When it comes to love, Hatchie knows that even the fleeting stage of infatuation encompasses more than just ecstasy. “Something lingers in the sea between/ Much more than this midwinter kiss,” she sings on ‘Sage’, a highlight on her new album Liquorice, which triangulates the dizziness, desperation, and disillusionment of young romance like it’s something you can bite into, savouring every layer. Following the introspective and experimental sensibilities of 2022’s still-infectious Giving the World Away, which saw her working with producers Jorge Elbrecht (Caroline Polachek, Japanese Breakfast, Sky Ferreira) and Dan Nigro (Olivia Rodrigo, Chappell Roan), Harriette Pilbeam embraced the melodic foundations of her earliest material, favouring simplicity and spontaneity over genre-hopping and, as she puts it on ‘Lose It Again’, “convoluted poetry.” Recorded at Jay Som’s home studio in Los Angeles, Liquorice brims with nostalgic influences, but Pilbeam’s maturing perspective – she’s 32 and married to her longtime collaborator Joe Agius – makes it feel worlds away from the project’s beginnings almost a decade ago. “I’m still stuck with these pathetic dreams,” she sings on the closer, a sentiment that could suck the life out of anyone. For Hatchie, it’s all colour.
We caught up with Hatchie to talk about The Carpenters’ A Song for You, intimacy, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and other inspirations behind her new album Liquorice.
The Carpenters’ 1972 album A Song for You
I was thinking about this one a lot, in particular in regards to the album cover. I love the warmth and the simplicity of it, and those were two key words when I was trying to plan my album cover as well. I just wanted it to be something really simple that looked classic and showed a lot of romance and joy. But I also love the Carpenters in general. I realized I was actually listening to this album a little bit when I was first starting to write my album. I find their music so comforting, and it really reminds me of growing up, with my mum singing, because my mum sings in that same kind of style. It just reminds me of being at home or being at my grandparents’ house, because that’s the kind of music they would listen to as well. I love Karen Carpenter’s voice – I don’t think she’s an alto, I think I looked it up one time and she’s a contralto, but I’m an alto, and I find singing her music really satisfying. I love the range that her voice sits in. It’s just a really comforting album to me, and I feel like it reflects a lot of the same feelings that I was trying to incorporate into my album as well.
Do you have any specific memories that come to mind of listening to that kind of music growing up?
For me, it’s not necessarily the album playing, it’s more my mum singing it or my grandparents listening to similar music. When I got a car off my grandpa years and years ago, it had some CDs in it, and they all kind of sounded like this. Adult contemporary, easy listening vibe, with real orchestral background music. The smoothness and the familiarity and the simplicity of the music really reminds me of them in that time, and I think that’s why it also feels relevant to this album, because I was just trying to write really classic love songs. I wasn’t trying to overcomplicate anything, I just wanted songs that felt really good to sing. In the sadder songs, you could feel that weight in the way that I sang them.
Hatchie is your outlet, but at various stages of the process, you operate as a duo with your partner, Joe Agius. Are you inspired by other duos when it comes to working together and creating boundaries between your personal and creative life? Or is that something you’ve mostly figured out between yourselves?
I think it’s something that just comes naturally to us. I can’t think of any particular duos off the top of my head that I have looked to specifically for inspiration. I think for us, we’re just so close, and we always have been for the entirety of this project. Joe was a big part of the reason why I felt confident enough to chase the dream of starting my own project. I’d always played in other people’s bands, and he really helped me find my feet on my own. We also have so much in common when it comes to our taste in music, and also how we like to create music. But I do love a good duo.
It’s so hard to even explain how we work together, and I don’t know that there’s anyone else who does it in the same way as us, because there’s so much overlap between our romantic relationship and our working relationship that sometimes, honestly, it can get a bit hard. But we’ve just always figured that it’s worth it, and we’re at a place now where we can separate our romantic relationship with our working relationship. But there was a period where they were the exact same thing. I think now we’re a bit older, we’re in our 30s, and we’ve both got other things going on. We’ve both got other day jobs as well, and that helps. I don’t know anyone else with a relationship like ours, and that’s scary, but also exciting.
