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    KATE MILLER-HEIDKE | Nightflight

    We all know her voice by now. Without question, they are some of the most gloriously elastic vocal chords in contemporary music. In one song, she will sound as hushed and intimate as a lover before sleep, before reverberating with an operatic force so great, it seems possible walls might collapse and time will fold in on itself. Across the Pacific and Atlantic—from Australia to Asia, the US and UK—stunned audiences have been mesmerised and transformed, one at a time, by the extraordinary talent that is Kate Miller-Heidke.

    Now, following double-platinum sales for her last album (2008’s Curiouser), sets at Coachella, international dates supporting Ben Folds, acclaimed opera performances in Australia and the UK, and catching US critics—from the New York Times to the New Yorker—off-guard, Kate Miller-Heidke returns with Nightflight, her first solo album in three years. Over 11 songs, Nightflight signals a new-found sophistication in songwriting that sees Kate meditate on homesickness, mortality, love and surrender, in an album that is both sonically lush and emotionally stark, deeply personal and yet utterly panoramic.

    Written between the frenetic jolt of London and the rising floodwaters of Toowoomba, Nightflight showcases songs about real people’s lives: family members who have died, teenagers who went missing in the ‘90s, friends looking for love in the wrong places and Kate’s own longing for home. In previous albums, Kate has immersed herself in high cabaret drama, polished electro-pop and heart-arresting ballads. With Nightflight, her mission was simple: to focus on the craft of pure human storytelling with clear-eyed clarity.

    “Everything I’ve ever done has been a reaction against the previous thing,” Kate says. “Nightflight is definitely a more vulnerable and exposed record than anything I’ve done before. If Curiouser was a playful, dysfunctional adolescent, Nightflight is more like a damaged, melancholy person in her late 20s. With Nightflight, we wanted something darker and more organic, more beautiful and more expansive.”


    Writing the Album

    In the three years since Curiouser—an album with singles that went gold (‘Can’t Shake It’), platinum (‘Caught In The Crowd’) and double platinum (‘Last Day On Earth’)—Kate embarked on the kind of projects you’d expect to see on someone’s CV over their lifetime.

    As well as touring non-stop across 2009 and 2010, she played major international festivals including Coachella (US), Lilith Fair (US) and Rifflandia (Canada), roughly 80 shows with Ben Folds across North America, the UK and Europe, as well as her own shows in Asia. Alongside long-term collaborator and partner Keir Nuttall, she also became the first Australian to win the Grand Prize in the International Songwriting Competition for ‘Caught In The Crowd’ (the judging panel included Tom Waits and The Cure’s Robert Smith), performed opera alongside David Wenham (‘Jerry Springer: The Opera’, Sydney Opera House), more opera in the UK (‘The Death of Klinghoffer’, English National Opera), scored 1.5 million YouTube hits for her novelty song ‘Are You Fucking Kidding Me?’, released an electro side-project album (Fatty Gets a Stylist) and infected New York with an earworm in the form of ‘Are You Ready’, a Fatty track used in the state’s lottery commercials.

    Living out of a suitcase eventually takes its toll though. There are the long flights, the unceasing jetlag and the disorientation of wandering through duty free shops without a sense of time zones. “Home becomes this intangible sense of what heaven must be like,” Kate says. “So at the end of all that, we decided to go in to hiding in Toowoomba for a few months in late 2010 and early 2011, to sort of cut off contact with the outside world and try to collate these scraps of ideas and half-songs. At the end of all this constant touring, it seemed like it would be a real haven.”

    Kate and Keir returned to Australia to set up a semi-permanent home at the old home of Keir’s maternal grandparents, who had recently died within a short span of one another. “After they both passed away, the house had been on the market but hadn’t sold, so we decided to move in,” Kate says. “It was a lovely house looking over the range. The most striking feature of the house is how everything of Keir’s grandparents’ is still there. Furniture, photos, bathroom stuff. Even day-to-day stuff like an empty wallet or Keir’s grandma’s half-used lipstick. That permeates Nightflight: a basic sense of our own mortality and the complete impermanence of things.”

