Frontman and chief songwriter Mark Lang says he loves playing folk festivals. "It's a gathering of people that are there because they love music and they love being together," Lang says. "It's a community and you feel it. Like, there is a difference between the big rock festivals, and we've played some of the biggest ones in the country, and folk festivals. There is a difference. Everyone is there celebrating together."

Lang also feels that folk audiences are often paying attention to different elements of the musical spectrum.

"There is this other thing in folk festivals, a different kind of connection, and I don't quite understand it. But I think it's because audiences are soaking in the lyric in a different way. It's not just about the melody and the beat. They're soaking in the stories. And that's partly what's such a powerful thing. I think the thing about folk music is it's driven around stories and shared experiences as humans."

Which suits Lang perfectly, as he revels in the storytelling aspect of music creation.

"Rather than being purely about melody, lyrical content has always been my main driving force as a writer. I can't just write for the sake of writing. I tend to want there to be something more in it, both for myself and for others that are listening to it."

The sheer power of folk music, says Lang, is that it's about storytelling. "It's about bringing things back to real human experiences. Whether that's love, loss, joy, death, all those things."

With Lang having recently experienced the difficulty of his wife being diagnosed with ovarian cancer, Skipping Girl Vinegar's latest album The Great Wave is full of the kind of raw, emotional, liberating stuff that Lang finds so attractive in folk music.

Influenced by the ocean and its changing moods, "this album explores a lot of stuff. It explores really bleak moments," Lang says. "It tracks going into the mire and then coming back out the other side and just celebrating life."

An important thing to Lang during the hard times is never letting the darkness take over.

"There is one thing about being in the bleak. I've always tried to look for the cracks and that's the bit that helps you. That even when things are pretty grim you might find a whiff of how to find your way out."

Balancing the yin and yang is something Lang is constantly aware of in both his music and lyrical content.

"In our live shows we definitely want to have a sense of joy, but I also want to acknowledge that life can be rough and things can be a bit dark," he says. "Skipping Girl Vinegar has often had joyful melodies and feelings on the top but there has often been darker undercurrents lyrically. Purposefully I do that because I feel that life is that, it's both joy and it's sadness and it's all those things. To appreciate the light you have to understand the darkness, and all those sort of things. And so joy is still definitely a part of our live performances. Because even when you go through really dark things, it's kind of like you appreciate the morning after a dark night."

Skipping Girl Vinegar at National Folk Festival

Where: Exhibition Park in Canberra

When: March 24-28, 2016

Tickets: folkfestival.org.au/tickets