Katie Noonan makes beautiful music from the pain of her husband and friends on Transmutant

KATIE Noonan has the voice to soothe the savage beast and was inspired to write songs to help her husband and friends cope with grief and depression.

For HIT July 30, Australian singer Katie Noonan, picture: Cybele Malinowski

His words echoed the sentiments of anyone who has heard Katie Noonan sing.

A man battling his demons had just listened to her new single Quicksand and wrote to the preternaturally gifted musician via her Facebook page.

“The sentence at the end just blew my mind. ‘When you sing, it gently held my heart and in the moments of your singing, I feel like I am known.’ F---! I don’t have bipolar or serious depression — I certainly have peaks and troughs — but that message is the reason why I do this,” she says.

Now recording as Katie Noonan’s Vanguard, the 38-year-old musical national treasure has released her 17th album, Transmutant.

Katie Noonan has a special connection with her fans.

Since her breakthrough single Special Ones with George, the band she formed with brother Tyrone in 1996, Noonan has forged a connection with her audience that is founded not only on the otherworldly power of her voice but the messages it conveys.

Special Ones provoked letters and emails from women almost twice her age, sharing their stories of domestic abuse. Noonan had written the song after being betrayed in a relationship.

“It was ‘you f---ed me over and I’m cutting you out of my life out of respect for myself’. Broken, on the new album, is like the grown-up version of that 15 years later,” she says.

That song, and many on Transmutant, were inspired by the pain of others — her husband Zac after his mentor died (Gratitude), her best friend Nina (Broken), a man crying as he farewelled his daughters at the airport (Goodbyes).

“My best friend just texted me, ‘I’m crying, you bitch’,” Noonan says, with a smile, after I inform her the song provoked waterworks the first time I heard it.

“If you need to cry, it’s great for that. I think release is so important because these days we’re all so busy trying to hold ourselves together, posting how great things are but not never saying we’re not OK,” she says.

Transmutant, whose cover is adorned by the John Olsen painting Five Bells, comes after a prolific period of collaboration for Noonan.

In the last five years, she has produced albums with guitar virtuoso Karin Schaupp, an album with her jazz trio Elixir and Songs That Made Me, a compilation featuring her mates, including Deborah Conway, Renee Geyer and Angie Hart covering the works they love.

She says the five years between her own original albums had mostly been busy with family and raising her two sons Dexter and Jonah.

“The last song on the album, Cloud Of Home is one of the happiest songs I’ve ever written. That song is for my boys,” she says.

“It’s funny, you have children and your whole life reprioritises of course, and yet I’ve done more music and so has my husband in the last five years.

“The demands of family crystallises your process because you have less time. And I am not going to f---ing leave my family if I don’t want to do it.

“I reckon Clare (Bowditch) and Kasey (Chambers) are the same, all of us working music mothers. My boys came on the road with him all the way up until school.”

One of a kind in her talent and independent in her nature, Noonan has carved an enviable career for an artist who doesn’t make the kind of music commercial radio will play or break concert box office records.

She does what she wants when she wants and how she wants. The classically trained singer and musician — she even has a crack at drums on Transmutant — gets tapped for the arts festivals and big gigs when her voice can inspire or soothe depending on the mood of the occasion.

Noonan laughs heartily when asked if she makes anywhere near the $300,000 used by the Federal Government on a website attempting to explain their 2015 Budget small business plan.

While she is staunchly proud of maintaining her artistic integrity, she admits she and her musician husband Zac are constantly worried about their financial security.

“It’s scary when you don’t have any guarantees. I have never had a wage in my life. When I have had my babies, it meant I couldn’t earn for months, there’s no maternity leave for musicians.

“And Zac’s gigs basically cost us money because the music he is doing is so very niche. But you just can’t measure his worth as a musician in normal ways.”

What she can measure is the extraordinary and thriving community of musicians she works with in Australia.

Ask her to talk about who she loves and she doesn’t draw breath for several minutes because in her almost two decades of singing, writing, recording and touring, Noonan has played with them all.

And they all love her back. John Farnham would watch every soundcheck when her previous band The Captains opened for him on tour. She grew up with Bernard Fanning and will reunite with him for a Brisbane Festival gig next month. And Sia recently tweeted “one of my favourite voices” with a link to the Quicksand video.

Noonan proclaims there is a very healthy “sisterhood” among Australian artists, male and female.

“That was really sweet of Sia; she’s a beautiful girl,” Noonan says.

“That sense of sisterhood was sort of the reason I did Songs That Made Me too. Often we are the only girl on the road and on the stage, I don’t know why but that’s the way it is. “In George and Elixir, I’ve always been the only girl.

“I love playing with women, it’s such a different energy, and it is important to support each other.

“I think if you are confident and happy in what you do, you are not threatened by anything else.”

HEAR: Transmutant (KIN MUSIC/UNIVERSAL) out now.

SEE: Katie Noonan, Melbourne festival, October 17 and 18; The Triffid, Brisbane, October 22; The Gov., Adelaide, October 29 and John Painter Hall, Australian Institute of Music, Sydney, October 30 and 31.

Originally published as Katie Noonan makes beautiful music from the pain of her husband and friends on Transmutant