INTERVIEW: Jenny Mitchell on her feminist anthem 'Trouble Finds A Girl': "There's never going to be any change if everyone doesn't get on board."
Aotearoa/New Zealand artist Jenny Mitchell creates music that mixes country, soul, blues, roots and pop into a sonic experience that is warm, emotional and all enveloping.
Mitchell recently signed to record label Cooking Vinyl and has released two magnificent creations - new single ‘Somehow’ and a powerful video for her 2021 single ‘Trouble Finds A Girl’.
‘Somehow’ is a darker slice of Americana pop-rock featuring the banjo and was inspired by a friend’s struggle with mental health. “It’s a reminder to check in with those we care about but also an acknowledgement that there’s often no easy fix for mental health and sometimes all our loved ones need is to know there’s someone walking alongside them, rather than trying to “fix” them,” she says.
‘Trouble Finds A Girl’, featuring Tami Neilson, was first released in 2021 and is a powerful, heartbreaking and extremely important song that was written in direct response to sexual misconduct and sexual assault within the music industry. “Trouble finds girls walking home after midnight…trouble finds a girl and calls that a girl a liar” they sing. “The song is for my younger self, who put up with far too much out of fear that if I didn’t ‘play the game’ I might lose opportunities,” Mitchell explains.
The music video was released on International Women’s Day this year and features Mitchell and Neilson singing with appearances from Mitchell’s mother and younger sisters as a circle of women and male allies form a supportive choir around Mitchell and Neilson as they sing ‘Burn it down / It’s trouble’s time to lose’.
Mitchell has been performing since she was four and placed third in New Zealand’s Got Talent when she was just 14. She specialised in Gender Studies while studying her Bachelor of Arts degree, studying the struggles of women dealing with sexism, which undoubtedly feeds into her lyrics which have an emotional intelligence, empathy and insights into the human experience. Mitchell is maturing into a remarkable artist and this new chapter in her career is looking to be an incredible experience for us all. We recently caught up with her to chat more about her latest music.
Jenny it is so lovely to see you, and oh my god ‘Trouble Finds A Girl’…. what a song! Firstly it so does doesn’t it? There's so much I want to talk to you about this song, but I'm going to start off by just asking you about the song and how it came together?
It's obviously about woman - and all people I guess - who have been impacted by sexual assault or harassment or anything like that. We were thinking about it particularly in a music industry context, but obviously, it's everywhere and it’s universal. Initially, I went into a writing room with Tammy, I've known her for a really long time, and she knows my younger twin sisters, we've always been huge fans of hers. My sisters have just come into the music industry and have started touring with me, and thinking about making their own music. It's so exciting for me, it's such a cool thing to see them go through that. I took them on tour and all of a sudden saw the industry from this whole new perspective. I was like ‘that person is actually making them feel uncomfortable’. All of a sudden I realised that as a young woman I've been touring on my own for years and years, and have been put in those situations so many times, but it's so different when you watch someone you know, that you care about, go through that experience. It became really clear to me that lots of spaces actually aren't safe, and that I wasn't happy, leaving them in certain places on their own. And that's where the song came from.
Do you think it's one of those things we get asked ‘have you ever experienced sexism’ and people will say ‘no’, because we go to the ultimate worst thing that could have happened. And when we talk to our parents about it, our mums might shrug it off and say the same thing ‘we used to get catcalled, we get our bums touched at work’. But when you're seeing it happening to someone young, you're like, ‘this was never okay’.
Definitely, and I've had really interesting conversations with my mum. She doesn't work in the music, she's a real estate agent and obviously it's everywhere, it's an all industries thing and we’ve had really similar conversations, ‘oh, it doesn't really matter’ and I'm like, ‘would you want someone to do that to me?’ And the answer is always no. I'm having this experience where even though that my sisters, it’s watching that next generation of people and it becomes a very different experience and I would like it to not happen!
‘Trouble Finds A Girl’ is such an amazing ensemble. Of course you have Tami Neilson, who has been a huge inspiration and influence to you. How did you come about collating and getting this team of babes together to sing it?
We wrote it in 2021 and the demo had some voices in the background and we both decided at the time that it would be amazing if we could somehow get other musicians and other people involved. So the choir on the track has Fanny Lumsden, who's an amazing Australian artists love very much, Kaylee Bell who is a New Zealand artist and my dad is in there as well. That is very much part of the conversation we're trying to start in the project, you will have seen there are men in the video and we initially thought it would be very much an all woman project, but there's never going to be any change if everyone doesn't get on board. We wanted to put that message in all layers of the song in the video that it's about everybody. There's so much power in men who are calling people out or are admitting ‘I have been part of this issue in the past and I haven't called people out’, or ‘I've known that things have happened and I haven't stood up for these people’. It's good to see those people being part of the conversation so that it’s not all the victims of these awful things that have happened that are doing all the work, and trying to make all the changes. [We need] people in power using the power in a good way.
And you take the the attack and defence element out of it as well. It's such an incredible song, the lyrics do really hit you because we all understand it, but it's also a very welcoming space. You are described musically as alt-folk-country, but there's just so much range in music today. How do you feel about genre and how do you feel that you sit in that proposed genre of alt-folk-country?
