A rising star on the Australian music scene, talented singer/songwriter Tullara Connors recently released her first single of 2020, an exceptionally well-crafted, emotive and powerfully memorable pop-rock masterpiece called 16 Seconds.
It is the first of what will prove to be a prolific year for the young guitarist/vocalist/composer, even in the midst of the Covid-19 lockdown, as she has a string of new music ready to be released, and has committed to doing her utmost to promote these songs through videos, interviews and her social media channels.
“A lot of things are on pause. Everything has been cancelled or postponed indefinitely. I had a few festivals lined up, but they’ve all written to me saying they’ve had to cancel. I was actually meant to be touring the U.S. and Canada with [Canadian singer/songwriter] Sarah Burton in July and August, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. I am just taking it day by day, waiting to see what happens, and putting my energy into release singles at the moment,” she said over Skype at midnight local time in Australia.
There is a significant Canadian connection to Tullara and her music, as 16 Seconds and other forthcoming songs, were produced by noted producer and international artist, Aurora Jane in Vancouver.
“It was going to be a full album originally, but I have decided to split it up and just spread out the music over the next year and a half. Half of the songs were recorded in Melbourne and the other half in Vancouver, so it felt right to split the songs up into kind of two groups. The plan is to release a few more singles and then wrap them up in an EP maybe in September, and then release the second batch of singles, with another EP coming out sometime next year. After that, if I want I can put everything together and maybe add some new stuff for a full debut album release later down the track,” said Tullara, a native of Ramornie, in the northern part of the New South Wales Territory on the eastern side of the Australian continent, between the major centres of Brisbane and Sydney. She currently lives in the nearby community of Grafton.
“Aurora Jane is an amazing recording engineer and producer. She actually did my first EP [Better Hold ON], back in 2016 in Melbourne. She found a Canadian girlfriend and moved to Vancouver, so that’s why I didn’t contact Jane to do my new album originally. I found someone else in Melbourne, but it just didn’t work out. It wasn’t what I was looking for. I was in a situation where I had spent a lot of money for not much of a result. I was talking to Jane one day and she said, ‘why don’t you just come to Vancouver and we will record what you need to do here.’ And I remember thinking, ‘alright, I guess I will start saving money again.’ I did fly to Vancouver and the experience was great. It was great working with someone who is on the same page as you. With the original producer, it wasn’t clicking as a relationship.”
Tullara was a guitarist before she was a singer and songwriter and spends as much time perfecting that part of her craft as she does her voice and compositional talents. Writing almost always begins with her plucking away at her six-stringed companion in search of the right riff, the right melody and the right emotional tone with which to convey what she is feeling.
She believes she has grown significantly as an artist since her debut EP, with countless hours of practice, rehearsal and hundreds of tour dates in the interim.
“Definitely my music is sort of heading in more of the pop-rock direction now, but it’s still got the folk, roots element to it. Lyrically I am always trying to be better. Sometimes when you hear pop songs, there are a lot of generic phrases and what not, so I am constantly trying to work on things that are relatable, but also not what you hear all the time,” Tullara said.
“And my guitar skills are better. My voice is definitely a lot better now, because I was always more of a guitar person back when I first started, so I have been working a lot more on my voice, and also playing a lot more gigs over the last four years. I have been playing an average of three shows a week, just really working on all aspects of my craft. A lot of those shows have me on stage for three hours. Around Australia there are music festivals and venues where you might do a one-hour set, but I also play a lot of gigs at hotels and pubs where you’re doing three sets, each one about an hour long. For those shows I will do 50/50 originals and covers, and that is definitely a workout on the voice, but it’s great at the same time because it’s building up my stamina.”
There is a sense of barely restrained emotion when speaking to Tullara. Whether it’s natural reserve, a protective barrier when talking to strangers or just an outward manifestation of a complex mind and a complicated way of looking at the world [both of which complimentary observations, by the way]. It is obvious, though, that there is both breadth and depth, sincerity and vulnerability to her emotional makeup, which is transmitted through her songs.
