Folk Bitch Trio - In Conversation
Interview & foreword by Beau Croxton
Folk Bitch Trio (left to right— Heide Peverelle, Gracie Sinclair, Jeanie Pilkington) by Copper Taylor-Bogaars
For our next cover story/installment of In Conversation, we present a group that you absolutely need to keep your eyes and ears on— Folk Bitch Trio.
This trio from Melbourne, Australia consists of singer/songwriters (and best friends) Jeanie Pilkington, Gracie Sinclair, and Heide Peverelle. They began their journey at 17, when Pilkington asked if the others would be “interested in starting a folk bitch trio”. Before they even launched their debut record, they were already performing on stages across the U.S., Europe, and Australia supporting artists such as Alex G, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Julia Jacklin and The Murlocs. They recently graced the cover of NME, and their debut LP dropped last Friday to resounding critical acclaim.
Now Would Be A Good Time is a stunning record that largely focuses more on beautiful, lighthearted and approachable tones of the folk genre. They bring a fresh, indie-rock approach that combines heartbreak and humor with the classic and timeless foundations of folk. When more serious moments do arise, they are delivered with an emotional strength and beauty that feels universal, human and beamed from the soul (see “Moth Song”). Now Would Be A Good Time fully immerses the listener in its rich harmonies, and it feels like a much needed exhale– it soothes your soul and calms your mind.
Their debut finds each member passing the torch on their strong songwriting throughout. Each member brings their own perspective and influences to provide each song with its own unique personality. Their friendship flows strongly throughout the music, as they all provide space and support for each other’s personal stories.
The group found the right context for their tunes by recording to tape, resulting in their most natural takes and a beautiful, warm production sound. It makes the record that much more impressive — as it showcases their stellar vocal chops in an organic way. The trio is so locked-in with their harmonies they often feel like one single, angelic entity (...they even finished each other's sentences in our chat!)
Their debut presents their best features to the forefront, by placing their vocal harmonies, chemistry and technical abilities centerstage. The foundation they have made with the record is remarkable, and the band can only expand sonically from here.
They also have such a fun, rock n’ roll approach to their music videos where they allow their colorful personalities run free. The trio often exudes a giddy playfulness in videos like "God's A Different Sword” and it brings a different energy to the calm and soothing indie-folk music that accompanies it. Their latest video, “Hotel TV” includes the band doing handsprings, roller-blading, eating pastries and setting off fireworks— pure fun.
I caught up with our next guests Gracie Sinclair, Jeanie Pilkington, and Heide Peverelle for a fun conversation ahead of their release. We covered their debut, the Aussie music-scene, “locking the fuck in” and all of the incredibly-talented Melbourne bands with kinda-silly band names. Check it out below.
Folk Bitch Trio by Bridgette Winten
BEAU CROXTON: So lovely to see you all today, glad I got to chat with you! So what can you tell me about your musical backgrounds as individuals before you all became “Folk Bitch Trio”?
GRACIE SINCLAIR: I went to a performing arts high school for jazz singing, and then went to university for jazz singing and I was really deep in it. I thought that when I finished uni, I was going to go to New York and do jazz singing– and then that didn't happen. I was fully doing something else and on a very different trajectory.
HEIDE PEVERELLE: We started this right after high school. So I didn't have a lot of background, but I think when I was about 17, I was very into the Melbourne lo-fi jangle-y scene. I thought that I'd be in a bit of a lo-fi jangle band– if I was to do music. But I didn't really see music as the thing that I was going to do…I went to a visual art university (for like five minutes) and thought that that's what I was going to do. But then we started this, and it sort of just became the big thing in our lives.
JEANIE PILKINGTON: Yeah– we started this when we were 17…so having a musical background before that feels almost like a stretch. I also started studying jazz, but I never finished it, because this was just much more compelling as a musical output.
BEAU: Gotcha. Yeah, I mean– that's how all the best bands start… with a small stint in art school/classes and then you do what you really want to do, right?
GRACIE: Yep!
BEAU: So the first time I ever saw Folk Bitch Trio was singing with The Murlocs at their Bittersweet Demons show–
GRACIE: Oh! You were there, in Melbourne?
BEAU: Oh, no – I wasn't there, I saw it online. I checked that out back then and thought “With a name like Folk Bitch Trio, and with voices like that… I gotta keep tabs on them!” It really seems everything has been going so well for you since that moment. I'd love to hear a bit more about the journey from 2021 to this debut a little more. How has that been?
HEIDE: Huge.
GRACIE: That gig definitely felt like a marker for me, in terms of a “level” of gig that we were doing, and that we knew we could do, because that was the biggest show that we'd done at the time. And we were 19. Straight after that, things just got bigger and bigger pretty quickly. Since then, (and since the beginning), we've just kind of taken all the work that we could…. And we have slowly been able to pick and choose, like “We don't want to do that,” and “ Yeah, we wanna do that!” We've plugged away the whole time. We've worked really hard. But it's always fueled by the next thing that makes us feel like we're on a roller coaster… It's been a million crazy moments.
BEAU: Yeah! It's been so exciting to see it all happen. Beautiful album, by the way, congrats on the record…Wow!
