CARLA GENEVE

Words: Joseph Maranta

Last Sunday marked the seventh anniversary of Greg’s Discount Chemist, Carla Geneve’s debut single. An indie rock banger steeped in Australiana; it bore witness to Geneve’s arrival into the Australian music scene. Having raised the bar to an audacious height, her eponymous EP would follow and would not disappoint.

Though barely old enough to grab an Emu Export at Six Degrees, her prodigious talent as a singer-songwriter couldn’t have been more obvious. From the dulcet I Hate You (For Making Me Not Want To Leave The City) to the euphonic crescendo of the odyssean Juliette, her first EP paved the way for one of the most consistent discographies in Australian music.

Her subsequent albums Learn to Like It & Hertz (released in 2022 and 2023 respectively) represent two sides of Geneve’s artistry. The former, a laborious pursuit of perfection which presents itself as a cathartic expression of her personal turmoils and triumphs, and the latter, a stripped-back effort conceptually born from a bi-polar diagnosis but permeated with a distilled confidence in her artistry and self-identity.

Now seven years removed from her first single, Geneve has become an ornament of Western Australian music.

It is a sincere pleasure to present our interview with her.

JOE: Thanks for doing this interview Carla! So awesome to chat to you. So you’ve just come off a string of shows opening for Troy Cassar-Daley and Tyler Childers, how was that experience?

CARLA: So Sick! I opened for Troy three times last year, and it was really special to see just how much time he had for everyone. He cared so much about each show and you could see the belief he had in how much people connected with his music. 

I opened for Tyler the other day, and it was fantastic, probably the biggest show we’ve done. There were thousands of people in Kings Park in Perth and it was the first show the band and I have done in a while, so it was a cool way of getting back into things!

JOE: How involved are you with Country music in Australia?

CARLA: I love country music, it’s probably 50% of what I listen to on a daily basis. But when I listen to ‘real country’ like George Jones or Willie Nelson, I feel as if I’m not living up to the country title.

JOE: How old were you when you realised you wanted to be a singer-songwriter?

CARLA: I wrote my first song when I was 13, after learning the guitar a year prior. I had to sing during my guitar lessons and I hated it so much, I’d usually cry after being made to sing. I wasn’t good at it originally, I couldn’t hold a pitch and really just wanted to keep playing guitar. I was nerdy and quiet as a kid, I’d just read books at lunchtime. 

I did a concert when I was 13 and everyone was like “wow that was really good!” and I didn’t really know how to react to that. But I just kept going for whatever reason and it naturally felt right. I really just fell into it, it wasn’t a question in my mind if I wanted to become a singer-songwriter or not. 

JOE: And how did you meet your stage band?

CARLA: So I’ve got Duncan Strachan on bass, he used to manage Mojo’s in North Fremantle - an amazing music venue, probably the best in WA in my opinion. Bryn Stanford is on the drums, and he’s an all round legend. I was introduced to him through Dan Caroll who makes my records. And then finally there’s Luke Dux who I’d say is my favourite guitar player in WA. The first time I saw him would have been when he was playing in Kill Devil Hills, which is one of my favorite bands from Perth. And I was just blown away. I remember breaking a string at a gig once and he lent me his SG. And I was like, “this is the best moment of my life. This is so cool!” 

JOE: You released your debut project in June of 2019, how do you reflect on it now after so much time has passed?

CARLA: I was doing some thinking about this yesterday actually. As artists we can be pretty bad at reflecting as we’re often looking towards the future, but I’m so grateful for all the places that project took me. It was when I first started touring and the first time I was committing to being a musician as a job. 

I still really like the songs on that record, I almost wasn’t thinking about what I was writing, like I was only 18 when I wrote Juliette. So reflecting on that, I think it was so raw and very ‘me’, and I think that’s something I’ll treasure forever, I don’t look back on it and imagine what I could’ve done differently. 

JOE: So following the ‘Carla Geneve’ EP, you released two full-length albums in two years. So how difficult was it to make so much music in a short amount of time?

CARLA: I found ‘Learn to Like It’ quite hard, because it was around the time I was becoming conscious of what I was doing. I remember knowing what I wanted very clearly, I became quite a perfectionist during the creation of that album. Getting it to sound exactly how I wanted was very hard, and quite stressful. 

With Hertz, I knew that I wanted to approach it quite differently, I didn’t want to have the same mindset. I think being in a studio is a skill just as much as playing live is a skill. When you’re playing in front of people you’re trying to create a moment for others, but in the studio you’re trying to capture a moment. It can be confronting if you overthink that factor, because that moment will last forever, it becomes locked. I was trying to let go of that fear, and I think I did it well because I’m very happy with Hertz. It captured a particular time in my life. 

JOE: Your hometown of Albany seems to continuously produce incredible creative artists and musicians. Have you been keeping up with the current crop of musicians?

CARLA: I haven’t lived in Albany for about 8 years so I always feel odd going back home. There’s a band called The Bures who I went to high school with and I love their music so much, it’s the type of music I’ll usually listen to at home by myself. 

I also played with Alison Parade when I was in Albany and it’s great to see those guys still doing it. 

JOE: You’ve just completed a solo-acoustic tour across the country, what is it about acoustic shows that you enjoy so much?

CARLA: I always end up talking with a crowd so much more when it’s just me. People who come to those shows are so great, and I’ll usually just ask the crowd what they want to hear and I’ll play from there. There isn’t as much rehearsing when it’s just myself on stage. The people who come to the shows, they’ve come all this way and they’ve listened to my music so it ends up being like, 

“I’ll play anything, what do you want to hear? I’m here for you guys.”

With the band it’s so beautiful to sink into a moment with the guys. We don’t rehearse much because they’re so skilled, so it isn’t insular necessarily, but you’re participating and communicating with the band mainly. 

JOE: You’ve stayed in Perth for the majority of your career but I’m sure there would have been some motivation to move eastward at some point. So what were the factors keeping you at home in the west?

CARLA: I love living here, all of my family is in WA too which is very important to me. I think I just never got around to it to be honest. It might’ve been a better move for my career to go east because flights across the Nullarbor are so expensive!

But I’ve travelled so much with my music - I’ve been able to see so much of the country without having to move which I’m so lucky to have experienced. 

JOE: As some of your Instagram followers may know, you’re a prolific scroller of Instagram Reels. Has there been a particular trend or video which has tickled your fancy lately?

CARLA: My friend Shaun and I have been very into this animal called a Hyrax - it’s like a capybara but smaller and more menacing. They’re a little rock creature that lives around the Middle East and Africa. There’s a great edit which features a System of A Down song superimposed with a Hyrax doing a screech, I’d recommend that everyone should go and watch that. 

JOE: And would you say that right now you’re in a writing or producing stage?

CARLA: I’ve almost finished a new record which is very exciting!

But I’m still writing all the time because I just love writing music. I just hate not being in a studio because it feels like I’m wasting time. I’m trying to keep things upbeat after Hertz, which was a bit more downbeat. I’m a sucker for depressing ballads, so I’m just trying to pick things up. 

JOE: And just finally, are there any young musicians across the Australian scene who have been catching your eye?

CARLA: Anna Schneider is fantastic, she’s a singer from Fremantle. Bronte Alva as well from Sydney, I want to give a shout-out to her definitely. 

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