“It’s almost always the guitar that comes first. It’s always a riff. With 16 Seconds, for instance, the opening riff was how that song started. Once I find a riff that I like, I start mumbling melodies and that eventually turns into words and once a sentence or two start to come together I am like, ‘okay, that’s what the song is about’, whatever is coming out at that moment. It’s a very strange thing, a weird thing. I don’t sit down and think, ‘oh, I am going to write a song about this or that.’ More often than not, I am just writing what I need to get out, I suppose, like a breakup, heartbreak, that kind of thing. Whatever is upsetting me, or making me happy, is what I want to get out,” Tullara explained.
“I remember I wrote a song about my dad. He died of cancer and I wrote a song called Six Months, which was six months after he died. It was the start of 2014 and he was 62. It was a very quick cancer. He was diagnosed the previous August and was originally given nine to 20 months and then about three months later it had accelerated, so it went pretty quick. It was the first song I had written since he died and I remember when I was writing it, after each line, I would start crying and by the time the song was finished, I had cried a whole lot. I think it was very therapeutic, I suppose, writing that one. It’s on my first EP, which you can still get online.
“Whenever I play it, more often than not, someone will come up to me and talk to me about someone that is close to them who either has cancer or who has died from cancer, which is a very common thing these days, unfortunately. That song actually did quite well for me; it got over one million streams on Spotify, so I guess people did connect with that one.”
Tullara said that song really tipped her off as to the power of music, from the side of the creator of such a compelling and insistently authentic track.
“That’s how I grew up as well. I grew up listening to music and feeling emotions from those songs written by other people that I didn’t know, but I could still connect with, and especially breakup songs and things like that, you definitely can relate to those ones pretty easily. It’s a cool thing to be able to find yourself on the other side and be able to connect with strangers you don’t know at all just by writing about something you have gone through, which is similar to something they also went through,” she said.
16 Seconds is one of the more unique ways of looking at the moment of a pivotal decision or result. It is a time if intense anxiety and confusion, as if one were on the precipice of a cliff in between falling into the abyss one way, or back to safety the other way. In the context of a relationship, everything could be on the line – a person’s heart, soul, spirit and mind. An immediate future of bliss if things go well, an interminable stretch of heartbreak if they don’t – all captured within the wise and revelatory lyrics Tullara composed for this evocative song.
“I was in a relationship, and it was still early days. We were doing a bit of the long distance thing and I didn’t know what direction it was going to go. It was sort of like, ‘are you going to tell me you love me or are you going to break up with me?’ I was involuntarily sitting on the fence, I suppose, and that’s where the song started. That relationship worked out at the time, we were together for two and a half years. We aren’t together now, but that’s okay,” she said, adding that the next single will be the song Let This Go, which is sort of on a related theme.
“It’s about a girl that I fell in love with who had a boyfriend, kind of, but then decided to stay with the boyfriend, and she lived down in Melbourne, so that song is based on that story and how it was kind of over before it began. The next song after that is called Stripper Song. My ex-girlfriend was a stripper, so I spent some time hanging out in the strip club and witnessing how it works in there. It’s definitely a very interesting industry, and the song is written from the stripper’s perspective. The main sort of message is that I am not going to love you like you think you love me. We can hang out and have some fun, but that’s it.
“And that’s because it’s definitely a fantasy land whenever you go into a strip club. It’s a fantasy for a few hours, you have fun and you go home. And it’s the same for the strippers. The song is directed to the people in the strip club and is from the perspective of the dancer and how you’re actually just doing a job and are doing it so well that some guys actually think, ‘yeah, I’ve got a shot.’ But at the end of the day, it’s a business.”
For more information on 16 Seconds and forthcoming releases, as well as any post-Covid-19 tour dates, visit www.facebook.com/tullaramusic, www.instagram.com/tullaramusic, www.twitter.com/tullaramusic or www.tullara.com.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for 30 years. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
