Carla dal Forno.
credit: Sanjay Fernandes
When the Australian indie singer-musician-songwriter Carla dal Forno started work on her fourth solo album, she initially wanted to make an abstract work in which she didn’t have to talk about her personal life. However, it didn’t turn out that way because the songs she was writing at the time didn’t connect with her, or she couldn’t tell what they were about.
But amid this creative block came a breakthrough one day, when dal Forno was at home just mucking around and not even trying to write a song. “I was strumming some chords on a guitar,” she recalls. “Something clicked, and I thought, ‘Oh, this is really has got a mood about it.’ The words to “Going Out” started coming out of my mouth. The song basically wrote itself. And I thought, ‘Okay, I’m going to have to reimagine what this album is about because this feels quite personal.’”
Dal Forno’s new album — her first since 2022’s Come Around — is the appropriately titled Confession, whose intimate and introspective lyrics complement her otherworldly dream-pop sound. Perhaps adding to Confession’s chill vibe is that it was recorded in a studio housed in a partially abandoned hospital.
“I live in a small country town in rural Victoria, a couple of hours away from Melbourne,” says dal Forno. “About 30 years ago, this hospital was decommissioned and they moved to another site. Since then, they’ve turned it into a space where artists and other practitioners can hire studios. But the infrastructure seems like it hasn’t been touched since the ’70s, honestly. There are orange and yellow walls, peeling paint and dusty carpets. So it’s kind of creepy, but playful as well. It’s a really interesting space.”
The aforementioned “Going Out” was the first song dal Forno wrote for Confession, which conveys the narrator’s unrequited feelings or obsession for someone, indicative of the album’s themes of melancholy, tension and yearning. “I had someone in particular in mind when I wrote the song,” she says. “I was really interested in exploring that feeling of your emotions completely taking over, where you’re not governed by reason or logic anymore. It’s the feeling of pursuing what you need or something.”
Relatedly, the album’s title song expresses frustration of being ignored by someone you like. “I think some people might be able to relate is that when you feel like you become fixated on someone and they seem like they’re distancing themselves, your fixation can increase… I really enjoyed writing that song because I think there’s some humor in it for me.
“This word ‘confession’ is so loaded,” she continues. “I had a really fun time writing the lyrics and playing around with these words, but also balancing that with vulnerability, I guess, of the lyrics and what I was talking about.”
In contrast, the romantic “Under the Covers” revels in the pleasures of domesticity. “I wanted to write a love song for my partner, who I’ve been with for quite a while now,” says dal Forno. “And I wanted to say something about long-term intimacy and what you value in each other when you have that understanding that’s deepened by time. So there’s the ordinary and mundane, but there’s something to celebrate in those rituals that are daily.”
While the majority of the album – on which dal Forno did all of the instrumentation — basks in electronic-influenced atmospherics, the folkish “Gave You Up” ended up sounding like a ’60s European pop song. “That was a track that I thought I would rework, and that it would sound more like the other tracks. But I ended up really liking the simplicity of it and enjoying it how it was.”
On the record are four instrumental interludes that link from one song to another.” I think so. I think they function as a kind of breather between narrative, and like if the songs are like snapshots of a moment in time and a conversation, and then it gives you a little break to shift.”
Dal Forno has been active professionally in music since the 2010s. She had played cello when she was in school and could read music, although she admits she didn’t imagine at the time that her career would be in music.
“I started going to see bands in Melbourne when I was still at university,” she recalls, and I was kind of shocked by how good everyone was. I made friends with some musicians, and we formed a band. I didn’t need to know many chords on a guitar. I just knew a few. But I started writing songs and really enjoyed that experience and kept going from there.”
Carla dal Forno.
credit: Sanjay Fernandes
One act that she listened to the most was the British psychedelic group Broadcast, as well as the Cannanes and the Garbage and & Flowers — the latter two as “bands that could write about their ordinary lives, going to the hardware store, walking to work, and posting a letter — experiences that I had too that I could relate to.”
After cutting her teeth with bands Mole House and F ingers, dal Forno made her solo debut with 2016’s You Know What It’s Like. Along in her career, she has performed in the States, where she hopes to do so again following her dates in Australia to support the new record. “I’ve had a whole tour worked out for later this year, but it’s a little bit up in the air at the moment because the U.S visa processing times have just been extended. When we initially applied for the visa, they said 12 months, and now they’re saying it’s going to take 18 months. So fingers crossed. It’s looking like I’ll either be there at the end of the year or the beginning of next year.”
As for future projects, dal Forno — who has done everything on her own for her solo recordings — says she is ready to collaborate with others again. “I recently wrote to another musician that I’m a fan of and said, ‘How about we try a long-distance collaborative project?’ I haven’t collaborated with anyone for like 10 years now, and I really feel like that would be good for my brain. It would be interesting to see what that sounds like.”