Words and music combine to create art and here. Despite the long-winded album title, Natalie D-Napoleon has demonstrated that she is gifted at translating ordinary lyrics into poetry and frankly you’d expect nothing less from a woman who was awarded a national poetry prize, offered a scholarship for a PhD in Poetry, then combine this with her musical and song-writing talents.
A one word album title wasn’t going to make the cut – hence twelve words are stringed together to make up the title ‘You Wanted to Be the Shore But Instead You Were the Sea.’
Spanning oceans and continents apart, D-Napoleon spent a decade writing and performing in California before returning to her native Western Australia. Performing in pubs to international festivals, she was on the verge of giving up on her musical career but decided to give it one last shout out along with her American band.
We are grateful she did as this latest album is well worth the time, energy and resources that went in to making it happen. It’s been eight years since the last album ‘Leaving Me Dry’ was recorded in Santa Barbara. There she set up home and wrote fluently, mostly on the front porch of her old Santa Barbara home, until an album formed inside her head, since honed to perfection by her four piece band in an old wooden chapel in the hills behind Santa Barbara. Armed and dangerous with just a microphone and instruments, in a form of experiment to see what would happen.
The aim was to capture the beauty and spontaneity of each song’s performance when it was still fresh and new, with the joyfulness that comes from unbridled creativity. A sonic, almost sacred beauty that resonated with all the musicians involved, and merged to make this album a joy to listen to from beginning to end.
She originally released the album via Bandcamp. It began taking traction with Radio Australia playing the first single and opening track, the powerful and memorable ‘Thunder Rumor’, enthusiastically adding it to playlists across Australia. The second single, the beautiful ‘Wildflowers’, helped drive the album up to the top of Australia’s AIR Independent Albums Chart, with rave reviews from critics across the antipodes.
With a grant from the Australian government, Natalie D-Napoleon is now able to release this cherished album internationally, via her own imprint, First Blood Recordings.
The album is a sea of sound that’s wild, gentle, ferocious, melodic and melodramatic all at the same time. It has many qualities, but first and foremost, it is a quality work of art.