Silver service
Long considered one of the finest of Australia's contemporary pop songsmiths since her days as New Buffalo and through her more recent jaunt alongside Sarah Blasko and Holly Throsby in Seeker Lover Keeper, Sally Seltmann is spruiking her latest album from her new home in the hip Los Angeles neighbourhood of Silver Lake.
Seltmann moved her family over to the historic locale late last year to get a little closer to the action as a songwriter for hire, a business that certainly picked up after she wrote the Feist hit 1234 in 2007.
"It's been really amazing since moving to LA just in terms of how many other musicians from all around the world are based here making music," she says.
"There's a really great positive energy in the air and in a lot of people's outlook and attitude in creating art and music, so I'm really inspired by that."
Before the Seltmann family packed their bags, she completed the newly released follow-up to her Australian Music Prize-nominated 2011 album Heart That's Pounding in the attic of her Sydney home.
For the first time in more than a decade, the multi-instrumentalist enlisted the help of her husband Darren Seltmann, best known for being in the Avalanches, to produce the record.
"He produced my very first New Buffalo EP, which was a very long time ago," Seltmann explains.
"We just kind of decided that we would work together on this album, Hey Daydreamer. It was good having his creative ideas and brain to be part of the project."
One of the first tastes of the finely crafted album came out in the incredibly infectious Billy, a tragic love story. The story told in the song is one that many couples in long-term relationships can relate to.
"I wanted to ask how much freedom do you give your partner in a relationship, and does that kill the relationship or is that what keeps it alive," she ponders. "So I just made up this story of this woman who loves her partner so much that she let him do really dangerous things and then he died but she still loved him with open arms and was proud of it."
Last seen in Perth under her solo guise when she opened for Bon Iver at Red Hill Auditorium in 2012, Seltmann hopes to return to WA later this year.
Channel Seven
