Lisa Mitchell – Bio
By Clementine Ford

“I recommend supporting your own unraveling.” 

So urges Lisa Mitchell in her meditative anthem ‘Supporting Your Unravelling’, a sophisticated and mature attempt by an artist to understand her place in the world. It’s one of many similar devotionals that feature on Mitchell’s fourth album, a glorious and heartrending tribute to what it means to be alive and learning in that same world - to have been old enough to feel its bruises and heartbreaks, but also be at the beginning of understanding our own individual insignificance within it. This is a work that manages to be both wide reaching and transformative in its exploration of what it means to be alive, and yet still feel like it speaks directly to how important the smallest of moments can sometimes feel. 

We have a collective cultural memory of Mitchell as a teenage girl appearing on a reality television show, but she has grown so far beyond the hesitancy and insecurity of youth. Culture itself readily positions women’s prime as coinciding with lack of age and experience, but as Hannah Gadsby observes in Nanette, there is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself. At 31, and with six years between albums, the shift from ingenue to powerful truth teller and weaver of magic is complete. It’s a transition that calls to Mitchell’s Celtic origins, whose roots can be seen, heard and felt across her latest body of work. This is an album that breathes, and a listener can almost sense Mitchell’s ancestors breathing alongside it.

And so we return to that line: ‘I recommend supporting your own unraveling’. Ostensibly a specific direction to the listener to unlearn the legacy of white privilege that exists within white settlers on stolen Aboriginal land, it is also a plea for surrender. Surrender what you think you know about history. Surrender what you think you know about power. Surrender what you think you know about yourself.

This theme of embracing humility and dismantling oneself in order to grow and do better in the world is the clarion call of Mitchell’s work. When she returned to Australia after years spent living in London, she committed herself to learning about her own place as a settler in Australia, and her responsibility to address that not just in her work but in her daily practice of living. She enrolled in Indigenous Studies, learning about the languages, history and traditional Cultures of the lands she was striving to tell stories on. Motivated by this unraveling of self, she began to explore her Celtic history and to study the Scottish Gaelic of her ancestors. 

To unravel a thing doesn’t mean to destroy it or even to separate it into a million pieces. An unraveled object becomes a singular piece, stripped bare of the artificial shape and form it held before. Unraveling is the precursor to rebuilding, a transition that can and should be done intentionally. In this album, the listener can hear Mitchell’s attempts to be deliberate about her humanity and her choices. Her passion for climate justice rings through clearly, but so too does the way she honours her own integrity as a woman. In ‘Thank You’, she thanks an ex lover who ‘broke my heart awake’. This ability to reflect on the more painful aspects of existence and see within them the opportunity for rebirth is characteristic of Mitchell’s wise storytelling capacity.

There’s a synchronicity to the fact the bulk of this album was written and recorded during the first year of a global pandemic that forced everyone’s lives and spheres to become very small and very still. There is a languidness to the work that feels dreamlike, provoking long buried memories that may be real or may just feel real enough. 

Once you’ve allowed yourself to be unraveled by Mitchell, you’ll want to return again and again.

Zombie

A Place To Fall Apart

Let Your Body

Let Me Stay Here

Supporting Your Unravelling

Apricots

As Love

I Believe In Kindness

Dreaming, Swimming

She Is Of The Earth

Blue

Summoning

Quickly scrawled on the back of a receipt during a summer break with her family, Wah Ha began as a rebellion against the pressure to always feel ‘OK’.

“When I play Wah Ha to people, I notice a certain kind of lightness fills the room. The lyric takes some weight off my shoulders. Even with the new album on the table I just couldn’t wait any longer to make contact again... Releasing ‘Wah Ha’ makes me feel a bit like ET reaching his finger out into the abyss, hoping to find another…”
http://thelisamitchell.com
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#wahha #lisamitchell

Wah Ha

Recorded Live Taken from It’s Coming On Christmas, available via iTunes: http://po.st/itscomingonchristmas

All proceeds go to coppafeel.org

Catch Lisa live in 2016

January
27th Birmingham Ort Café
29th  Durham Old Cinema Laundrette 

February
3rd  Newquay  Whiskers 
4th  Perranporth  The Watering Hole 
5th  Mount Hawke  The Old School Bar & Kitchen 
At Crypt Studios

The Coldest Night Of The Year (feat. Georgia Fair & Anita Lester)

Wonder

Neopolitan Dreams

Clean White Love

Coin Laundry

Warriors

Sidekick

Warhol

Warriors official release for the rest of the world (Uk/Europe/USA) will be APRIL 14TH!

The Boys (2017 Mix)

Lisa Mitchell - Neopolitan Dreams

Lisa Mitchell - Coin Laundry

Pirouette

Lisa Mitchell - Pirouette

Love Letter

Romeo and Juliet (Triple J Like A Version)

Lisa Mitchell - Oh! Hark!

Like every kid born a stones-throw of 1990, it goes without saying that I have watched every episode of, ‘The OC.’ Therefore it is a high-school dream-come-true to have made my own version of the theme-song of the series, ‘California,’ by Phantom Planet. 🌴🎧👽 x

Produced and mixed by Ant Whiting
Photo Jane Stockdale / Art Jessica Holmes

California

Stop

The brand new single from Lisa Mitchell - Spiritus. Available now on ye olde iTunes. 

Lisa Mitchell - Spiritus

Bless This Mess, the single, inspired by the household saying you often see cross-stitched and hanging on a Nanna’s wall, is the follow-up from Lisa’s uplifting Spiritus EP that was released earlier this year. Featuring Lisa’s trademark lyrics and melodies, Bless This Mess also sees her rock out like never before. Both Bless This Mess and Spiritus will feature on Lisa’s sophomore album, released October 12th in Australia.

Lisa Mitchell - Bless This Mess

23rd September - Reeperbahn, Hamburg / London 25th September Bush Hall / 1st October - 7 Layers Festival Amsterdam, Holland

Lisa Mitchell

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