Why so serious?

Three songwriting friends have overcome the tyranny of distance to make an album that ranges from upbeat rock to quiet acoustic numbers.

Mia Dyson, Liz Stringer and Jen Cloher Picture: Stuart McEvoy

Halfway through the first Dyson Stringer Cloher album is a sparkling, piano-driven song that acts as a mission statement for the three singer-songwriters who first joined forces six years ago. “Hey baby, I’ll tell you for free / Don’t want to take this shit too seriously,” they sing together in its chorus. “Cause it comes and it goes, makes you high, takes you low / And you can’t take any of it with you when you go.”

This catchy, witty track is run and done within three minutes, yet for Mia Dyson, Liz Stringer and Jen Cloher, Too Seriously fulfils the dual purpose of being a helpful reminder for the trio, who have together accumulated several decades of writing and performing in their respective solo careers.

“I wrote it about getting older, and just being like, ‘Oh f..k, who cares?’,” says Stringer with a laugh. “I think you spend a lot of your time as a young person in that kind of head space, where what people think of you is important, and has bearing. I’m finally at a point now where I feel I know who I am more, and I back myself more.”

The song is the product of hard-earned experience, and of choosing in which aspects of an often fickle industry to invest one’s time and energy.

“Too Seriously really does nail that sentiment,” says Cloher. “That’s the thing I’ve discovered in my process of recording and touring, or any creative project: it has to be really fun. I actually don’t want to make records where people are stressed out, or do tours where people are angry. I’m just not interested; if it’s not a great process, then what’s the point? The process is really the only thing that I can have any sort of control over.”

Dyson concurs with her bandmates. “I think we’ve all experienced going through taking this music business — and this career and our success, or lack thereof — so seriously,” she says. “Painfully seriously, in the sense of equating our self-worth as human beings with whether we succeed or fail at music.

“I feel like, in some ways, I’m very lucky: I haven’t had the kind of mega career that I perhaps dreamt of when I was 20, without really knowing what it meant.

“But the career that I have had has led me to have a really wonderful life, where I’ve gotten to let go of that attachment to a certain kind of success, and equating my self-worth with my status in the music business. It feels very light, in a good way: all of that weight that we carried at various times, to various degrees, has lifted for all of us, and we now get to enjoy music for its own sake, and not for the game of where it leads next.”

Too Seriously is one of 10 songs on the trio’s debut album, which was recorded and mixed in eight days in Chicago in April. It offers a range of styles from upbeat, overdriven rock ’n’ roll to quieter acoustic numbers, but always at the centre of its sound is the interplay of three distinctive voices.

The album is a strong collection of songs from three women for whom music has been the overarching theme of their lives, and its release follows a six-year break in the group’s discography. Dyson Stringer Cloher recorded a three-track EP in 2013, and played about 40 shows throughout Australia — including locales that rarely appear in touring artists’ itineraries, such as Tennant Creek and Alice Springs — which saw its members perform a mix of group and solo songs together, before their respective careers pulled them apart again. Those were happy memories for the three friends to return to in the intervening years, however.

Of the trio, only Melbourne-based Cloher calls Australia home; Dyson has lived in Los Angeles for about a decade, while Stringer has put down roots in Toronto, meaning their geographical distance has played its part in that hiatus, too.

The album’s opening track and lead single, Falling Clouds, tells the story of Cloher seeing female rock performers for the first time — in 1991, when she saw the Falling Joys and The Clouds as a 16-year-old in Adelaide — and how they “kicked the door wide open so I could walk on to that stage”. In its music video, directed by Annelise Hickey, the trio dress up as male rock icons, with Cloher applying tape, chest hair, groin bulge and a sparkling body suit for a look that’s part Marc Bolan, part early Freddie Mercury.

“I really wanted to have some fun with this project,” Cloher says. “I think often with collaborations, whether it’s three men or three women, it can get very serious; there’s lots of photos where you’re all sitting there, being ‘serious songwriters’ together and making these very earnest clips with your guitars. I just think it’s really boring, and I wanted to lighten it up.”

As each of them can attest, the life of a singer-songwriter is not just about lounging around, instrument in hand, waiting for the muse to appear: instead, there’s a hell of a lot of tricky admin work required behind the scenes, which can become enervating to the point that it detracts from the creative aspect that first draws an artist towards this sort of career.

“It’s incredibly difficult to balance that; you’re using two very different centres of the brain, and you’re trying to have no overlap there,” Stringer tells Review on the phone from Canada. “And to somehow negotiate this natural sensitivity that you have to have as a creative person, with an industry and a capitalist world that’s very brutal, and can be full of a lot of rejection.

“It’s hard, and so projects like this fill up the tank,” she says. “After years of doing this professionally, I realise that it’s necessary for me to do that: part of my job needs to be looking after myself, and making sure that my energy stores are not consistently depleted. It’s really easy for that to happen, so this feels like a recharge.” Having reignited the initial spark that drew them together, they hope this project can become something that can run in parallel with their respective careers, rather than having to wait another five or six years between tours.

“It has this beautiful back-and-forth, where I think Dyson Stringer Cloher inspires my solo career, and my solo career inspires the other shows,” says Dyson. “It just feels really fun to have not just the one focus of ‘Mia Dyson’, and to be able to join forces with my friends and just be on this other page entirely. It’s great.”

That sentiment is in keeping with Too Seriously, whose insightful lyrics — “Basically I’m telling you to lighten it up / The older that you get, the more you realise you’re enough” — only ring more true with each passing day. “What’s happened for all three of us in varying degrees, as we get older, I think there’s less urgency around things needing to work out a certain way,” says Cloher.

“And there’s a greater acceptance around the course that your career has taken. Mia and Liz and myself have probably been writing, recording and touring for 15 to 20 years, so we’re deep into our practice. Something that’s really nice about recording, planning the tour and looking into the future this time around is that it’s literally just something that we’re doing because we enjoy it,” she says.

“There’s not any pressure around it needing to sell this many tickets or ‘work out’. That pressure to succeed isn’t there — which makes it a lot more joyful.”

Dyson Stringer Cloher is released on October 4 via Milk! Records/Remote Control. The trio’s tour begins in Red Hill, Victoria, on November 1 and ends in Adelaide on November 16.