Lisa Mitchell’s musical meditations into Celtic and Indigenous roots

A former Australian Idol contestant has been digging deep into her personal life for her latest release.

In between albums, Lisa Mitchell went back to school.

The artist, who left high school at 17 to follow her creative muse after melting hearts as the indie misfit on the 2006 season of Australian Idol, immersed herself in ethnomusicology studies at university.

Those studies would inspire a deep dive into her Scottish ancestry and Indigenous culture, which would inevitably influence her recently released fourth record A Place To Fall Apart.

“I’d always been super curious about my ancestry; my granny is from the Isle of Arran, this beautiful little island off the west coast of Scotland,” she says.

“I’d grown up going to folk festivals and had a really good dose of Celtic melody as a kid, so that all resurfaced during my studies and it definitely comes up on the album.”

You can hear nods to her Celtic ancestry in the use of uilleann pipes – the Irish bagpipes – on the record and in the folk inflections in her voice.

Singer Lisa Mitchell has been inspired by her Scottish ancestry and Indigenous culture. Picture: David Caird

Her studies of Indigenous culture and history – from colonisation and the frontier wars to language – would also inform her new songs.

The beguiling Summoning opens with a lyric referencing the endangered Wollemi pine and the stories that the ancient tree holds.

“The deeper I went into Australian Indigenous history in terms of culture, the more I started to get this glimpse into what a culture might have been like before we went into this really homogenised western world,” she says.

Another song, She Is Of The Earth, sings the glories of the Murray River, which Mitchell grew up alongside in Albury.

Singer Lisa Mitchell has a new album out. Picture: David Caird

These musical meditations emerged when the songwriter caught herself ploughing the well-hewed turf of heartbreak during writing sessions.

“I went through a break-up in 2018 and I found myself standing there with my guitar, writing the fifth pathetic love song about that break-up,” she says.

“And I said to myself, ‘This is my writing space and I am going to write about what I care about’ rather than just letting my emotions do whatever they wanted to do.

“We love the heartbreak songs, right, but it was super important for me to use those muscles to write about what I think needs attention.”

The elemental sound of A Place To Fall Apart follows six years after the pop dance vibes of her Warriors record, which peaked in the ARIA top 10 in 2016.

Since then, Mitchell has reinvented herself as an independent artist while constantly exploring not only academia but other practices that “nourish” her life, with the latest being the study of Shiatsu massage.

Music may be her primary creative expression, but Mitchell still appears to question her identity as a songwriter and performer, just as she did on the Australian Idol stage half her lifetime ago, when the artificiality of reality television clearly didn’t sit well with her.

“I think, in a way, it’s just part of me; it’s never been my main thing, either,” she says.

“I definitely still feel it’s a commentary on my life and what I’m interested in. I’m so curious and I love exploring and I think music is a beautiful diary that I will always keep.”

A Place To Fall Apart is out now.