Stephanie Cherote: Some Holy Longing

- There’s a ghostly voice floating up out of northern New South Wales. Touched with a world weary sadness, it’s the sound of a soul that’s seen more than plague and flood. In fact it’s seen the world and at every stage of that journey the sound of its longing has become more plaintive and piercing. It’s as though Stephanie Cherote travelled the globe, looking for something, and all she ended up with is the memories of what she left behind.

That’s how it sounds, anyhow, on her debut full-length Some Holy Longing. I imagine it can’t quite be that bad, living on a farm in New Brighton and raising her son with her partner; although raising a child always induces a certain level of regret for the life that came before, I suppose.

The path that got Cherote to this point is certainly an unconventional one. Not every young, unsigned artist wins a songwriting competition that gets them a mentorship with Island Records over in LA. The trip, which began in 2008, included a recording opportunity with legendary producer and Interscope founder Jimmy Iovine, who offhandedly described her voice as “a bunch of nostalgic threads, Stevie Nicks in her early years”. At this point, I’d be surprised if Cherote wasn’t quite tired of hearing that quoted back at her, but if there’s one thing worse than a tired compliment, it’s having someone say it’s wrong.

I mean, sure, there’s something shared in that husky sweetness, but if you sort through that ‘bunch of nostalgic threads’ I think a comparison to early Leonard Cohen is much more compelling. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t obvious before Cherote laid down her album. I suppose half of the uncanny echo -maybe even three-quarters- comes from the songs Cherote is choosing to write, but if you can listen to Some Holy Longing and not find yourself thinking about Suzanne or Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye, then I just don’t know! It’s certainly helped along by the leathery, beaten-up qualities which both voices had at a fairly young age. Cherote’s rough mezzo is untrained and my initial impression was that it wasn’t much, but in a way that was perfect for her love-lorn, life-worn writing. There are moments however, in songs like Faces or The Hours, where, contra Cohen and with gargantuan effort, her very heavy voice takes off with a ringing beauty that really makes you sit up and shut up. It seems like the sort of instrument you could do a lot with … or just Marianne Faithfull the crap out of it.

Cherote one-ups Cohen again with her backing string section, something that the old man, with his ever simpler accompaniments could never muster. What a thing it is, too. Continuing her unusual journey, Cherote felt boxed in and abandoned Island and LA, decamping to New York City, to live in a semi-converted laundromat (is that like a tube hotel made of washing machines?). She worked by day and feverishly penned string arrangements inspired by old Disney movies in her spare time. I understand she went many other places -London, Berlin- in her travels, but when she arrived back in Oz, Cherote assembled a twelve piece chamber-ensemble (replete with players borrowed from the ACO) and laid down the measured, tasteful and rather exquisite backing to her record.

At the heart of the record you'll find that over the course of the years there has been love and heartbreak in Cherote’s  life, as there is with most people, but she has captured the whole experience with unusual resonance. I loved her description in an interview with Broader Lines, of how a naive love poem slowly grew into the much more circumspect and graded feeling that we hear as the song Summer Love:

I wrote the first verse one afternoon when I came home from the beach (in Sydney). It was very childlike and I suppose quite frank in tone. It painted the picture of what Love might look like in a most innocently simple completeness. I didn’t think much of it at the time but I carried the scrap of paper in my mind because it had something so plain as day about it, that’s very valuable for a writer.

I revisited it two years later in Costa Rica, I was alone again, by the sea, pondering over that sense of ‘love’ I’d imagined. I assembled lyrics for the first and second verse with chords and then again, it lay rested in the back of my head for some time.

It wasn’t until after another few years writing other songs and living other “lives’, I was in New York, sitting at a coffee shop in the East Village reflecting on the spirit of that poem. I felt that the soberness had transformed into an elusive longing. I couldn’t revert back to being the girl on the beach but I could console her, so I wrote the bridge and the final verse, bringing some philosophy and gentle resolve to the process.

The album is full of the power of the two opposing forces: innocent desire and the mature stoicism of loss, their power only becomes more intense as the yawning gulf between them grows. “Some are buried in contentment / Some are bound to what they knew / Some are caught beneath the shelter / Some are stuck above the view / Summer love, summer love, summer love, where are you?” Surrounded by compromise and ossified by time, still the old feeling courses somewhere deep beneath, a channel full of passion and aching sadness, unsettling the whole life that rests atop it.

There’s more than just longing on this record, like the Ennio Morricone via Gareth Liddiard instrumental interlude of You Who Knew and the duet with Cherote’s brother, Daniel, on All Because Of You which confirms those Lee Hazelwood & Nancy Sinatra suspicions I’d been having; but there is so much longing. Arriving like some deeply repressed echo of the past, one that will be denied no longer: it surely is Some Holy Longing.

- Chris Cobcroft.