Lisa Gerrard is an Australian composer and singer as well known for her reclusive, enigmatic nature as her contribution to the band Dead Can Dance and the Golden Globe-winning soundtrack for the movie Gladiator. She has a new retrospective collection out, and is embarking on her first solo tour of Australia. I had the pleasure of interviewing her over the phone. A similar version appears in The Courier-Mail of February 24.
EARTH is very much on Lisa Gerrard's mind these days. The enigmatic Australian singer and composer feels a deep connection to the planet, and fears for its loss in an age of climate change and rampant consumerism.
So it should not surprise that her Golden Globe award came for her work with Hans Zimmer on Gladiator, in which scenes were rooted in the importance of earth. The movie opens with a hand moving across a field of wheat: Crowe's titular character is a farmer who feels the dirt before battle. Totemic gods are buried in the earth of the arena at the conclusion, with the striking Now We Are Free providing the reprise.
Likewise, it makes sense that the Gladiator tracks The Wheat and Elysium open a new collection of her work, simply entitled Lisa Gerrard, and that Now We Are Free ends it.
The collection follows The Silver Tree, a solo album released late last year, firstly on iTunes and then on CD.
``At this stage, we haven't really found an equilibrium with our environment,'' Gerrard says.
``We can coexist with every fragile being here; to live on a planet and be able to flourish beside it.
``That's what The Silver Tree is all about.''
Gerrard is a singular artist - Zimmer says one of the few true artists he has worked with - who both puzzles and enchants with her compositions. Gerrard has plenty to say, but she eschews words, instead using her own language of vocalisations to convey intense emotion, accompanied by a landscape painted using an array of world instruments and stylings, and electronica. The sounds of her childhood in multi-cultural Melbourne are prevalent - Mediterranean and Middle Eastern in particular - and her music covers the gamut, from Celtic to Native American and African.
Her distinctive voice came to notice when she teamed with Brendan Perry to form the nucleus of a musical outfit called Dead Can Dance in 1981 in Melbourne. The band's popularity soared after they relocated to London, where their synthesis of digital technology and European folk, medieval and world music earned them a cult following.
They released nine albums, with both Perry and Gerrard sharing vocal duties. They disbanded in 1999, but reformed in 2005 for a world tour.
Eight of the 15 tracks on Gerrard's new collection are taken from the Dead Can Dance canon. One comes from her first solo album, The Mirror Pool, another from Duality, recorded with Pieter Bourke, and the remainder from her work on soundtracks.
Gerrard's popularity with filmmakers has been climbing since Dead Can Dance scored Baraka. Michael Mann helped break Gerrard in Hollywood when he used her compositions on Heat and The Insider. She has contributed music to a host of movies since: tracks from Ali and Whale Rider are included on her new collection.
Gerrard's relationship with Hollywood has been an uneasy one. She has, her publicity says, turned down work she did not feel to be artistically true.
``My life is changing now,'' she says in a philosophically infused telephone interview. ``I've had this baptism of fire with the movie industry. It makes you feel like you've been thrown into the coliseum.
``As a 45-year-old woman I'm a little shattered from being brave and taking risks."
She says she is inspired by seeing a generation of youth who are environmentally aware, and feels nurtured by her children, with whom she lives on a secluded farm in rural Victoria. ``Children are the very thing that give us the responsibility to do anything, to overcome our selfishness.''
Music, she says, is a spiritual force that can forge a link to the primal, earthly forces that have been subsumed by industrialised, consumerist society.
``Music is an opportunity to daydream: an empowerment of who we are. We should be allowed to daydream whenever we want.
``It can take us out of the fleshy type of object we move around in and get connected with everything.''
Gerrard feels a strong connection with the natural order, and fears for its loss. Technology might give us the opportunity to save the planet, she says, but it can just as easily prevent us from hearing the call.
``Will it take a total loss of everything to make us understand where we are?
``There's more to life than being a blob in front of a plasma screen telling us to come to Harvey Norman.
``Australia is coming of age now. We could be a leading force able to further the interests of those things needed to keep the planet liveable. How irresponsible we are! I love the old concept that we can't eat money.
``We are told what we must have, what we must buy, what we must do. It has so little to do with any deep meaning of who we are.''
She released The Silver Tree on the internet because she sees the internet as an environment where those who love music can find it on their own terms, rather than being shepherded by mass marketing. The internet can be a unifying force in the fight to save the planet, she says.
Gerrard is looking forward to taking her musical message to her native land when she embarks on a solo tour of Australia for the first time later this year.
It is, she says, the first time she has been able to afford to tour here, but there is, not surprisingly, a deeper, earthier reason. It is all about connection. ``I need to play in my own country, to connect with my own turf.''
Lisa Gerrard plays The Playhouse, QPAC, South Bank, on April 5. The retrospective Lisa Gerrard is out now through 4AD.
Lisa Gerrard's website