I feel it maybe used to be a bit more straightforward, or maybe it didn't maybe people had to put themselves in boxes whereas people don't really care anymore. It used to be if you were a country artist, if you're Patsy Cline, you did Patsy Cline country all the time. It was more straightforward, whereas I feel these days, people like Tami are such a good example in that she is very much country, but she puts in all these different flavours and thank God she does because each album is so different and so interesting. People are much more accepting of going along that journey now with people and seeing what comes next. I'm probably the same in a sense that I'm always listening to new music, and I'm always inspired by new music so I would hope that I will continue to evolve my sound. I don't want to album one to sound like album two and so on. The label thing is so interesting, because in New Zealand, I would be considered quite country, but in Australia where I've spent lots of time touring, and at country festivals I'm the folk one. It's so funny that just doesn't really translate, we just don't have as big of a population in New Zealand and the folk country world is growing but it's still quite small so people's understanding is a bit narrower. So I just put folk in alt-folk-country and hope for the best!
Music, you play music!
A lot of people are saying singer songwriter is now their genre, and that makes sense. But in saying that I am really proud to be a country artist but in New Zealand we're still sort of educating people that country music is cool, and country music doesn't always sound like a banjo and a yodel. I'm proud to fly the flag a bit and show it's much more diverse than that.
I guess people who don't listen to it, their assumptions of country are either very old notions that their parents considered country, or it's very conservative American country. And a lot of artists such as yourself coming out of Australia or New Zealand, are a younger generation and it's a rockier sound or it's a poppier sound, and that might possibly be the window where people go ‘does this still mean it's country?’
Yeah, every show I play without fail, someone will say ‘I really don't like country music, but I really like what you do’. You're right. It's what you listen to, so if they're exposure is a lot of American boy country, beers and trucks,, I like some of that as well, and that's cool, but it’s not really what I think of when I think of country music. I think of Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris and people like that. Even though they are just so not niche, I feel like it almost is the southern hemisphere’s understanding of country music. It seems wild that Emmylou Harris would be niche, but I think to the average person, it’s either that really old western sound, or trucks and beers and girls.
You've got this amazing way of writing that is both incredibly personal and also empathically puts yourself into someone else's shoes. You did it with ‘Somehow’, and also ‘Let Me Be’, which was inspired by your parents getting together, which I think is beautiful. As a creative, it must be incredibly cathartic. How do you go about those different perspectives when it comes to songwriting?
I love writing about my perspective on the world, but often find other people's perspectives more interesting. My understanding of the world is always within the lyrics, I'm never going to be able to only see it through, you know mum’s eyes or dad's eyes. From a writing point of view, I find it really cathartic, and also a challenge. It's something different to think about. One of my favourites to play still is a song called ‘Ends Of The Earth’, which is about my mum's parents who came from Ireland in the 50s and moved to Gore. I knew the story of them for a long time, all the little details of how they got on the boat and what happened. And then I went to Ireland when I was 18 and I really started to understand that obviously, it's so far from New Zealand and I was like, how could they have left this all behind? This is horrific, this is the most heartbreaking thing I've ever seen. Yet my songwriter self really enjoys delving into the ideas of what my granddad would have thought in 1957, it’s very interesting for me to explore. There’s details that like in ‘Let Me Be’, and there's been a couple of times I’ve played it live when mum and dad have been there, and they've felt kind of funny about it. Now they're happy, very happy to be the subject of the story, but initially, it must have been quite a funny experience.
‘Somehow’ is about watching mental health and struggle, and the person that it's about is remaining anonymous, that is part of protecting her privacy. Everybody should talk about mental health more, but it's not my job to be telling everybody how she was feeling. By writing from my perspective, and keeping her anonymous allows me to write about these things and talk about these things that are very important to me. Initially that song was not written for the purpose of spreading any message. I wrote it and then sent it to her and I didn't think it would be something that would come out into the world, but it just has turned out that way and I'm really glad that it has because it's something that's really important to me. It's an interesting experience, when you're not just writing about yourself, and you're not the only one impacted by what you're saying.
Have you always written in hand with performing, and when did you know that this is what you wanted to do?
Yeah, I have been performing since I was four years old and I'm really grateful for that. My dad is a singer, he always played music and still does. He got me singing from the get go, I started singing with him on stage and eventually started singing on my own. Having that foundation has meant I've never had to deal with being uncomfortable being on stage like a lot of people go through. It was so inbuilt in me that it’s probably where I feel the most confident compared to other parts of my life. It’s just part of me. I started writing when I was about 11, which went hand in hand with getting guitar, that was the seed. I sang for a long time, went to some singing lessons, tried to learn piano failed, tried to learn violin and failed. Tami was very much part of [launching a music career] because I saw her at about the age of 10, she was standing on stage with a guitar and I was like, ‘ah, that's cool’. I really identified with this girl with a guitar type thing. Once I heard that guitar, I felt like I could start writing my own stuff. I wrote about heaps of different types things and since then it’s very much my therapy, my coping mechanism for the world.
I love that, the girl and the guitar. It’s so important to have those role models there, because just by seeing that, look where you are. The more representation and the more inspiring women there are out there, the more we're going to see girls coming out with their own guitars and music. Lastly, before I let you go, what's coming up for you?
I'm excited about the next few months, there's more music coming in only a couple of weeks actually, which is really exciting. A song that is inspired by a woman who lived a bit before my time, Lucille Ball from I Love Lucy, which is a bit of a throwback. It's very much about woman and different decades and what we wish for and jealousy and things like that. it’s song I've had written for a couple of years, really excited to put that out finally. Then there's more music coming after that, touring is a little bit funny at the moment, but hopefully I'm going to have some shows in June. Really looking forward to doing the thing that we do all of the admin for, rather than just doing the admin! Really, really excited about this year and keen to just get out on the road and see real people in real life, that would be nice!
‘Somehow’ is out now via Cooking Vinyl Australia. You can listen here.
’Trouble Finds A Girl’ is out now. You can listen here.
To keep up with all things Jenny Mitchell you can follow her on Instagram and Facebook.
