Maple Glider: “I Just Needed To Say Some Of Those Things Out Loud”
On 2021’s To Enjoy Is the Only Thing, Tori Zietsch’s first album as Maple Glider, she magnified vignettes from her life, bringing listeners in close to bear witness to those small moments.
Foregrounding that intimacy was a distinctive sonic world recalling the rawness and emotionality of Jackson C. Frank and Vashti Bunyan, built around her gossamer vocals, acoustic guitars and atmospheric textures — a folk record both earthy and otherworldly.
More than two years later, her new album I Get Into Trouble builds on those foundations in all respects for a tremendous follow-up that feels bigger and bolder than To Enjoy Is the Only Thing while holding on tight to its roots. Lusher production guides much of the album, making its sparser moments feel all the more powerful.
Part of what threads the two albums together is Tori’s decision to work with the same core working group on both, again collaborating with Big Scary’s Tom Iansek and Mildlife’s Jim Rindfleish. It’s a decision she says was born out of both a shared creative language and a desire for familiarity following Melbourne’s lengthy pandemic lockdowns.
“We started recording after the final lockdown in Melbourne, literally within a few weeks. So naturally, it was weird being around people, and I was really anxious still, especially for that first year. So, it was kind of just a way of making things as gentle and as fluid as possible.”
Lyrically, many of the songs on I Get Into Trouble feel like a continuation — either spiritually or more literally — of the themes Tori addressed in earnest on her first album: embodiment and objectification, a restrictive religious upbringing, the sting of bad romance and the crush of isolation.
They’re approached with more candour here, a shift Tori partially credits to introducing some of those songs into live performances. “I’ve had really beautiful people come to my shows. I’ve often had just a really nice sort of gentle audience. So, I’ve felt quite comfortable just singing those songs.” Equally, Tori says she felt emboldened to “stand a little bit more in those songs, and what I’ve wanted to say”.
“Just giving it time to ease some of the pain in them,” she says. “Acknowledging that they were really painful to record at times, and difficult coming up to releasing them.”
“There was genuine fear and anxiety just around the release of some of those songs. But how lucky I have been to experience a really quite nice feeling after having put them out, feeling quite affirmed after having released them.”
One of the songs Tori felt the most anxiety in the lead-up to releasing was ‘Dinah’, a deceptively buoyant and poppy cut that invokes the story of its titular Bible figure — in which a woman is sexually assaulted, then victim-blamed because she ventured out to spend time with “non-believers” — to draw parallels with Tori’s own experience. “The same thing happened to me when I was only 17/Do you think I got what I deserved?” she sings. “I’ve been in the church making sure no one’s looking up my skirt/But I do not feel safe here.”
It’s Tori’s most direct song as Maple Glider yet, searing and incisive and cathartic. “It was explicit because it had to be explicit, for myself,” she says. “I just needed to say some of those things out loud, and I just needed to sing them, in order to acknowledge them.”
‘Dinah’, along with ‘Don’t Kiss Me’ — a slow-burning salvo against the predatory objectification of girls by men — sizzle with anger, harnessed here as a propulsive energy. “Anger was the reason those songs were made,” Tori explains. “I was so angry. I think I had been internally angry for a while. There was this period of just complete disassociation with my upbringing. Then there was awareness, slight acceptance, and then came the frustration and the anger.
“It was just suppressed feeling, sitting somewhere trapped inside my body, and coming out in other ways. [Those songs were] a good way to channel the anger and redistribute it, and let it all flow through my body in a different way. A good kind of sensation of energy everywhere. ”Playing the songs now feels like a “boost of energy”, she says, a release.
“That’s been a nice shift, to take that very concentrated and directed anger and push it into other places, so it doesn’t feel quite like that anymore.”
As severely as those songs burn with righteous fury, there are many moments on the album that ache with stark loneliness. Few artists capture the feeling of isolation like Maple Glider, and I Get Into Trouble is full of songs that — like the best songs about loneliness do — offer a portal to connection, a balm for others who might feel the same way.
There’s the yearning for escape from a doomed relationship on ‘Two Years’: “I’m still here/Staring at the wall, hoping I’ll see beyond it/But it’s never getting smaller than it is”. Then there’s ‘FOMO’, a portrait of malaise that gives language to feeling cut off from the world and doing nothing about it. “I’ve got a fear of missing out, and I have it so severe/I am not myself, and I have not been all year.”
But quiet hints of optimism peek through on songs like ‘You At The Top of the Driveway’ and ‘You’re Gonna Be A Daddy’ — both of which are addressed to her brother, and have a disarming lightness and warmth to them. ‘For You And All The Songs We Loved’ clings to hope desperately, even in the face of heartache: “Put that song on, the one we love that makes us sad/I’ll pretend I’m not going anywhere.“
In a visual scrapbook provided to press ahead of the album’s release, Tori wrote she was looking forward to a new phase in her life after I Get Into Trouble is out: writing love songs and listening to Dolly Parton on repeat. “I’m all talk,” she laughs, when I bring it up. “I said I want to be writing love songs. Have I written any love songs? No. But that’s the plan. I’ve been smashing Dolly still.”
She might not have undergone a full transformation, but Tori says she’s felt considerably lighter in the time between then and now. “I had this bit of tenseness or something for a period — maybe it’s just the after-effect of everything that’s happened — and [felt] wobbly. But it’s been nice to connect with more people that also feel wobbly.”
“There’s so many joyful things that I’ve had the privilege of being able to experience recently,” she adds. “I’m just feeling generally a lot more optimistic about it and excited to see what happens.
“I’m not exclusively listening to Dolly Parton at the moment, I have not written any romantic love songs,” she says. But she’s well on the way there.
Maple Glider’s new album I Get Into Trouble is out now.
Alex Gallagher is a writer living and working on Gadigal land. They’re on Twitter @sensitivfreight.
Image credit: Supplied