the queer community actually were able to? Does that bring some sense of balance to that rage, is where I’m coming from with that question.
Yi-Lynn:
Absolutely. I feel a lot of joy about that. But rather than balancing out the rage, I think it sort of sharpens it a little bit more. I think that actually what it does is it reminds me that joy was so easy to come by, all we needed was to give people the opportunity to marry and we denied them that for so long. So I think that actually it makes me more angry rather than less.
John Murch:
Because this has been done, we can now do this, this and this. Hopefully maybe even a little bit more simply.
Yi-Lynn:
I hope so. But we seem to have moved from an interest in material and legislative change to an interest in cultural change. It almost felt like the biggest legislative hurdle people feel has been crossed, it’s same sex marriage, and therefore now it’s all about cultural change, it’s all about making sure we use the right pronouns and making sure that we use inclusive language and making sure that we have the right number of the right kind of people on TV. And that is all great and I think that is all so important and that goes hand in hand with other kinds of change, that’s so, so valuable. But I do think that in some ways, we have kind of lost sight of some of the real material injustices that impact people.
John Murch:
Let’s talk about the first single, which is Just to Feed, said to be a response to the exhaustion and burnout caused by the activism to get these things that we’ve just spoken about done. It’s not a short song. I was exhausted by the end of it. Do you want to talk about exhaustion and burnout, have a listen to this song called Just to Feed. Joking.
Yi-Lynn:
I know, they’re all bloody long, aren’t they? I remember playing Just to Feed for my partner the first time and there’s a lull after about halfway through and she goes, “That was brilliant.” And I was like, “Zip it, there’s a lot more coming.”
John Murch:
I’ve recently received numerous emails letting me know that Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill has a radio edit. I’m there going, I think the whole point is that you should just play the whole thing.
Yi-Lynn:
Yeah. I really believe that. And before we spoke about Joanna Newsom and god, talk about a template for a long song. I feel like all of mine are positively spartan compared to her sort of 10 minute long orchestral mammoth works.
John Murch:
Someone who has worked in and around the health fields, someone who’s been directly impacted by things like the 2017 plebiscite, what are those things that people can do for themselves to help during those times, exhaustion and burnout? Because clearly you’ve been through it, you’ve released a fantastic EP from it.
Yi-Lynn:
I would say that one of the things that burnout loves is isolation. I think that when you’re so fixated on a single thing, it can be really hard to get perspective about what else there is in your life, and the stakes become so high in the thing that you’re involved in. Whether that’s work or whether that’s a political cause or planning a big event for your family, whatever it is. You can become so fixated on that single thing that you exclude other things from your life. And so the stakes of that thing are kind of artificially raised and every failure becomes crippling, every new step that you take become really dogged by anxiety.
Yi-Lynn:
So I would really encourage people to take the time to find pleasure in other things in their life. And that can be really, really hard. You can feel like nothing is as urgent as this one thing I’m working on, but I would really encourage people to do that. And the other thing I guess to remember is that it’s never only just about you. Nothing in history has ever succeeded or failed on the back of a single person. It’s because there are many, many people involved. And the more that you keep those people in the loop with you, the more you can sort of say, “Look, I need to take a step back. I need to have a break. I need to only be doing this a few days a week. I need to only be engaging on these particular topics.” So making sure that you’re not isolated is really, really important.
John Murch:
Yi-Lynn, thanks very much for joining radionotes.
Yi-Lynn:
Thank you so much for having me, it was a pleasure.