Leah Senior
Sunday 30 August
Glenlyon Community Hall
There are few better ways to spend the final Sunday of winter than sitting inside a country community hall, sipping tea, eating a fresh scone and letting Leah Senior’s voice wash over you.
As part of the Winter Sounds Music Festival, Australian-based folk artist Senior brings the Glenlyon Community Hall to life and transforms the humble venue into an intimate listening room. Outside, the sun is shining brilliantly on the final weekend of winter and inside Senior is singing of spring awakening, making the setting feel almost perfectly choreographed.
Senior has a voice that commands our attention with clear, soaring and disarmingly honest lyrics effortlessly moving between delicate bedroom folk intimacy and the playful flourishes of baroque pop.
Joined by her sister on backing vocals and her partner on guitar, the three form a beautifully understated unit. The harmonies between the sisters are particularly gorgeous, adding warmth to songs that already feel deeply rooted in nature and introspection.
Senior’s storytelling is just as engaging as the music. Introducing one song, she reflects on the strange contradiction of a world with “a lot of punk music being made and not a lot of punks” — a typically wry observation that gives the song an extra layer of bite.
Another highlight is a deeply personal song dedicated to her nanna, featuring the poignant line, “She shall have me wherever she goes.” Senior explains that the song feels especially fitting in this Community Hall setting, recalling how her nanna and her used to attend similar community venues with her mother, who sang in a choir. The song connects generations, music and place in a way that feel particularly poignant in this setting.
Senior also offers a glimpse into her recently completed fifth album, ‘Pt. Roadknight,’ an introspective exploration of nature and the human experience that continues to develop her distinctive sound.
The story behind one of its songs is almost as memorable as the song itself. Recorded in a studio temporarily established inside a beach house, the sessions were disrupted by construction at the neighbouring property. The noise eventually forced the studio to relocate but only for the neighbours to finish their enormous new house and seemingly never even come to enjoy it, Senior tells. Her bemusement at the whole saga became the perfect introduction to a song about the absurdity of it all.
As winter prepares to give way to spring, Leah Senior offers a fitting soundtrack to the transition with a fragile, funny, thoughtful and quietly magnificent morning of humble folk music on the doorstep of a charming Victorian country town.
Words by Michael Prebeg