    Moving from London to Toowoomba was a culture shock, but Kate and Keir embraced how Toowoomba afforded them isolation. Eventually though, they got more isolation than they anticipated when floods rolled into town that January. “Toowoomba sits on the top of a big mountain and the house had beautiful expansive views. That also meant we could see the rain coming in from miles and miles away. There was something eerie and slightly sinister about experiencing heavy rain that doesn’t let up for so long” At their peak, the floods closed off roads and literally shut Kate and Keir in for weeks. “We couldn’t leave if we wanted to,” she recalls.

    All of this informed what you now hear on Nightflight. “The writing process was shrouded by death in a way,” Kate says, “but also these contrasts. The fact we were living in an old person’s house, but we’re both young, the fact we were living in Toowoomba, a place we didn’t feel we belong. So there are all these contrasts between light and shade, life and death, joy and melancholy, and honesty versus obscuring the truth.”


    Recording in Melbourne, Mixing in Suffolk

    After writing the album in Toowoomba, Kate and Keir recorded Nightflight over two months in Melbourne. “For a long time we thought we’d do it in England, but we wanted that option to collaborate with people we know and like,” Kate says. “Toowoomba was so isolating and we didn’t then want to put ourselves through that again. It did take a while to remember how to converse with other people after that long,” she adds, laughing.  “We worked from midday until midnight for months recording the thing. We lived and breathed it.”

    Keir Nuttall co-produced Nightflight alongside engineer Rob Long and legendary rock producer Lindsay Gravina (Rowland S. Howard, Mick Harvey, The Living End, British India) in Lindsay’s Birdland studio in Prahran. “Lindsay is kind of a Melbourne institution,” Kate says. “He’s a strange genius who rarely ventures out into the sunlight. We never saw him eat. For a while we suspected he was a vampire. He has this track record of making really dynamic, warm-sounding records with a lot of great people. Especially the Roland S. Howard stuff he’s produced. It sounds so alive.”

    Instrumentalists included James O’Brien (The Boat People, Machine Translations, YesYou) on bass, Gemma Turvey and J.P. Shilo on piano and a mini choir of friends. Kate also enlisted a small army of drummers: John Castle (Washington, Lior, The Bamboos), Steve Pope (Angus & Julia Stone) and Dan Parsons and Luke Moller (Shane Nicholson) on violin/viola. After recording in Melbourne, Kate and Keir took Nightflight to Suffolk in rural England, where it was mixed by Cenzo Townshend (U2, Florence And The Machine, Kaiser Chiefs, Snow Patrol) over three weeks.


    Song By Song |Nightflight

    1. Ride This Feeling

    Kate says: “Like a lot of songs on the record, ‘Ride This Feeling’ is about drinking. [Laughs] That was really our only refuge in Toowoomba, especially when the floods happened. We would watch the news and see all our friends’ Facebook updates, where they were covered in mud, getting in and helping out. The fact we were trapped really started to drive me to drink. On the night of the floods, we went out to the pub because you just felt like you wanted to be with people at that point. Usually, nightlife in Toowoomba is nothing special, but that particular night, there was an electricity in the air. But in the days following, I started to feel even more isolated, not being able to help my friends and family whose houses had flooded.”

    2. Sarah

    Kate says: “This story happened to a friend of mine, one of my best friends from high school, and the story’s told from her point of view. It is nearly all real details—I’ve used some literary licence—but it’s mostly real. In Grade 9, her friend went missing at a music festival and two weeks later, just turned up at her parents’ house with no memory of where she had been. My friend was never allowed to see her again, because everybody blamed her. To this day, my friend doesn’t know what happened, because her parents broke off contact. My friend and I had a sleepover in Grade 10, and she told this story to me over several hours while we were lying in our beds with our lights off. I’ve never forgotten it. It was a story that has always haunted me.”

    3. Nightflight

    Kate says: “‘Nightflight’ is about the journey flying to and from Australia (between the US and the UK). It’s such a huge trek. There’s always that sense of purgatory when I’m getting on those flights: wandering around duty free, feeling somehow semi-human and sort of losing yourself. I actually love flying and the excitement of long distance travel, but there is this melancholy, bittersweet feeling of leaving loved ones behind. Doing this kind of work, you do miss out on a lot of things: birthdays, weddings and funerals.”

