Verse Chorus Verse: Astro Children

Astro Children’s Millie Lovelock on the story behind the Dunedin duo’s new EP, Plain and Fancy Killings.

For the first in our new series Verse Chorus Verse – in which local artists break down the stories behind their music – Millie Lovelock explains the songwriting process behind Astro Children’s new EP, and why she often finds herself driven by desperation and helplessness.

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Writing Plain and Fancy Killings was a lengthy process. We recorded the EP at Chick’s Hotel with Nick Graham at the end of 2014, but we began writing it immediately after releasing our first album, Proteus.

The songs were written over a three-year period, if I’m counting strictly based on when they first happened. And although ‘Despair’ was the first song I wrote with the title Plain and Fancy Killings in mind, the song that actually started the writing process for me was ‘Play it as it Lays’.

I was trying to reconcile who I was with the music I was producing.

I wrote ‘Play it as it Lays’ at the end of 2013. At the time I was still in a guitar pop band named Trick Mammoth, and I was trying to reconcile who I was with the music I was producing, at the same time as dealing with the toxic relationship I’d found myself in with our record label and a close friend of mine.

I have always struggled to take myself seriously as a songwriter and as a vocalist and guitarist, and while the song can definitely be read as a snapshot of a specific situation, it really came from a place of deep personal anxiety that I was never going to be able to hide my inadequacies and my inconsistencies.

As a songwriting moment goes, this was a turning point. Until then I had avoided writing with anything personally specific in mind for fear that my song writing would stagnate. When I wrote ‘Play it as it Lays’ I realised that my experiences and my responses were malleable, and so my songs could shift and grow.

With a newfound obsession with multiplicity and shifting meaning, I started to write the rest of the EP. I found myself drawn to repetition and insistence. As a songwriter I found release in being able to confine melodies to short, deliberately obtuse phrases that were able to be loaded up with whatever emotive meaning was driving me at the time I sang them.

In my songs I can be simultaneously villain and victim.

In my songs I can be simultaneously villain and victim, and for that reason I spend a lot of time messing around with external influences and how they manifest internally.

I study English literature and so when I find a phrase that sticks to me I’ll more often than not lift it and chew it up. ‘Despair’ is Vladimir Nabokov novel about a man who kills his double, ‘Plain and Fancy Killings’ is an Ernest Hemingway article, and ‘Play it as it Lays’ is novel by Joan Didion.  

For me, writing and performing involve slipping in and out of myself until I settle on the right place to be, the right way to think, the right way to feel. I’m often driven by desperation and helplessness, but I’m very conscious of how paralyzing those feelings can be, and so I think Plain and Fancy Killings is Isaac and I pausing and then pushing forward to the next moment, over and over again.