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy seems like a direct inspiration for ‘Part That Bleeds’, and I’m curious if The Umbrellas of Cherbourg fed into the record in a similar way.
The Before series definitely inspired that song. But in terms of Umbrellas of Cherbourg, this is another one that was just as much of a visual and emotional influence as it was a narrative and sonic influence. I discovered this movie when I was a kid. I think me and my sister watched it, because my dad had a lot of DVDs growing up, and he had this DVD. We just randomly put it on one day based on the cover of it, and it was amazing. I think we bawled our eyes out. I’ve watched it on my birthday a few times, because it feels really nostalgic to me, and I think it’s one of the best movies ever made, I think. I love the technicolor. I love that every single shot is exquisitely beautiful and feels like it could be a poster. I love that there’s not a single spoken word, as far as I can remember. I haven’t watched it in a while, but I think it’s entirely sung.
It was the first example that I saw growing up of a tragic romance where – and this is a spoiler, so I don’t want to ruin it for anyone – the couple doesn’t end up together in the end. And that just tore me apart when we first watched it. It was mind-blowing to me that they did that. I’d never seen any really sad movies, because I was so young. The emotional effect that it had on me was a big inspiration. Music and film can both have such a massive effect on you, and that was something that I wanted to recreate.
Intimacy
Intimacy is a big theme that runs across the album, but there’s a trio of songs, from the title track to ‘Sage’ that really seem to home in on the dynamics of intimacy at that point on the record. Were they tied together in your mind as you were making them, or was it a matter of sequencing?
That was kind of a coincidence, those songs falling together in the album with the track listing. When I was working on the sequencing, I was focusing more on the sonic journey rather than the lyrical narrative journey. But when I look back on this record as a whole, I think that almost every song is about exploring the concept of intimacy and connection with yourself, your friends, or your romantic or sexual partner. Those songs in particular, I really wanted to illustrate the desperation of falling in love – and of lust as well, because not all of these songs are about actual love. They’re about thinking that you’re in love, or about just kissing someone or touching someone for the first time, and that desperate feeling that you get when you feel like you need to see them or touch them again, and you feel like you’ll die if you don’t continue with them.
As a whole, this record explores a few different themes of intimacy, and that’s something that I was really focusing on in my personal life as well. I was working on my relationship with myself in particular, trying to become closer with myself and understand myself more, and I think that goes hand-in-hand with being able to have a closer relationship with the people around you. I think that’s reflected in a lot of the media that I was consuming as well.
How did the idea of cherishing the bittersweet become key to the record and that understanding of yourself?
I think it was just accepting that it will always be a part of life. Actually, there’s this book that I almost included, which is Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole by Susan Caine. It’s all about the bittersweet elements of life, and how so many people fear sadness or melancholy, but actually, I think that if you welcome that into your life, you’ll find that you can live a more whole life. I read that book before I started this album, and then I read it again while I was working on the album. It’s been a real integral part to me understanding myself a little more and accepting the darkness as well as the light.
Not so much these days, but especially back then, I had a tendency to be quite a negative person, and quite a sentimental, nostalgic person to my own detriment. It was really important for me to move forward and accept that those parts of me that can maybe be perceived by other people as negative, are actually just as important as the parts of me that are really positive and happy. I think it’s really healthy to embrace that, and it really helped me get through the last few years. It really gave me inspiration for this album to put a lot of thoughts that I had been dwelling on in these songs, so I could kind of move on from them.
The song ‘Anchor’ I feel like leans into the darker, heavier sentiments more than any song on the record, especially musically.
That song is definitely the heaviest song on the album, which felt important to me to include. I wrote it when I was really low, so the lyrics came to me quite easily. I don’t really remember what it was that was making me feel so bad; I think there were a few things that I was ruminating on. But it’s kind of integral to the album, and I like that it’s towards the middle of the album, so it shows you the rollercoaster that heartbreak and romance can take you on.
Do you feel like, at least in the past, you’d be tempted to discard songs that come from that place?
