Melanie Horsnell thinks a cookmight learn French by reading French cookbooks, so thefolk pop artist decided to develop her French speaking skills by making an album.
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"I've been trying to learn French for years; since I was a little girl probably," says Horsnell. "My speaking is no good. I can speak to people in the present tense, but I can read a lot better, so I can understand when I'm reading and writing."
Called Dans la mer aussi il y a des etoiles (In the Sea Also There Are Stars), the album was written last year during a crowd-funded trip to France. Horsnell travelled with her daughters, then 2½ and 4½ years old.
"We made up a lot of the journey as we went, which was good for songwriting, being inspired by new people and being inspired by different environments and just that romantic French thing," says Horsnell.
"Part of the thing was not just throwing myself in the language to speak. They say that you learn best if you do it with something that you love, and I love songs. So putting myself into songs and trying to learn a language at the same time seemed like a good idea."
Technically, one of the main challenges was getting her work to sound natural.
"Everyone was a little worried about the pronunciation, the accent and the phrasing," says Horsnell.
"The hardest thing I came up against is actually the phrasing, because when you write a melody you accentuate certain words. I had completely forgotten about that being a big part of songwriting. So when I'd sing the words to a melody and then sing them to a friend to listen to they'd say 'I can't understand what you are talking about'. All the wrong words were accentuated.
"I'd have to go back and just sit there reading through, talking to people at bus stops and in children's parks. Reading my lyrics out loud to make sure that I'd got everything correct."
As well as improving her French, Horsnell wanted to follow up on French radio exposure she received from her first album, the Australian Music Prize long-listed Cloud Appreciation Society.
"My first album was actually released in Europe before Australia, just by luck," she says, explaining it had been picked up by a European publisher called Metisse Music, who helped her get played on Fip Radio in France. "It was such a wonderful thing that they featured my album and took it up. So I had two of my songs translated into French and I put those out and they were featured as well on the radio. So all this time I was thinking I need to do more French songs to follow that up."
Recorded with Brian Campeau, Dans a mer aussi il y a des etoiles was originally intended to be an EP, but things changed once the writing process begun.
"I ended up writing with a poet called Alain Rivet, mostly with him and also with a lady called Helena Noguerra and we wrote so much we ended up with a whole album's worth of songs."
"When you put together pieces of music and you want to make an album you want it to all fit together," she says. "It ended up being a little picture of our journey, of our three months overseas … it was a fantastic time. I'll probably think about it forever."
Who: Melanie Horsnell
Where: The Street Theatre
When: Saturday,November 29
Tickets: $20 presale, $25 on the door @ www.thestreet.org.au or 6247 1223
