How Cash Savage Wrote An Album To Her Grief & A Letter To Her Marriage

"I actually started a band in high school with Nick Finch who now produces the albums. I told myself I'd never be a country musician and we used to joke about it, that we'd become country musicians when we were 25 — at 15, 25 seemed a long time away — and low and behold, I play country music!" Cash Savage laughs over the phone. "I'm dishonest to my 15-year-old self."

Savage grew up in a musical family, with both parents musicians and her uncle being the one and only Conway Savage of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds fame. "I haven't really aspired to emulate many people, but I've always been a big Janis Joplin fan. I love how she phrases and structures the sound of her voice through the lines of her song, and that goes for Patti Smith as well. And Grace Slick from Jefferson Airplane," she adds. "[Joplin] can just go from like zero to 100 in her voice; she'll be doing these little soulful bits and then it just goes into this fuckin' 100% crazy wail without any effort. It's like she doesn't even take a breath in-between."

"Who knows that they want to get married? Not me! I don't know many people that would think about it in this day and age."

Savage and her band The Last Drinks have been touring their third album One Of Us since 2015, and demand shows no signs of waning, just recently selling out Melbourne's Corner Hotel. "It's gotta be a dream, as a Melbourne musician it's on the bucket list," she enthuses.

The album's blues grunt and mellow country tones recounts a difficult period for Savage. "This latest album is much more about grief than anything else... Between me and my partner we knew about four or five people who suicided. I've lost count now. Two of them were quite close, and none of them had anything to do with each other. It was just a weird time. But at the same time I was having wonderful times with the band, and our first international tour, and I got married, so it was quite a juxtaposition of emotions and that's what One Of Us is to me, all those different emotions in one album," explains Savage.

Her appearance at Women Of Letters in April opened Savage up to an entirely new style of performance. "I was very much out of my comfort zone, I don't normally stand and read! I know it probably doesn't seem that different, but it is that different," she muses. "I was quite nervous beforehand. It went really well, there's a lot of love in the crowd. Everyone gets a heads-up that they're not supposed to record or anything, so they set up a really safe space there so you feel like you can really talk about anything you want which is quite nice as a performer.

"The theme this time was A Letter To The Thing I Didn't Know I Wanted, which was a hard theme for me, but I wrote it to my marriage - not to my wife, but to my marriage. Who knows that they want to get married? Not me! I don't know many people that would think about it in this day and age... but then when you get married there's things that do actually change. The way that the world sees your relationship, which is an interesting thing. I dunno. I'm so fucking bored of how politicised my own marriage is, so it feels like a funny thing to talk about."