    4. The Tiger Inside Will Eat The Child

    Kate says: “‘The Tiger Inside’ was originally a track written for out Fatty Gets a Stylist project. It was always a great song, and when we started doing it live as a duo it just worked really well. You tap into something completely different using a different voice and acoustic instruments, so we thought it was worth sharing. It’s one of those songs that doesn’t have a definitive version, and I think that’s true of a lot of good songs: they should be able to stand up. We’re not religious in any way, but it’s kind of a Zen Buddhist song, really, of trying to hang on to that elusive moment that slips through your fingers as soon as you think about it directly.”

    5. Let Me Fade

    Kate says: “For this song, we used the same string arranger who worked on Peter Gabriel’s Scratch My Back record. It’s basically a song about wanting to disappear, about surrendering the idea of yourself and shrinking into nothing for a while, which I guess is kind of depressing [laughs]. This is one of those songs where I dreamt the chorus, and I dreamt it was this bunch of kids singing it, really joyfully and with abandonment, all together. When you dream the words and melody together, that is always great.”

    6. I’ll Change Your Mind

    “It is hard to write love songs without them coming out sounding cheesy, that’s for sure, especially upbeat ones—they’re just nearly impossible. But this one actually has sad lyrics, and I find that exciting: putting sad lyrics to a happy song. It’s basically about a woman stalking her ex, whom she can’t quite get over, spending all night in the car outside his house, and shivering, thinking that … when he wakes up and sees her there he’ll change his mind about her.” Story of how you courted Keir? [Laughs] “It’s just a futile hope. If you listen to the lyrics, she’s never going to change his mind; she’s deluded.”

    7. Humiliation

    Tribal/jungle territory. Written in a different way? “It was written on the computer, whereas everything else came from organic instruments. This one was mostly Keir, he writes on the computer all the time. With Ableton, you can play the piano with the keys and just mix different loops. And it’s a song about being socially awkward, and I’m like that all the time. Particularly in music industry schmoozy things, which neither Keir nor I deal with very well. It’s just so full of artifice, but look: I have good days and bad days. I also think it’s the fact Keir and I have spent the last eight years in the same room together; it’s really not healthy. You forget how to speak to other people, because you develop this strange language between the two of you, and it’s quite exclusive, in that it excludes other people.”

    8. In the Dark

    Kate says: “This is really Keir’s song, and it was written fairly quickly. It’s about his grandparents, who lived together in Toowoomba and passed away. The first time we played it to his mother was quite hard, because you tap into things you didn’t even know you felt. The car sits where he parked it / no more clicks on the clock / Clean and neat as he kept it / Now he’s gone, gone, gone’—because that car is still in that garage. For us, ‘In the Dark’ sums up a lot of themes on the record, somehow, the contrast between the dark and the light. The outro of the song is about moving towards the light, which is death, but at the same time it’s the start of something new.”

    9. Beautiful Darling

    Kate says: “This is another dream song, where Keir dreamt he was lying in the grass, listening to Cyndi Lauper’s new single and crying because he was so moved [laughs]. He woke up with the chorus in his mind: ‘Beautiful darling / you make me believe / it could all be okay / hope is a real thing.’ This song was written very late in the recording process. We only had about a week left in the studio and we just frantically got everything together to put that one down. It’s great when songs come to you in dreams, but the trick is actually remembering them.”

    10. The Devil Wears a Suit

    Kate says: “Part of me is reluctant to say who this song is actuallyabout[laughs], but let’s just say it’s a song about the banality of evil and how often it comes under the veneer of respectability. The opening line of the song ‘End of October / sun’s fallen over / wolves on the street’ came from when we played a show in Madison Wisconsin on Halloween. It was freezing cold and there were huge packs of very drunk men in masks roaming the street yelling and breaking bottles. After the show we were exhausted from all the travel and to get to our hotel room had to carry all our gear through this dense raucous party in the hotel. It was an eerie night, we were a long way from home and the song started from that strange place. The song is influenced by Irish folk music, because both Keir and I have always loved Irish music.”

    11. Fire & Iron

    Kate says: “The closing song is told from the perspective of a dead narrator, watching her childhood boyfriend walk his children through a park years later. Fire And Iron is the image of a car crash, but it also refers to her being a spirit and him being material. The two characters are linked throughout the song by smoking. We liked the idea of smoke because it is an ephemeral element.”

     

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