Music in the time of COVID: Laura Hill Keith Jeffery and Sasha March

Story by Kate Le Gallez.

Above: aura Hill shown in a screen grab from her Lilac Cove video clip. Photo Darren Longbottom. Videographer: Brad Halstead.

There were certain words in 2020 that so quickly flooded the lexicon they traversed the distance from buzzword to banished with heretofore unseen haste. You could say it’s unprecedented. As some words were devalued, others were bestowed new meaning: take ‘essential’ and ‘non-essential’. When COVID restrictions first came into effect, these words suddenly had the power to determine lives and livelihoods.

For many musicians (category: non-essential) it meant both desolation and opportunity. Venue closures and travel restrictions saw calendars wiped and plans shelved. Three musicians – Keith Jeffery of Atlas Genius, Laura Hill of Lilac Cove and Sasha March – shared their stories of what it’s meant to be a musician in the time of COVID.

After eight years in America, Victor Harbor-born Keith Jeffery was already back in South Australia when conversations started to turn more frequently to daily infection tallies. He’d spent January and February with his brothers and Atlas Genius bandmates, Steven and Michael, recording a new album. On the March morning he landed back in his homebase of Los Angeles, California’s governor announced a shelter-in-place order which remains in place to this day. A week later, he was on a plane back to Australia.

‘I think it could have been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made,’ he says. We’re sipping glasses of orange juice on the first hot day of the season, overlooking Victor’s bowling green from The Anchorage’s front deck. Coincidentally, it’s also the spot where the Jeffery brothers played their first gig. Their proverbial big break didn’t come until almost a decade later when, in a series of events their soon-to-be adopted home of LA would be proud of, a respected New York music writer blogged about one of their songs. ‘And then we started getting emails,’ recalls Keith. A record deal followed and by August 2012 they were touring the US.

Eight years later, Keith is back in Victor ‘sitting out’ the pandemic. With the album in the bag he needed a new creative outlet, something worthy of sharing beyond the lo-fi iPhone-in-the-bedroom setup. ‘I feel like once Chris Martin cornered that market, people are going to want to gravitate towards Chris Martin versus someone else,’ he jokes.

Keith’s spin was to team Atlas Genius’ music with the South Australian landscape. He began filming a series of solo performances to be shared on the band’s website and socials. Called ‘on my own’, each performance is shot by drone in an isolated location, the slow pullback of the camera revealing snippets of South Australia, from a patch of green amid the burnt out Cudlee Creek Forest to the lichen-flecked granite of Petrel Beach. One video

Above: Keith Jeffery in a screen grab from his ‘On My Own’ series seen here in the scrub of the Waitpinga cliffs.

shows a beanie-clad Keith sitting, guitar in hand, on a blanket amid salt-stunted bushes. As the shot pulls back, the craggy folds of the Waitpinga Cliffs are slowly revealed in full as the Southern Ocean, deceptively sedate on this particular day, rushes rhythmically at their base. It’s simple and arresting in equal measure.

Keith is optimistic about what’s next. ‘I think that creatively, this year has been arguably the best year of my life,’ he says. The songs he’s so excited to release will soon be out in the world and in the meantime, the south coast is a pretty excellent place to be.

Moana-based singer-songwriter Laura Hill had her passport ready and was about to lock in tour dates for her new venture Lilac Cove when the pandemic hit. Blue eyes wide as she sips her coffee at Maxwell’s Grocery, Laura doesn’t dwell on what could have been but instead on what was and is her COVID silver lining. ‘It made me realise, I have time to really think about this and the execution of it,’ she says. ‘It just felt like, if there’s a positive from COVID, it was the time and the headspace that I needed to really execute it and be creative about it.’

June and July brought a fertile period of experimentation and writing for Laura. She likens her songwriting sense to a radio frequency – always there in the ether, whether you’re tuned in or not. Honing her frequency, Laura found space to write an album’s worth of songs for Lilac Cove helping to cement the shift from Laura Hill, awardwinning solo artist, to the new collective. These songs channel a more refined energy, with Laura’s transcendent vocals layered with rich textures.

It’s easy to characterise 2020 as unreservedly dire for the music industry, but Laura sees bright spots too, particularly for local artists. Just as we’ve looked at our own state with newly appreciative eyes, so too have local audiences enjoyed discovering some of their local talent as interstate and international artists stayed away. Certainly Laura was thrilled to pick up a spot at The Governor Hindmarsh in Adelaide vacated by New South Wales band The Rubens to launch Lilac Cove’s new single in November.

