Olympia Taps Into The Unfiltered And Unhinged On Her New Album

“When I made Self Talk,” says Olivia Bartley of her 2016 Olympia debut, “we just happened across all these synthesisers on the record. It was quite funny that people thought I was a synth artist. I kept saying, ‘Oh, wait, we’re gonna try something different on each record, just you wait.’ And, now, here’s Flamingo.”

Flamingo, Bartley’s second album, features far fewer synthesisers and far more guitars. While her lyrics and subject matter still carry complexity and depth, this time around the singer-songwriter wanted to make something less heady, more emotional. This was prompted by a simple question: "How do you make a listener feel something?” 

“That opened a huge investigation to me," Bartley says of the central study of the album. "The beginning is obvious: if you want the audience to feel something, then you have to feel something. So, a lot of guitars are forward in the mix, there’s a lot of downstrokes, it sounds more visceral, there’s more of a sense of urgency, almost anxiety... The song Come Back, it’s almost as if those lyrics are being shouted into the wind. They’re like an argument where you’re pleading. There’s nothing passive about the record. There’s no passive lyrics. Everything is strong. Everything is considered.”

"If you want the audience to feel something, then you have to feel something."

Bartley recently got to road-test Flamingo’s songs in advance of its release, touring through Europe supporting Julia Jacklin. It’s a long way from her childhood growing up in Wollongong. “Growing up on the coast, you see the best and the worst of people,” she offers. “You see people bored, that coastal boredom, it’s hard to get jobs on the coast. People can be living in the most beautiful spaces in the world, but not really be using them, really be in them. But, personally, I have a love of nature, which I’m sure comes from growing up where your daily life is shaped by the environment.”

Growing up in a religious family, music was always encouraged, and Bartley picked up the guitar in her childhood. “I never had any lessons, I was always self-taught. It was always a way of trying to recreate what I could hear in my head,” she recalls. “The first song I ever wrote was in primary school, and I had to perform it at school assembly. Could I have been 12? I could probably still play it, off by heart. I think it’s gone deep in there, on a cellular level. It was called Always Keep The Faith. It was in G-major. It was terrible.”

Other than guitar, another obsession was going through fashion magazines, cutting out pages, preserving them in plastic sleeves. She thought that was going to be her future career, if only because music seemed unlikely. “I grew up pretty working class. I thought you had to have a job where you have a regular income,” she remembers. “In the Christina Applegate movie Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead, she becomes a fashion designer, or at least a pretend one. I was obsessed with that movie. So, I think that’s pretty much why I went to uni and studied fashion.”

But, when studying fashion — and falling under the sway of designers like Vivienne Westwood, Issey Miyake, and Hussein Chalayan — Bartley found herself thinking more about music. The comparisons between clothes and pop are apt: each ultra-accessible, omnipresent parts of society, but also artistic vehicles that can be used to deliver deeper ideas. “Everyone wears clothing, and some people take it seriously, some don’t,” Barley offers. “That, in itself, is really interesting. Some people hang all their identity on their clothes. But, there are huge social and cultural issues that underpin fashion. I’d always created, and I’d always kept journals, but it wasn’t until I studied fashion that I really felt committed to music. It shaped my songwriting more than anything else I’ve ever learnt.”

In Olympia’s stage presentation and music videos, you can see the influence; both in Bartley’s literal outfits and in her artistic conceptualism. The latter begins with the simple fact of Bartley adopting her romantic pseudonym. “I wanted to perform under something that wasn’t my name, because I didn’t want to create an autobiographical project,” she explains. “I didn’t want to be a folk artist. I wanted to create art that was bigger than myself. Even with Flamingo, it’s a deeply personal record, but I’m drawing in all these other threads that make it more than me. There’s innovation and fantasy there. I don’t think Olympia is a character.

"Or," Bartley laughs, "maybe she is. It’s more just a way to draw parameters around the project.”

Flamingo is a simultaneous study of grief and love (“grief is a lot about love, they sit side by side”), its influences wide and varied: Francis Bacon’s paintings, Natalie Diaz’s poetry, and two books, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City. All look at both the individual and the cultural; how history connects to the present. Bartley co-produced the album with Burke Reid, challenging herself to learn more about the technical side of recording, while she also challenged herself to make music of more ‘feeling’.

“I did a lot of personal excavation,” Bartley says. “If it were up to me, I’d just love to move to the country, play Tetris, and get fat. But [Olympia] is about pushing myself, and everything we’ve done in this project has been about that. On this record, I did a lot more research about production. I wanted it to feel like an immersive experience for the audience, so I had to read up a bit. I used words in the lyrics on this record that I don’t use in my personal life. I’m trying to tap into the unfiltered, or the unhinged.”