It's not like she was lazy.
Holly Throsby made six albums in seven years including a highly praised children's album, See!, which she won't play for her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter Alvy.
![Holly Throsby has released <i>After a Time</i>, her first album since 2011.](/web/20170214074515im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/c/l/l/h/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gu8a0e.png/1487046942311.jpg)
"I should play her my record but I feel weird," she says with a look of embarrassment. "I don't really want to listen to it together."
All those albums were minor gems of hushed singing and oblique but intense feelings. An English major arts graduate who did her time behind the counter of a Balmain video store, Throsby started as a reluctant performer. Singing was simply the best way she could get her songs out, not her choice of career, but she loved the craft of songwriting.
In that intense early burst, she was nominated for ARIA Awards, toured widely, recorded in the USA and on the NSW south coast, and made an album with two other singer-songwriters whose talent outstripped their profiles, Sarah Blasko and Sally Seltmann, as Seeker Lover Keeper.
Then nothing for six years. Complete silence. Not just no releases but not even the thought of making music again.
Instead, Throsby was writing her debut novel, Goodwood. Set in a fictional south coast town, it was part murder-mystery, part coming of age story and part drily humorous multiple character study.
She had Alvy and a partner, Zoe, a dog she dotes on and she found that writing long form fit "my personality and my sensibility". Nothing else seemed necessary.
"I found when I was writing Goodwood I was so immersed in that fictional world that I wasn't interested in music at all," Throsby says, stabbing at a pile of coleslaw in the back garden of a Redfern pub.
"I did for a time shut that part of myself down. I had a quite powerful feeling against music and I was at a loss."
This sense of loss, of disconnection with the idea of making music, was evident to those who spoke with Throsby in the year or so after her previous album, Team. There was no satisfaction: she was tired from touring and felt "musically quite depleted". Writing, playing and recording "was all connected for me to negative feelings".
"I felt like I had lost my feeling for it," she says now. "Then writing fiction I found I could say whatever I wanted to. I could do anything."
Yet it was the completion of that novel that reignited an interest in making music. Not just an interest, but almost a fever.
Deep into a late and final draft of the book – an editing process others complain about but she found hugely enjoyable – with a fresh baby in hand, she started thinking about music for the first time in years.
"I remember reading through the final edit, the very, very last thing to do, and when that was finished I had this wonderful sense of achievement and completion and I suddenly thought, great let's get back to music. I had this dying passion to make a record … I became very excited about it and was all fired up."
Throsby started writing to add to a handful of old songs, including the wistful-yet-hopeful Aeroplane, which became the second single from the new album, After A Time.
"They all came together and just popped out," she says, laughing. "It was really exciting, I think that's why I was so impatient to get into the studio. I was annoying. I was calling people in the band, hurrying them along and wanting to do this. It was like recording my first album in a way."
What had changed? "When I came back to it I found I didn't have to think about it."
Oddly enough for someone often seen as cerebral and a little distant, with a minimalist singing style that suggests emotions kept in check, music's appeal for Throsby is that it doesn't engage the brain first.
"After I wrote the book it made me think a lot about the purpose of a song. What's the point of a song as opposed to the point of fiction or prose or poetry?" she says. "A song to me now feels more like an offering. Because it's necessarily small compared to a novel or other longer forms, it's an offering in the sense of saying here is a fragment, or a moment, or here is a feeling, and that's it, that's all it has to be."
The songs that mean the most to her are those she came up with quickly rather than labouring over. They came from a "feeling place, a sensory thing", not an intellectual place. Throsby, who confesses she is happily prone to intellectualising in other areas, enjoys this simplicity.
Amid the flurry of activity in her music career, she is also working on her second book, and remains as much a student of songwriting as novel writing.
That goes back to early hushed minimalist heroes such as Will "Bonnie 'Prince' Billy" Oldham, with whom she sang on Would You? in 2008, and Mark Kozelek of Sun Kil Moon, who sings with her on What Do You Say, a quietly powerful song of marital malfunction on the new album.
It also applies to her Seeker Keeper Lover bandmates who are working with her on songs for a new album. Last time around, Blasko, Seltmann and Throsby brought their own songs, which were sometimes sung by one of the others. This time, they have set themselves the target of writing everything together.
It's been something of an eye-opener for Throsby, who hasn't had much co-writing experience, especially compared to Seltmann who has forged a successful career between Los Angeles and Sydney as a writer of choice for people like the Bangles' Susanna Hoffs.
"It felt like the right thing to do," says Throsby. "We wanted to evolve the idea of being a band and being cooperative."
It's a reminder of something else that separates Throsby the novelist from Throsby the musician, or perhaps what appeals enough to make the novelist not want to give up being a musician: company.
"I love singing now. I love singing with other people," she says. "It's such a great feeling."
After A Time is out now. Holly Throsby plays the Clarendon Guesthouse, Katoomba, March 9; Newtown Social Club, March 19, hollythrosby.com.
HOLLY THROSBY PRODUCTIONS
Albums
On Night (2004)
Under The Town (2006)
A Loud Call (2008)
See! (2010)
Team (2011)
Seeker Lover Keeper (2011)
Novel
Goodwood (2016)