Marmalade’s Simmering Songstress
Emily Lubitz of folk band Tinpan Orange tells me that she ‘totally fell in love with’ Tasmania on the bands recent visit to participate in the Cygnet Folk Festival. Emily says Tasmania is ‘beautiful’ and ‘like another country’, ‘fresh and crisp’.
Our conversation turns to the origin of the group’s colourful name ‘Tin pan Orange’.
Emily tells me that it was actually chosen from a list of options that performers peruse because it as it ap-pealed (pardon the pun) to them. I say actually because the group used to employ a little creative licence and fun when people quizzed them about the band’s name origin.
They cheekingly credited the name of the band as an homage to their grandmother who lived in Africa and made them marmalade in a tin pan.
The latest single ‘Rich Man’ from the new album ‘Love is a Dog’, Emily tells me the single had very simple production values. Produced in her own kitchen with the aid of some lamps, a camera, a stylist and director and completed in five hours. Emily plays the role of a rich woman who is adorned, by ‘unknown’ hands with fur coats and a jangle of jewellery. Emily’s character accepts the adornments but is weighted down both physically and metaphorically with their physical heaviness and its accompanying responsibility. The woman then removes them to feel freedom that wealth cannot bring or buy.
The conversation turns to creativity and Emily talks about the idea of ‘soft mind’ ie the undirected mind being open to the creative process. She gives the example of the movie ‘Pollock’. In one scene of the movie Pollock, the artist, is seen sitting in the studio staring blankly. A time elapse occurs and we see Pollock still sitting and staring only later to burst into a flurry of creativity. What this scene hopefully demonstrates is the value of what we might consider aimless time which actually is a time of fertile thought of the undirected or soft mind.
See some of that wonderful creativity in performances by Tinpan Orange.
You can see the video of Rich Man here
You can see Tinpan Orange in Hobart on April 29 at Grand Poobah and in Launceston on Sunday May 1 at Fresh on Charles.
Paula Xiberras
