ANGIE COLMAN
‘OUT OF THE HEADLIGHTS’
Some songs take time. On first listen they leave you questioning, knowing you need to come back. They reveal their layers, textures and complexity with something like reluctance, as if they don’t wish to overwhelm, as if revealing too much too soon would flood the senses. Perhaps there’s a shyness about revealing their grandeur? Perhaps its deference to the listener, wanting each of us to be free to make up our own minds? Perhaps it’s just that there’s so much packed into their three-or-so minutes that they demand your repeated presence, each listen drawing you in closer until there’s just you and the song and nothing else exists.
“I feel very different from the person I was a couple of years ago.”
So it is with Boorloo/Perth artist, Angie Colman’s latest single, ‘Out Of The Headlights’. When we met to talk about her new release, I made the mistake of telling Colman that, for me, the song wasn’t an instant listen, that I had to work to hear what she’d been up to. Colman was affronted at first, concerned that maybe I didn’t like the song, but then she responded as all artists at the top of their game would.
“I fucking love this song,” Colman countered. “I love this song. I feel like it’s the first song that I’ve ever made. I had a huge hand in the production of it so, unlike every other song I’ve made, this was about trusting myself, trusting what I’m doing.”
Since we last spoke, around two years ago, Colman has become one of Australia’s preeminent original artists, gaining the sort of momentum that will see her support Crowded House on their upcoming Boorloo dates. After that, there are no limits. Glastonbury is still a very real possibility. ‘Out Of The Headlights’ is indicative of Colman’s musical change of gears, it has a sense of growing maturity and insight as a songwriter that Colman has never lacked, but that is now coming through with the deftness and clarity of an artist who has served her apprenticeship and is now ready for everything that comes next.
“It’s quite a vulnerable song,” Colman said, talking further about ‘Out Of The Headlights’. “When I wrote it, I didn’t know what I’d said until I’d said it. It just felt like raw honesty and then, looking back, I saw I was talking about being uncomfortable with having sex with this person, talking about not wanting to show myself, talking about needing someone to comfort me. A lot of it is a bit metaphorical, but when I looked at what I was saying I was like bleugh, that’s so true. It’s embarrassing, in a good way.”
Then Colman went on to say, “Making music can feel a little bit exposing,” with all the leaning towards understatement that makes ‘Out Of The Headlights’ a slow-burn experience that speaks its truth on an almost cellular level.
Speaking about the impetus for her progression — as a woman and as a songwriter and performer — Colman said, “It was it was a really hard year in the lead up to the release. I’ve felt so depressed and so disconnected from people and, releasing this song, I feel like I’m reconnecting. It feels painful because there has been so much chaos in my personal life.
“The song is about meeting someone who is patient and loving, someone who you feel comfortable with because you know you’re going to be accepted with kindness. I’d had a few relationship breakdowns and I just felt so negative about myself. I’d started making new friendships but I was scared to be real around people and was feeling like I had to perform all the time, had to be funny and charismatic and I couldn’t let anyone see that there were levels of stress and fear in me and that I was feeling really down about myself. I didn’t want people to know that’s what was happening.
“Those lines, take me out of the headlights / take me home express the comfort of having someone who sees me for who I am and is not worried about my professional life. Someone who I can fall asleep on the couch with while watching sumo wrestling. Someone who cares about me whether I’m going to be performing the next day, or writing and recording a song, or whatever it is that I do in my job, and just loves me.
“I couldn’t imagine why people would want to be around me,” Colman continued, “but now I do.”
Colman’s journey isn’t uncommon, it’s as timeless as the human experience. What is uncommon, though, is Colman’s capacity to turn her experience into the sort of music that speaks to and for us all. Like a lot of things in Colman’s life, that didn’t come easy.
“I struggled so much at the start of this year,” Colman said. “I’d quit my job, and my plan was just to write music. I was trying to live up to being an artist, quote unquote, but I couldn’t write for the life of me and I felt like, ‘Who am I if I’m not writing music?’ It was quite a painful couple of months. I felt very isolated. I was putting so much pressure on myself and I don’t know why.
“If you’re always thinking about how your life is meant to be, you’re never just happy with how it is, so I spent a lot of time thinking, ‘This is what I want for my life, this is who I should be, this is where I need to go,’ and trying to fulfil this self-created prophesy thing. I never just enjoyed the fact that I was in a position where I was living in a cute house, going to the beach and writing songs.
“I don’t know if it was depression, but it was certainly a period of serious consideration of who I am and what I really want my life to look like, because I had all this free time and so I sat there and I took a good hard look at myself.”
Listening to Colman, hearing and feeling her pain, but seeing it in the context of her progress as an artist and in the glow of the release of the very surefooted and immensely beautiful ‘Out Of The Headlights’, I couldn’t help but see the image of a snake shedding its skin, a painful, unscratchably itchy process that is essential for growth and renewal. As when I suggested that ‘Out Of The Headlights’ might not be an immediate take for everyone, Colman was sceptical about the metaphor.
“I think in that shedding of the skin,” Colman said after a long pause, “I decided that I really needed to accept that that I wasn’t going to change very much and it was going to get harder as I progressed. I’ve got big goals I and I want to achieve them. In the past months, I’ve learned that my identity as an artist doesn’t have to be separated from who I am. My persona as a musician is an extension of me. This person I’m trying to create as an artist is an amplified version of who I am.”
Standing back as an observer, it feels like there is little doubt that Colman will achieve her goals as an artist and, if latest release ‘Out Of The Headlights’ is anything to go by, her creativity and ability to connect with her audience is completely unconstrained. As for Colman the person, it feels very much like she’s been through an extended moment of the getting of wisdom.
Before getting back on her bike to return to her cute house by the beach to either write more songs or sleep off her Saturday morning hangover, Colman parted with this:
“I feel very different from the person I was a couple of years ago.”
As a critic, it feels like Colman also is a very different artist to the one she was a few years ago. Both are good things, first for Colman and then the world.
Angie Colman launches new single ‘Out Of The Headlights’ at The Bird on 30 November with strings by Tender Is The Night and supports from Jack Gaby and Tanaya Harper.
Tickets are available here.
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