(all) : Thank You!
BEAU: I'd love to hear anything about your song writing process for the record. How did you approach the material, you know, as an individual, and then bring it to the other members? Or do you all do it together?
JEANIE: I mean, for this record, because it's our first, I feel like (as is the case for a lot of bands) there was no kind of structured writing process for it. It's just a collection of all of our songs that were good enough to be on an LP, from the last sort of five-ish years. Some of them have been written years ago, and a couple of them were written really close to recording. But for the most part, we still kind of follow the formula of writing by ourselves and then bringing it to the group. And yeah–it changes a lot along the way. But for the most part, it's still mostly written by just one of us, which I think is interesting. And I look forward to how people interpret that when listening to the full length, because it's a pretty even spread of writing across the album.
Folk Bitch Trio by Copper Taylor-Bogaars
BEAU: Are there ever any moments where you maybe think, “Oh, no, actually Gracie would be better at singing this…I'm going to give the first verse to her,” or anything?
GRACIE: I think when you're writing a song, you're probably writing to your own strengths.
HEIDE: It would be interesting to see if we could write a song for each other. I think that would be a fun experiment. But yeah– generally, it's a very individual experience. Even though we're all very much a part of each other's lives. The songs and the subject matter are not really a surprise when we bring it to the group, because we know what's going on in each other's lives. But yeah– it does feel like a very individual thing.
BEAU: What can you tell me about the song “The Actor?” That's a big favorite of mine. I love the way the supporting harmonies kind of swoop into the progression– it's very beautiful.
HEIDE: Thank you. “The Actor”... I wrote the bulk of “The Actor”, and it's based off of a pretty literal situation, but I think generally it’s about the mask you put on when you start dating someone, and how you don't really know who someone is until shit gets hard, I suppose. Until things get a bit difficult and you crumble a little bit. Like most of our songs, it was written on an acoustic guitar. It went through a couple of different iterations. We kind of finished it a couple of times, and then didn't like how it turned out because it sounded a little bit too angry, or something. We changed it and added some fun guitar things. Our producer Tom Healy kind of helped to revive it a bit, because I think sometimes in the studio you can get a bit bogged down by getting into the nitty-gritty of a song. He was very good at creating some space to see it in a different lens. But yeah, that’s the song really!
BEAU: Amazing. That kind of ties into my next question….( points to Gracie) Awesome Amyl & The Stiffers shirt, by the way!
GRACIE: Yeah! They do a really good bit of merch! They don't make this hoodie anymore.
BEAU: Yeah, I think I remember that one. I've been keeping up with them since before their debut on Flightless and I’ve been seeing them here in New York for ages... Speaking of which, Folk Bitch Trio joins a crew of Australian bands with awesome and funky band names like “Amyl & The Sniffers” and “Tropical Fuck Storm”, right?
GRACIE: I think it probably is definitely connected to the Australian–
JEANIE: Sense of humor.
GRACIE: Yeah and also the sense of not taking yourself so seriously. So when you do your first gigs, your friends can't poke fun at you– without you saying, “Well, yeah, we're already poking fun at ourselves.”
JEANIE: It definitely comes from a culture of insulating yourself from being transparently searching for success, or trying to create something that people are gonna like. When you have a band name that is a bit stupid, you can kind of make your music a little bit more serious, and you're still kind of under that facade of being an idiot. When really what we're doing is quite serious and quite calculated. Everything we do, we want it to be very good and we enjoy quality. But I think having a band name that… I mean, some people really love ....and I think it is clever, but it also came from my 17 year old brain, and it is a bit stupid. I think that it is a very Australian thing to have something like that that's sitting at the front of your acts that makes it unserious.
GRACIE: Like “Amyl and the Sniffers” is also a silly drug reference, but they're incredibly calculated and incredibly hardworking, serious business people, especially Amy. Same with “King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard”. But they are some of the hardest working people we know as well!
BEAU: Absolutely! So I had a question about the Aussie music scene. So I recently interviewed Jim McCullough from CIVIC– and I asked him this same question really… I asked “What is it about the music scene in Australia that's nurturing so many great bands to come to light?” And his answer was something like, “You don't really know when you're kind of ‘in it’ yourself”. I would love to hear your perspective on that as well. It feels like….you blink– and then next month, magically, there's another new, incredible band from Melbourne.
GRACIE: I feel like that's true. You don't know when you're “in it.”...You just know your friends are really fucking cool.
JEANIE: I think it's hard to put it down to like, whether it's the culture and whether it's the scene or whether it's not a coincidence, but a collection of talented individuals that could be from anywhere. I mean, in Melbourne, we are really lucky. We have great community radio. We've got great local venues, and there's great people around that champion bands from the start when they know it's good. We've been really lucky in that way, because there's people who booked us for shit when we were 17 that we definitely didn't think we were worthy of yet, but I guess they kind of see what you don't.
GRACIE: There's space for it. Melbourne is not isolated by distance. There's a lot of autonomy, like as a young person… I'm thinking of all the factors that would allow you to enter music as a young kid– you can get around by yourself easily…if you rode your bike or walked, or caught the tram, or whatever.