For me, there’s not really a temptation to not keep songs like that. I think those songs are the ones that come more naturally to me, as someone that tends to focus on those elements of love and life more so than the joyful, positive elements. I’m better at that now, but at that point in time, I was very much stuck in that spiral of negativity. That song wrote itself, whereas if I were to try and write a really happy song, I think I would find that a lot more difficult. I have so many more songs in my discography that are about the downsides, the darker sides of love and everything that comes along with it. That’s something that I’ve really worked on over the last few years, so it’s not as much of an issue for me now. Looking at the tracklist now, even ‘Sage’, which is talking about somebody being in love with you, is still quite sad and negative, focusing on the bittersweet elements of it. I think that’s why I love the song ‘Liquorice’, because it’s probably my best example of singing about the good sides of falling in love with someone. And even then, it’s quite a dark song.
The 1998 rom-com Sliding Doors
It’s a movie that I’ve seen a bunch of times since I was quite young, but I watched it again at some point in this process. I’ve always been fascinated by that concept of the butterfly effect, the idea that one tiny moment in your life can completely change the trajectory, and I was thinking about that a lot in terms of both my romantic life, but also my career and my personal life. It really scares me that something so small – for example, in that movie, her missing a train and falling down some stairs completely changes the trajectory of her life. I thought that was a really interesting focus point, and it helped inspire a few of the concepts on those songs when I was feeling like I didn’t have that much to write about.
From the outside, my life is quite boring in a good way – it’s really stable, and I’ve been with my partner for over 10 years, and I have a good life in general. But I guess I’m somebody who tends to, like I said earlier, focus on a lot of the negative aspects and get quite down a lot of the time, particularly when I was writing this album. So, for me, even if good things are happening, I still have a tendency to think about all the what-ifs in my life, all the other good things that could have happened that didn’t.
I’m curious if watching a film like that can kind of create a lens through which you see your life for a little while, if it can have a tangible effect on how you filter and write about it after the credits roll.
Yeah, totally. I think some movies really stay with you for a few days. This movie is a bit of a silly movie; at the end of the day, it is just a ‘90s Gwyneth Paltrow rom-com. But the concept is true, it’s realistic. It just made me kind of second-guess everything that’s ever happened to me and wonder if certain things had happened just because other things had, and what was actually a domino effect. It’s not good to dwell on those things too much, because I guess what’s meant to be will be, and things will play out as they’re meant to play out. Where you are is where you’re meant to be, I guess. When I was quite displaced in between album 2 and album 3, I think that was a good reminder that I’d end up where I needed to be regardless of what happened.
Her mum’s old melodica
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Or as I saw you call it, “good girl vape.”
[laughs] I have it here. It was my mom’s when I was a kid. I was always fascinated by it when I was a kid, and we used to always play it. There’s not a lot to say about it, other than I just included it in some of the songs. I played it in ‘Wonder’, and I think maybe in a little bit of the background of ‘Liquorice’; I think it’s mixed very deep into the back in the outro. I wanted to put woodwinds on this album, I wanted to have some sax and some clarinet, but I wasn’t able to, so I put a bit of this in. It was a nice tie to Sixpence None the Richer’s ‘Kiss Me’ because that has a similar sound in it.
Speaking of the mixing, I did want to ask about working with Alex Farrar; he’s had a hand in so many great albums this year, but Liquorice feels like a bit of a sonic outlier in terms of its overall sweetness.
I actually don’t know much about Alex; we haven’t spoken or met. I’m quite trusting of whoever the producer usually wants to work with for mixing; in the past, we’ve worked with producers who are also mixers, and this is the first time we went through it in this way. But I’m stoked with how it went, and I can’t imagine anyone else mixing it now.
I had it in mind because he also produced the new Keaton Henson album that’s coming out this week.
Oh, cool. He’s had a very busy year.
New York in the summer and fall
You mostly wrote the record in Brisbane and Melbourne, and you recorded it in LA. What aspects of your time in New York do you feel like seeped into the songs?
When I started the album, we were spending some time in America. We had been living on and off in LA, and we had decided to come back to Australia, but we spent a bit of time in New York before we did that, to kind of say goodbye. We have a few friends living over there; two of our friends, Jeremy and Katie, who are married, have a place in upstate New York, and we were staying there. We were staying at their place on the 4th of July, and that was when I wrote the first track on the album, ‘Anemoia’. We were just having a really nice time, so I feel really nostalgic for that area. When I wrote that first track on the album, we were all working in different rooms of the house. Joe and Jeremy were working on music in one room, Katie was working in another room, and I was working in a third room. I started playing around with that song, but I went for a drive first in their car, and I heard the song ‘I’m Not In Love’ by 10cc on the radio. That really inspired me to work on the song ‘Anemoia’, and I took a lot from the production and instrumentation of that track, in terms of the synths.
