Genevieve Maynard: First Eleven.

Genevieve Maynard plays the Gollan Hotel, Lismore on Thursday, The Healer on Friday, the National Hotel, Toowoomba on Saturday and the Great Northern Hotel, Byron Bay on Sunday.

Genevieve Maynard found her solo career on hold after being drafted into the ranks of Stella One Eleven. While the band has some downtime, she’s well and truly back on track, and her acclaimed debut EP has now been trumped by the release of Ghost Notes, her well overdue full-length album.

“It feels fantastic to have it finished. It’s been a long labour, and to have it finally done and to be able to go out on tour with an album and a band is just a brilliant thing. I’m feeling very professionally and personally fulfilled at the moment.”

Is it a different sensation to when you completed work on the last Stella album?

“Totally different. Even though I’m really heavily involved in Stella and I love it, got involved because I was asked to produce, and they needed another guitarist. But for me it’s doing somebody else’s music. When I was asked to produce I was already working on my solo stuff, and writing my own tunes, and I had to put that on hold. It’s a great feeling of satisfaction to be able to do it finally.”

Do you try to record everything you’re working on to keep a musical sketchpad of your ideas?

“I used to use a tape recorder before I had a studio, but then I got sidetracked into the studio thing. While it’s a fantastic tool to have and it’s a great way to build a song up, I’m getting back into a mini disc thing because you can get that immediacy of listening back straight away. With the studio because you can make it good you try to make it good, and that interferes with just writing.”

How do you know when enough is enough when you’re working in the studio?

“My general philosophy is that what you leave out is as important as what you put in, which I guess applies to many areas of life.”

Is the notes you leave out being as important as the note you include where Ghost Notes as an album title came from? I guess it’s a musical note that implied but not actually scored or played…

“You know you’re the first person that knows what a ghost note is. I like it because it’s a pun to me. To a non-musician it could be a note written by a ghost, or a memory of a note or something like that. It wasn’t a conscious reference to leaving things out. I was worried about what to call the album, and I just liked it.”