‘I’m Not Trying To Slide Between Things With Ease’: Georgia Knight Is Embracing Incongruity On ‘Beanpole’
Georgia Knight opens her debut album with something of a mission statement: “I’m looking to start fresh/I’m looking to start anew,” she sings at the top of Mingle.
That humble couplet can’t help but reflect the Melbourne songwriter’s questing approach to what became the quite disparate eight songs on Beanpole. There’s the feverish trip hop of Desire, the full-band agitation of Rockerbilly, the transfixing melodrama of Everybody Knows My Business Now and the whispered, lullaby quality of City Gone To Seed, just for starters.
Recorded across the space of a year in 2023, the album was made in close collaboration between Knight and Andrew “Idge” Hehir at Northcote’s Soundpark Studios, with the pair tinkering away at night after Hehir’s other sessions were done for the day.
“We’d just sit down and talk and drink Canadian Club,” recounts Knight by phone, “and figure out what we wanted to do. I was really lucky: I was able to build the songs in the studio and figure it all out as I was doing it. But it took a really long time.”
Other contributors stopped by to lay down their parts in a piecemeal fashion, including Knight’s backing band of Nick Finch (bass, synth), Rosie Noyes (pump organ, guitar loops), and Holly Thomas (drums). She also dabbled at other studios and with other players, including Joe Orton, Jethro Pickett, and The Drones’ Dan Luscombe.
“I like to have control,” Knight readily admits. “So I tried to work it out that it would be Idge and I and one other person [in the studio at a time]. It didn’t always work out that way … It was made in such isolation, but oddly there are so many hands on it.”
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Learning Curves
Dark, vibey and spacious, Beanpole more than delivers on the promise of Knight’s early singles and her 2023 EP Hell On Bent Street. It’s a late contender for the year’s best Australian album, and an indelible introduction to her coolly brooding yet deeply emotional songwriting.
Between the rasps and cracks of her naturally husky singing and the quiet desperation and withering wit of her lyrics, these songs are as striking as they are strikingly different from each other in individual style and treatment.
“It was like a production apprenticeship,” Knight says of the year-long recording process. “I learned a lot. When I listen to it now, I can hear my brain expanding [at the time]. And that’s why it seems to fan out quite far [stylistically]. I was looking but not really knowing what for. And that ended up being the character of the music.”
She likens that element of looking to being famished but not knowing exactly what to eat, resulting in what she calls a “hungry” tone for Beanpole. That hunger gave her the freedom to not question many of the far-flung artistic choices she was making.
“If you’re really hungry for something and you’re searching and you’re naïve,” she explains, “the judgment on your creative decisions is mitigated. And that helps with making things. You don’t stop to question where you’re following the rules or not, because you don’t really have any concept of what the rules are. You just know that you’d like to do something.”
By way of example, Knight recalls writing each new line of City Gone To Seed – the album’s heartbreaking centrepiece – during the actual process of recording the song. Yet that doesn’t mean that everything she worked on made its way onto the record. In fact, there’s another album’s worth of material that didn’t make the cut.
Besides Knight’s shadowy vocals and ruminative songwriting, the connective tissue on Beanpole could well be the autoharp, the chiming yet somewhat ominous-sounding instrument held close to the chest while strumming. Knight discovered the autoharp a few years ago, and it eventually became an animating force behind the new album.
“I can’t tear myself away from it,” says Knight. “I’ve been given two [more of them] recently. It’s such a good tool. Talk about naivety: it’s perfect for that. It’s so limiting: the one that I wrote the album on has eight chords. And I was feeling so rootless that I needed that as a kind of backbone to help me.
“It was addictive, trying to squeeze a melody out of something that was so limited.”
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Tone Development
Knight grew up in the outer suburbs of Melbourne, while her mother worked as a nurse and her father in environmental science. Her attraction to the arts didn’t include music until her late teens, when she began playing in a band that she suspected simply wanted a female member.
She studied sculpture at the prestigious Victoria College Of The Arts but felt like an outsider, being only 18 and still living at home rather than in a sharehouse.