We also wrote ‘Lose It Again’ in New York, with Jeremy [McLennan], so I feel a lot of nostalgia for that time and place. New York in the fall is my favorite season that I’ve experienced anywhere, because I think it’s just so beautiful, and it really was a big visual inspiration for the colours and themes of this album. The pumpkins on people’s stoops, all the different tones of orange and red and yellow leaves on the trees. I really wanted this to be an autumn album and to feel like that. That was why it was also really important for the album to come out around this time of year as well. I know it’s coming into winter in America now, but it still feels like it’s kind of carrying across.
What was it like going back to LA to record the album with Melina Duterte?
It’s always interesting going back to LA, because we’ve been there so many times, and I’ve had such different experiences there. I think going back, it feels more like we’re just visiting friends, going back there to work. The first few times we went were such fun, incredible moments of discovery, and I guess high vibrational experiences, where we felt like it was a really special place. The first few times we went there were really a whirlwind. But every time we’ve gone back, we’ve made more and more friends, and it’s felt more like a familiar and casual place for us to visit. After spending so much time there and trying to live there, we ended up deciding that it didn’t really feel like home to us. I guess I romanticize it less than I used to. I think I romanticize New York more now than LA, but who knows what my answer will be in another two years.
The 2022 documentary The Jangling Man: The Martin Newell Story
This must have come out around the same time you released Giving the World Away. Did you watch it around then?
Yeah. We were in London, touring Giving the World Away, and I was honestly really depressed when I was touring this album. I was probably at one of the lowest points that I’ve been at, for a number of reasons, and I was really struggling mentally and emotionally. One of my favorite things to do is take myself to the movies; going to the movies alone is a really special, intimate thing that I do with myself. So I did that, and it really helped me feel better and get some clarity, to get away from everything.
I was really inspired by this documentary — I was going through a big Cleaners from Venus phase, for whatever reason. I’d heard their music before in passing, but I was really going deep on it around this time. Coincidentally, I think Joe told me that that documentary was playing and encouraged me to go see it to kind of get out of my own head. So I did, and it was really funny and really inspiring. I really loved learning about what an outsider he was, and how he approached everything in such a different way from how I approached music. Everything he did was just so simple – he worked with a four-track tape recorder, and that kind of blew my mind. Listening back to the songs, you really can hear that there’s only a couple of layers on them, but I never really thought about that before I saw it. It inspired me to go for a much more DIY, simplistic approach to my album and abandon all the bells and whistles that I had become obsessed with on the second album. To really reconsider what it was that I loved about making music, how I wanted my music to feel.
I really started to experiment with keeping songs as simple as possible while still having as much of an emotional effect on the listener as possible. I feel really proud of myself for that, because I do feel like I made a lot of strides, and I was able to reconfigure how I made music. I feel like I achieved what I set out to do in terms of simplicity.
What were the challenges of sticking to that approach, given that it came so early in the process?
Stopping myself from overworking songs was a really important thing for me on this one. The last album we made was during lockdown, so we had all the time in the world to work on it. I think that was really great, and I don’t regret that, but with this one, I really tried to live my normal life while I was making this album and not put my entire life on hold. I think that helped not to overwork the songs. It meant that, if I had an idea, I would only work on it if I really loved the idea and I really wanted to work on it, rather than kind of forcing myself to spend a whole week on it, like I did last time. It was challenging, when I was excited about certain songs, to not do 10 different versions of them and keep adding more and more layers, because I definitely have a tendency to do that. But letting the songs breathe was the main thing for me. If I was working on a song, and I was tempted to add more, I kind of forced myself to just leave it and be like, “How about I’ll come back to it in a week? And if I still feel the same way about this idea that I want to do, then I’ll do it.”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Hatchie’s Liquorice is out now via Secretly Canadian.