JEANIE: I think maybe it's an ironic thing to say, but when you're playing in a band in Melbourne, I don't necessarily think that you take it very seriously that it could be your career and success isn't really everywhere in the way that it would be in somewhere like LA where you can kind of start your project with in mind that it's going to become your job. And so I think that maybe with that in mind, a lot of these bands that come out start off with just a real appreciation for being in a band together, and making the music, and not making any money or doing these like big festivals or tours. And I think then, when success does come, it has this really nice authenticity because the people who are doing it didn't really expect it to get there. Maybe that has something to do with it.
Because we definitely feel like that, you know, we never expected to even be necessarily putting out an LP, but here we are.
BEAU: I mean, with all the jazz chops !?! Come on.
(everyone laughs)
BEAU: I mean, I'm listening to this record. I'm like, “Wow…There's no way– they can't be self taught. This is so amazing and technical.”
JEANIE: That's just what it's like in Australia— it doesn't feel accessible. It doesn't feel like a job that you can follow the steps to have. Touring is a hard hog when you're an Australian.
Like… it's expensive and it's far. And yeah, you kind of have to have the right people around you, and be really good– but also you have to get lucky with who happens to find your music and champion you.
HEIDE: I think also in saying all of this–there's a lot of support. But there's also a lot of the opposite. I don't know if you know about ‘tall poppy syndrome,” in Australia. I think for many years we didn't say “we're musicians.” You just say, “ Oh, you know, I do this on the side” because people don't take it seriously. Like even people who are still close to us now.
GRACIE: Even my family. They have no idea.
HEIDE: Yeah, our families. They're like “Oh, are you still doing that little music thing?” I'm like, “yeah…. yep, still doing it”. I think both things exist at the same time because in Australia, a lot of people don't take it seriously. Which I think… Maybe that's a “them” problem.
BEAU: Maybe that's the secret– you just do it, and randomly find success.
BEAU: Well, I'd love to talk about the record more– how was the process of recording the record in New Zealand with Tom Healy?
HEIDE: It was so good.
JEANIE: We had a great time..
GRACIE: We were locked in.
JEANIE: We were locked the fuck in. I don't think any of us have ever been so locked in something in our lives, which is great. Auckland is beautiful, but it's a tiny city. I think it wasn't necessarily part of the decision making process to go somewhere quiet– and somewhere where there's not much to do. But I think that really helped, because all we had to think about and care about was this record. Every single day, we’d go in, warm up the tape machine, then solve the puzzle pieces of our songs, and then go home and sleep and then do it all over again. It was a grueling process, because it's quite confronting to try to come face to face with what you want these songs to sound like…after so long. We've had a lot of trial and error with recording– like EPs that have never come out, and like singles that just didn't quite feel right. It was a confronting process to figure out how we wanted the record to sound, but we did it!
BEAU: It sounds amazing– sounds like tape was the answer, apparently. It's difficult to record a tape as well. You don't get a little cheat code…
HEIDE : Yeah– I think we found that it was kind of the best way for us to focus and lock in because we had to be so, in a lot of ways, considered and present. Maybe it was placebo, but like whatever it was, it worked for us. I think that being so deliberate and being there in the moment was really important for us.
GRACIE: And you also have to disregard your perfectionism. You have to let go of a lot, because you can't do that many overdubs. It's easier. It's so much easier if everyone's just in the room, which is what we would do anyway– but because we're all perfectionists, we would probably go back in and be like, oh, “Let me just drop in for that.” That's how we end up sounding too shiny and too clean and not like ourselves…. if any of us had engineering capabilities, it would be bad!
HEIDE: What a nightmare.
BEAU: Oh yeah. With the perfectionist thing, you know, probably best that you don't…
GRACIE: But you get that with tape is that you just, we just got ourselves as we are. So that's fantastic.
BEAU: Looking forward to catching you in New York next week. What's next for you all? After the record release, what's the plan?
JEANIE: I mean, we're going to be on the road for a long time.
GRACIE: We're taking it worldwide! Yeah!
JEANIE: We just started, basically being on tour for the rest of the year—
GRACIE: Our lives…..For the rest of our LIVES.
BEAU: (laughs)
JEANIE: A lot of that, a lot of touring. And then– you know, always writing songs. Just writing songs and being on the road. It's a simple life…. For two things (laughs) But yeah, hopefully what's next for us, we don't know about yet.
HEIDE: Yeah. That's how it feels. I feel like there's a secret…that we don't even know about yet.
JEANIE: …There's an email with the subject line “Coachella” just inching towards our inbox.
BEAU: Well, it's like Gracie said it before…. Just keep chasing things that make you feel like you're on a roller coaster.
JEANIE: Exactly. We're thrill seekers!
GRACIE: Luck… Luck is opportunity meeting preparation.
HEIDE: Yes!
JEANIE: Word up.
GRACIE: Word up.
BEAU: (laughs) Awesome– dropping truth bombs today. Well, thank you— it's been a joy to speak to you, and I’ve really been enjoying your record. So nice to meet you & we'll catch you in New York. Congrats! Peace Out!
ALL: See you at the show. Thank You! Peace!