“I wanted to find a way of working that was faster than visual arts,” she recalls. “It just felt like it was too expensive and it took too long. It didn’t seem like normal people would be able to judge what I was doing – and it felt really urgent that normal people would make a judgement on what I was doing, so that I could figure out if I was good or not.”
After falling in with some Bourke Street buskers and then working at bars, Knight landed a job at Some Velvet Morning, a now-shuttered music venue in the inner-north Melbourne suburb Clifton Hill.
She figured out how to mix live music, and proclaims that she learned more in a year of working there than at her three years of uni. More to the point, she learned that aforementioned sense of control, which led to the confidence to start playing as a solo performer.
She has come a long way since then, with Beanpole earning an album launch at Howler in Brunswick along with dates at the RRR Performance Space, Sydney’s Phoenix Central Park, a pair of festivals in New Zealand and a slot on next year’s Golden Plains lineup.
But rather than try to hammer the diverse approaches for each song into something more uniform, she’s planning to honour their sonic individuality.
“I’m not trying to slide between things with ease,” shares Knight. “If things are incongruous, then they’re incongruous. I’m not looking to make them fit together very much at all. What I’d really like to do is put them all next to each other and develop something new.
“That’s all I really want to do: see if I can develop a new tone, just for the enjoyment of it.”
While she described herself as a bookish child and somewhat shy as an adult, Knight doesn’t overly suffer from stage fright. What she struggles with most as a performer, actually, is being asked what her songs are about.
“That gives me grief,” she says. “How do you talk about what you’ve already said in the clearest possible terms?”
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Boot-Sucking Mud
Knight is still officially based in her hometown of Melbourne, but she has also been spending a lot of time in Lyttleton, New Zealand – the rich musical community that’s long been home to her partner.
“I’ve found that it’s a really good place to generate music and writing and other work,” Knight says. “There’s some convergence happening on the South Island that makes it feel easy to generate stuff. There’s not as many people around, and it’s got a gothic overtone.
“So I’ve been popping over a bit, which has been really good. I needed some space from Melbourne.”
Speaking of space, Knight is also feeling a subtle push away from her trusty autoharp.
“I’d like to put it down, to be honest,” she confides. “At times it can feel like a bit of a knickknack … I think for the next music [I make], I’d like to try something harder and a different way of performing. I wanted to pull away from guitar [before], and now I’m starting to have a similar feeling about autoharp. I’ve got designs on other instruments and other ways of making music.”
The latter may just include pop music, a form that Knight flirts with a bit on Beanpole. (Especially on the bustling beat and higher vocal hits of Desire.)
“I’m looking at pop music out of the corner of my eye all the time,” she says. “I want to see what you can do with it. More and more, pop is just seeming like a really raw form. It’s really inviting.”
As for her upcoming slate of live shows, there are several pinch-yourself moments in the offing. One is doing her launch at Howler, a venue she used to live around the corner from and recalls seeing great gigs at. “I mean, it’s just the classic tale, isn’t it?” she offers.
Similarly, Knight admits to being “pretty stunned about” getting to play Golden Plains in March. She went to the Meredith Music Festival at the same site for the first time two years ago, toiling away at a pierogi stall in order to secure a free ticket. Her highlight of that weekend? Seeing the raucous Sydney punk band C.O.F.F.I.N. in pure muddy bliss.
“I was watching them and both of my boots got sucked off by the mud,” she remembers with a laugh. “It was just fabulous. I loved it. So I’m hoping for that [in March]: thick, boot-sucking mud.”
So she didn’t get her boots back? With signature dryness, Knight responds: “I got one back, but it was pretty useless without the other.”
Georgia Knight’s Beanpole is out now. Tickets to her upcoming tour dates are on sale now.
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Georgia Knight – 2025 Tour Dates
Friday, November 21st – RRR Performance Space, Melbourne, VIC
Tuesday, November 25th – Phoenix Central Park, Sydney, NSW
Thursday, November 27th – Howler, Melbourne, VIC
Beanpole album launch
Saturday, November 29th – The Others Way Festival, Auckland, NZ
Saturday, February 21st – Port Noise Festival, Lyttelton, NZ
Saturday, March 7th - Monday, March 9th – Golden Plains Festival, Meredith, VIC
