IT’S NINE O’CLOCK ON A SATURDAY and the regular crowd shuffles in, there’s an old …wait, wait a minute. Sorry! Instead of the Cajun-flavoured, Richard Thompson-influenced, roots-based, country-drawing music that would be more appropriate for the band Small Town Romance, somehow a bit of Billy Joel slipped in there.
But there’s an explanation. See, it’s 8pm on a Tuesday and shuffling in to a quiet room in their Melbourne home are Small Town Romance, also known as Flora Smith and Jim Arneman, songwriters, singers and producers. With their two kids in bed and sleeping (well, mostly – there may be a bit more convincing to do for one of them) work can start. You make do as artists, small business folk, work-from-homers, parents.
Is this part explanation for why it’s taken a minute between the first Small Town Romance album, 2016’s self-titled, and this year’s second, Home Fires?
“We had a few delays,” says Flora with a smile. Yeah, a few, as Jim chimes in to explain. “Two kids, a pandemic and a feature documentary,” he says. “That was kind of the schedule between records.”
It wasn’t exactly planned. Or if there had been a plan, it got overrun by reality, as the documentary (Slim And I, about Jim’s grandparents, Slim Dusty and Joy McKean – yep the country music giants, parents of Jim’s own legendary mother, Anne Kirkpatrick) turned out the least of it.
“Before you have kids, you have the starry-eyed optimistic idea that you can just fit it all in: ‘it’s not a problem, just pack them in the back of the car’,” Flora laughs. “We did a bit of music after having [their eldest] Helena. When Helen was about two we were gigging a bit more but really focusing on the writing process of this record, and we got the majority of this recorded before we had Rollo.
“He is now nearly three, so that gives you an indication of how long it took between starting the record and finishing it. But after he was born we said, if we do it now we’ll kill ourselves. There is no point; we want to enjoy it.”
All of this brings into focus the new album’s opening and title track, Flora’s Home Fires, a gentle sounding slow dance – “sweet” even, to use her description – that comes at us as unsparing selfishness, someone saying “let me run where I will, while you’re always standing still”, keep the place going while I seek out the life I want, as “some day I might come home”.
The song was written well before the children and for sure there’s a different resonance to those lyrics now, two children in. There’s even more reverberations felt though because it was written to be sung by and about a man, but now is being heard in a woman’s voice, as a woman’s story.
“It was written as a portrait, a sketch, as a lot of our songs are, and I wrote it as an observation of people with a fantasy of wanting to have it all,” says Flora. “It was more of an indictment …”
“Quite judgey,” interrupts Jim. “And when we had children, the song was sitting on the shelf. When we blew the dust off it was like, wow this has a different sort of meaning now and we can inhabit it quite differently.”
Flora agrees. “It was more of an indictment of absent fathers and then it became something of a fantasy,” she says. “In literature and in art there are so many narratives and stories and films that are this very maternal fantasy: the fantasy of a mother abandoning her children. And I think it is so deeply explored through female writers because for the most part, mothers don’t abandon their children, but [she chuckles] they certainly fantasise about it. But it stays in that space of fantasy.”
Hearing it sung by woman there is a part of you listening which can’t help but shift it away from the personal and make it more of a character song. We still lean into the failed male and lean away from the runaway female, to spare our sensibilities as much as anything.
“But I definitely feel it very differently now,” says Flora. “It is definitely one of the taboos of being a mother, saying sometimes you just want to run.”
That in the end made it right for Small Town Romance.
“It was the easiest one to record and it was one of our favourites on the record just because of that having a whole new meaning and singing completely differently,” says Jim. “Sometimes that happens in songs: you don’t really know where it came from or how it applies, what part of you is in that song, and then three or four years later it will be very clear what that was about. It’s a strange kind of premonition as therapy.”
Had they considered swapping lead vocalist? They’ve done it before after all, singing a song written by the other.
“Yeah, we had,” says Flora. “I said Jim you should record this because you’ve got a really beautiful crooner tone. But I think I was correcting you, saying no no, sing it this way, and you said ‘you should just sing it’.”
And in truth, it just hits harder when heard from the perspective of a woman.
It’s worth noting that Flora has been known to describe their music to people as “country music for grown-ups”, ‘and while she says it with a smile, it’s not really a joke. See for example, in that same space of music and concepts for grown-ups, the way the new album finds a balance, with a bit of kick, with the final track Ordinary Life.
Without sugar loading, Ordinary Life finds someone explaining how a partnership can be what makes an unremarkable, an uneventful, short of glamour or money or wild adventure life, something special. So the album begins with running away and ends with coming closer.
“I was really set on that closing of the album,” says Flora. “There is quite a lot of, um, dissatisfaction across the songs. We joke about how I write songs fantasising about leaving the family and Jim writes about maladjusted middle-aged men [she laughs], but actually Ordinary Life draws that to a close as we go, zoom out a little bit, it’s an extremely fortunate life.”
The song was written while Jim was spending a lot of time on Slim And I, and the juxtaposition of lives across the generations was hard to miss.
“Slim and Joy’s life was so extraordinary and Joy as a person was so extraordinary,” says Flora. “And Jim would be coming back from Sydney [where the production work was being done] showing all the stories of this incredible life and, I don’t know, it’s a bit of a sobering moment when you have your first child and you have these grandiose ideas of yourself and that puts it all in perspective. Their story felt like such a stark contrast with being at home by myself, while Jim was at home in Sydney, with the baby thinking, ‘oh my God, stuck in the suburbs’.
“But that is an extraordinary gift as well, to have a comfortable, secure household and a loving family and people in your life. You can strive for whatever you want but the foundation of a happy life is an appreciation for that.”
Jim grins. “If Slim and Joy’s catalogue is all songs about being restless and on the road, all of our songs are really about being homebodies,” he says as Flora smiles beside him. “That’s who we are: happy to be plonked in one space.”
On a Tuesday, or Wednesday or Saturday night, where you can be pretty certain they’d have a ready answer if someone sitting at a bar, putting bread in their jar, was asking “man what are you doing here?”.
Small Town Romance – Home Fires is out now.
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