Finally, after months of writing and arranging new songs, we started recording my new album yesterday. Our drummer Shane Nesic came up from Brisbane and Christian set up the big living room in our home Shaktu as a recording studio (Shaktu is shack no.2 on the farm). Despite the heat, we got drum and bass tracks for the first 3 songs done. Today we start on a song I only wrote a couple of weeks ago, so I guess the long wait to record has been a blessing in disguise. There’s another song too which has made the A-list which I wrote while I was in the UK a few weeks ago.

News from the farm… we now have a very cute baby goat called Sonny, the result of our buck Frankie’s Great Escape a few months ago (he leapt through a hole in his fence and then leapt on as many goats as he could). More kids are due to be born today so it’s possible Christian will have to go from being sound engineer to midwife at the drop of a hat. Frankie is very sweet-natured for a billy goat but I’ve been feeding him silver beet and cabbage leaves and so he now yells at me every time I go in the veggie garden.

It has been boiling hot – far too hot for spring. So hot in fact that I went swimming with snakes the other day (not bad for someone who used to have such a phobia I couldn’t even look at them on TV!). The veggies in my garden wilt in the midday sun but revive again as I spend an hour each afternoon watering them. Some days the air is hazy from smoke – there have been fires in the area and being surrounded by trees makes us vulnerable. We’ve talked through our fire plan – what we would take with us if we only had 5 minutes to get out.

But right now I’m not thinking about fires or snakes or even baby goats… I’m thinking about these new songs and how incredibly lucky I am to have Christian and Shane to help me record them. I’ll keep you posted on progress…

I hope all’s well in your world.

xx