Words by Lily Richardson // photo by Maya Luana
The music industry has been a common thread through my whole adult life. A string I unravel behind me, in case I one day need to find my way back through the labyrinth of living. It’s where I work, where I create, where I’ve made most of my friends and a lot of my memories.
It’s also now the subject of my academic path. I’m researching the Australian music industry in a post MeToo landscape. In doing so, I have been speaking with many different people who are enmeshed in music. To kick these conversations off, I ask them to give me their take on the current state of the industry in general. There’s a pause. A sigh. A “to be honest with you…” Touring is expensive. AI looms threateningly, taking shelter in the shadows cast by streaming platforms. Power is shifting, festivals have been collapsing, regional areas feel musically drought stricken. It seems most bookers are worried about their bottom line before programming a diverse line up.
The industry is changing, unpredictable. But our conversations invariably move on to where people take comfort in music, and one answer that has emerged is community building. I know first-hand that community-making is a salve, because I feel it through the clews world.
Going to local gigs, listening to music we wish we’d made, collaborating with people. The communities I see and am part of in music are beautiful places that often transcend, if not co-exist, with industry pressures.
The past few years of clews have been filled with many such pressure points. Making our team an income, then becoming self-managed and independent, running our small business into the red trying to release and tour music. We’ve been the opener at festivals playing to small crowds and losing money while we were at it, we’ve toured internationally, paid everyone except ourselves, and the opportunities that I once would have pinched myself for started to feel like a dull ache while I began to feel like an ungrateful, spoiled brat.
I felt like we were trying to “make it” but the goal posts kept moving. Grace (my little sister, and the other half of clews) and I do have fully fledged career paths outside of our band, but clews was making me uncomfortable.
I’ve been shifting around in clews like it’s a hard plastic chair in the waiting room of the next phase of my life.
Not a great way to view a creative project that has made so many of our dreams come true.
So this year, I changed my perspective to view clews as a conduit of community beyond being a band, a business, an identity. And I have felt so energised, so creative and so free. The more Grace and I build the clews world, the more I talk to people about my PhD research, the more I realise that music can facilitate a community of connection, support and kindness, and that is the great glue between humans.
Something I love about working in and researching the music industry is that the cultural industries are, I think, sites of social change. As a microcosm of broader society, the creative and cultural industries both reflect and hold a mirror to the outside world. I want my life to imitate my art.
Over the years, we’ve had clews followers tell us that our shows are one of the only places they feel like they can show up as their true selves. We’ve had younger girls at festivals tell us how they noticed we were one of few women acts on a line up, and appreciating us for that. We’ve had people reach out with stories so specific to what we share through our songwriting that I’m reminded we’re all made of the same damn star dust. We’ve snuck fans into industry events by giving them a guitar to carry, we’ve been sent scrawly letters from kids and met people in the strangest places (planes, saunas, greasy spoons and remote hikes) who have listened to our music. If you’re reading this you might even become one of them, which means you’ll be part of this community along the way.
We all have the capacity to create and find communities, just as we have the capacity to alienate and isolate. People like me with privilege and power can learn a lot from the fierce, loving and kind community building done by the marginalised. Like in the music industry, the queer scene has done so much heavy lifting when it comes to the formation of safe spaces, making the industry a better place for everyone. Women, First Nations artists and people of colour continually carve out space for each other and create communities that I see as creative and ambitious, with an eye on the horizon of change. I want to walk the walk of community, which means protecting those I love while trying to understand those who challenge me, because I can. I do not take lightly the creative output that clews casts into the world. I feel a responsibility to feed back the love I have felt from making music.
I think the centre of the clews orbit is our community. The deep, molten core, the truth of our shared realities. There’s a song in that.