If the pandemic has offered a universal lesson on the fragility of life, it only amplifies what Laura was already experiencing personally after both of her parents and her auntie were all diagnosed with cancer in 2018. This perspective brings a certain freedom. ‘From a creative point of view, when all this other stuff is so, so much more important, who cares if it doesn’t work?’ she says. ‘If you burn the cake you’re baking, you bake another one. I just wanted to put some wings on and to see where this could creatively go.’

The creative experience has been more tempered for singersongwriter Sasha March. ‘In the beginning it was this real overwhelming feeling of that kind of expectation to grab the time and be super productive,’ she says over the phone from her home in Sydney. ‘But I have found it’s been a bit more of a slow burn process.’ Time is, as they say, a gift. But the experience of time in a pandemic has been fraught as days have seemed to stretch, >

Above: Sasha March in the ‘Yellow Throne.’ ‘My brother Aaron started a photo project a bit before COVID and lockdown hit. Each shoot with different people got more hectic leading up to the lockdown with everyone feeling unsettled and imagining some kind of apocalypse.

bleeding together into a repetitive soup. ‘The reality of having a pandemic at the forefront, it’s pretty hard to focus on anything else, even just general day-to-day conversations,’ she says.

Sasha grew up on ten acres near McLaren Vale and enjoyed the sort of free-range childhood where you’re called in for dinner by the ringing of a cow bell. She wrote her first ‘crappy song’ at sixteen and after finishing school travelled around Australia and overseas. Singing has always felt natural to her, ‘and then from performing live, experiencing that connection with the audience and positive response,’ Sasha explains. ‘It’s a nice feeling, you’re doing something that connects to people and you can feel that coming back.’

But that feeling has been a bit different this year. Sasha recently played at The Vanguard in Newtown: ‘it was just so nice to have people back in a room together and feel that sense of community,’ she says. But the gig was decidedly COVID-chic, with audience members seated at cabaret-style tables and split over two sittings to meet density requirements. The kicker was the prominent signage declaring ‘No whistling, singing or yelling. If you are enjoying the show, please only clap.’ At first Sasha wasn’t quite sure how to interact, she felt clunky and stiff. But by the second set, things loosened up a little. It was a decidedly first date vibe: exciting and awkward. She’s recently returned to the studio, hoping to put an EP together for release early next year. ‘It’s been quite a long process for lots of different reasons and it feels really, really necessary to get those [songs] out creatively and emotionally,’ says Sasha. With catharsis comes space to begin processing this chaotic year that began with fire and never let up. It’s a road Sasha is only now beginning to walk. ‘Trying to come to any conclusions would be forced, like trying to prematurely emerge from an experience that’s incomplete and we’re all still very deep in and confused by,’ she writes to me after our conversation. ‘I generally create after an experience when I’ve had time to find perspective, I don’t tend to frantically write while in chaos. So I’m holding hope on finding words for this wild time. There are a couple of songs already and more ideas coming.’

And really, that’s been the story of this year. We’ve all been feeling our way through 2020, adjusting our habits and expectations, trying to make sense of an altered world. Even as I write this in the sprint towards deadline, South Australia is again on red alert as a new COVID cluster has emerged. Whatever happens, we’ll all continue to find our own ways of processing the events of 2020. Cooks will cook. Writers will write. And musicians will make music, gifting us a soundtrack to this wild year.

OPEN 11-5, 7 DAYS · 219 STROUT ROAD MCLAREN VALE · SAMSONTALL.COM.AU

F O O D W I N E G I N DISCOVERY

salopian.com.au

/salopianinn

@salopianinn

08 8323 8769

e bookings@salopian.com.au

corner main and

mcmurtrie road

mclaren vale

Story by Kate Le Gallez. Photography by Andy Rasheed.

Page left and above: Recent additions to the school include a colourful architecturally designed building, nature play areas and ‘Block 69’, where children can roam free in a natural environment.

At the start of 2020, Encounter Lutheran College took possession of 69 acres directly to the north of their pre-existing campus, reaching all the way to Waterport Road. It was an exciting start to the school’s twentieth year and ‘the most exciting initiative I’ve ever been part of,’ says Kelvin Grivell, ELC’s principal, some ten months down the track.

