Frally’s message home: ‘Geography and distance are gifts’
The Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter reflects on her Adelaide childhood, and how she found her voice “many miles away”.
‘Sitting around trying to get all my dreams aligned / It’s not a given that I’m reading all the signs,’ sings Frally Hynes on Message from the Future, the title track of her latest EP.
Backed by sparse piano and delivered in breathy vocals that evoke Sharon Van Etten or Beach House’s Victoria Legrand, it’s a line that echoes her uncertain path to songwriting.
“I was always a writer but I didn’t put the two together until much later,” Hynes says via email from her home in Hollywood Hills, where she has lived for the past five years.
Music had always been a part of Hynes’ childhood in South Australia; her grandmother’s old piano was part of the furniture in the family home, and she began taking classical piano lessons in primary school. But that didn’t mean she felt at home on the stage.
“I remember performing at a piano recital when I was very young and being terrified and I never wanted to do it again!” she recalls. “You could say I am a reluctant performer to this day.”
Instead she went to film school, where she would make instrumental pieces to soundtrack her screen work, often using a dictaphone to record “field sounds” from the sound of church bells to children playing.
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It was only after relocating to the United States in 2001 — with then-husband Ben Folds and their young family — that she first learned the guitar and, eventually, performed her songs in public, in Nashville.
“I really feel that for the most part in life the major battles are within oneself and as a consequence tend to be created in the outside world,” she says of her relatively late arrival as a performer.
“Whether it’s ‘I’m not good enough’ or ‘I care too much about how others see me’ or, even worse, some kind of victim mentality where it’s someone else’s fault that you are paralysed from your true purpose.
“I was always a pretty rebellious spirit and an original thinker, but I think that was squashed in me a bit growing up. The ‘what will people think’ if you don’t fall in. I tried to fall in but I couldn’t and so I had to then find my voice again many miles away.”
Since finding her voice Hynes has released two full-length albums — 2010’s The Light and 2013’s Apis Mellifera — and formed the folk duo Venus and the Moon with Rain Phoenix, elder sibling of River and Joaquin. She’s also worked as a music supervisor, and helped score film projects including HBO’s The Case Against Adnan Syed, and the Paris Hilton doco This Is Paris.
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The latter features Hynes’ melancholic take on the Cyndi Lauper classic Girls Just Want to Have Fun, which has racked up over 1 million streams on Spotify.
The lyrics for Message from the Future arrived at another moment of uncertainty, after contracting dengue fever on a trip to Mexico.
“It was at a moment where my brain was literally on fire and I thought it might be possible that I wouldn’t ever recover,” she says of bunkering down to recover at home, where there was little to do except play piano and stare out the window.
“It’s quiet and has a lot of light and nature. Out of this imposed stillness I heard an other-worldly voice that said, ‘This is a message from your future, you’re alright’.”
Once the fever broke, and that voice from her subconscious turned into a completed song, it became the opener for a new EP completed at the nearby studio of producer and cellist Oliver Kraus in Laurel Canyon.
She also tapped guests including guitarist (The War on Drugs) and Teddy Thompson, the son of “British folk royalty” Richard and Linda Thompson who Hynes says is “one of the best vocalists on the planet”. Thompson also appeared on The Light, and returned to duet on a stark cover of the hit 80s ballad Only You. Like the Lauper cover, this take strips away the glossy, loved-up synths of Yazoo’s original for something more elegaic.
“I remember as he started singing in the studio that Oliver, who was recording him, shed a tear because it was just so beautiful,” she says of recording with Thompson. “I love singing with him although sometimes I feel like such an imposter singing alongside him. But I don’t let that stop me!”
Hynes says she still makes it back to Adelaide, where her mother and some of her brothers still live.
“I was there in November and spent a few weeks with her,” she says. “I love going back. When my kids come we head straight to Lucia’s for that insane ravioli and then to Haigh’s for the peppermint frogs. They love it too.”
All the same, it’s the time away that has helped her find herself as an artist.
“Sometimes geography and distance are gifts in this way,” she reflects. “For me as an artist I had to make peace with total vulnerability and that’s when my authentic ‘lost’ voice showed up. Then I had to accept, cultivate and nurture that voice and get comfortable with it.”
Message from the Future is out now