Of course we now know that 2020 would quickly veer off the usual course, and with it, the school’s planned celebrations. While this extraordinary year has challenged us in unexpected ways, it’s also changed the way we look at our own backyards. In both of these respects, ELC’s acquisition – fondly known as Block 69 – has proven prescient. Not only does it expand the school’s backyard, giving their over 600 students immediate access to the Fleurieu landscape, it also offers the chance to find new and different ways to support ELC’s students to develop into resilient individuals ready for life beyond school. In parallel with the resilience discussion, ELC’s approach to early learning in the pre-school and early primary years was increasingly recognising the value of play. Perhaps the first big step on this journey was building the creek that runs through the junior school, which can be manually turned on and off as required. Aesthetically, it was an antidote to the ‘dog’s breakfast’ of play areas that had been added during the school’s rapid expansion, but it also normalised play – in all it’s messy, imperfect glory – as part of the school day.

Soon the staff began to ask why this approach couldn’t translate throughout the whole college. They were looking for ways to get out into the environment to help build resilience, but also to find ways to play. ‘So when the land became available, it was partly the resilience piece, but also this idea of not just having to get on a bus or go for a walk to get to the Fleurieu, we’ve got it right there,’ recalls Kelvin. The creek, which seemed like such a big step at the time, now seems small fry in comparison. ‘You look back and you think, well that enabled some people to feel more at ease,’ says Kelvin. And maybe it’s one of the reasons why people have embraced the block so openly, he muses. >

Above: The new middle and senior spaces, alongside others like the library – known as The Nest – and the GPS Café, finished in 2015 and 2016 respectively, have been thoughtfully designed. Page right: The creek runs through the central meeting area of the school and allows children to play around in the water.

The block purchase happened just as a $7 million project developing the middle and senior school was nearing completion. Having grown from an R-7 school with 76 students and eleven staff in 2001, to over 600 students through to year twelve, 85 staff and an early learning centre in 2020, the school had invested heavily in developing the built environment and facilities on campus.

The new middle and senior spaces, alongside others like the library – known as The Nest – and the GPS Café finished in 2015 and 2016 respectively have been thoughtfully designed; a student-centred approach to form has expanded the function these spaces offer. While the café provides chef-prepared meals for senior students, it’s also a learning space offering pathways to hospitality jobs or informal learning opportunities for students who need support beyond classroom learning. And the coffee’s good too, Kelvin adds. The library also expands the traditional idea of what such spaces offer – the spiral slippery dip is a bit of a giveaway. The flexible layout can accommodate multiple groups of students at once, as well as breakout spaces for meetings. It’s become the hub of the school, not only a place for students to gather but also somewhere the wider community is welcome, whether it’s babies and their parents at the weekly ‘Books in the Burrow’ songtime or guests attending the 2019 SALA opening.

The block takes these ideas further. While many have asked Kelvin what the school is going ‘to do’ with block, he explains it’s not intended to be any one thing. And it’s sheer size means it doesn’t need to be. Some ideas are taking shape, like revegetation of native Gahnia filum grasses and a possible permanent structure offering shelter and perhaps water and solar storage. It’s hosted two inaugural runs: the Jamieson Ultra Marathon and the Fraser Dash. The latter saw runners race diagonally across the block, prompted by a student (Fraser) who asked how long it would take to run from one end to the other (just over three minutes for speedsters). There’s been cooking, with foundation students whipping up a ‘Wombat Stew’, a year five campout and a pump track built by a group of year nine boys. Teachers in the junior school are re-mapping their curriculum to intentionally include block experiences, with the idea that no learning unit can be completed without visiting the block. >

The new building includes a chapel, flexible learning spaces and the yellow ‘french-fries’ as they have become affectionately known.

Beyond this, Kelvin envisages a set of principles governing the use of the land that tie its enjoyment to ELC’s approach to teaching and learning. He lists seven pillars covering resilience, real-life learning, christianity, wellbeing, the environment, community and Ngarrindjeri perspectives. In enacting each of these pillars, it’s the opportunity to make connections, both physical and spiritual, that seems to excite Kelvin. There are big ideas to explore, like how local action to revegetate the land supports the global youth climate change movement led by Greta Thunberg or learning about the Ngarrindjeri nation via the shield trees identified on the block by Narangga Ngarrindjeri man, Cedric Varcoe. And there are the seemingly small things, like climbing a tree or cooking a marshmallow on a fire for the first time, simultaneously chipping away at the nature deficit while offering the chance to experience the inherent risks of these activities.

The chance to connect the big with the small, the small with the big right there in ELC’s backyard intentionally locates student learning within the bigger picture of life beyond school. It’s something Kelvin has become increasingly mindful of and the block offers a new way to rise to this challenge. ‘We have an amazing gift down there,’ says Kelvin. ‘I believe it really is our responsibility to leverage it in every possible manner so that it can be, it can exceed our expectations and it can be something that isn’t just a gift for the kids who think they’re outdoorsy kids, but for every student at Encounter.’