Cash Savage finds strength in vulnerability

Cash Savage & The Last Drinks kick off their So This Is Love national album tour on Saturday, May 6, at Mojos and are one of the special guests at AC/DC-inspired Fremantle event High Voltage on Sunday, May 7. BOB GORDON chats with Cash Savage about the emotional experience involved in writing and recording her first album in four years.

I read an interview you did with Beat Magazine in Melbourne last year where you were talking about playing shows again and how it was much more of a walk-up factor for ticket-buying since the pandemic. With this album, which comes four years after the last one with so much happening in between, how does it feel to be back 100 per cent – with an album and a national tour?

Hmm… it doesn’t quite feel like 100 per cent. So I don’t really know how to answer that because, honestly it doesn’t feel like it did before. It definitely feels different. And I’m not sure what I’m walking out into when I do this tour. It’s the same thing, we’ve had some shows and the pre-sales have sold amazingly and then some shows where people say, ‘they don’t buy pre-sales in this area anymore. It’s all in the last week.’ So it feels like a very different world that we’re walking out into.

When was most of this album written? You returned to your hometown of Port Albert during the lockdowns didn’t you?

That’s right. I wrote a couple of songs in 2020, but most of the songs were written in 2021-22. We recorded the first part of this album at the end of 2021 and then the second half in May 2022 and then I did overdubs between May and when it was finished in November.

What was the thinking for you when you were writing during those lockdown periods? I know that for a lot of writers and artists during that time thoughts and motivations regarding songwriting were very mixed. It all seemed to be about doing livestreams. Did you feel a different kind of pressure to write?

Yeah there was pressure. I had all the time in the world but nothing to write about. And writing about the pandemic, particularly in 2020. I mean, any band that wrote about a pandemic… well, I don’t know. I found it very difficult to write during the lockdown, particularly that first year. Every Day Is The Same and $600 Short On The Rent were written in 2020, but the rest of the album was written afterwards.

I saw this little comic that had this guy getting in a rowboat in this huge storm and these massive waves crashing over him. And he was saying, ‘now’s the perfect time to finish my novel’ – that sort of really summed up what the pandemic felt like to me. It was just too hectic. I was just trying to survive, and it was too hard to actually create.

You mentioned Every Day Is The Same and $600 Short On The Rent as early songs. Were they songs that you grabbed on to, knowing they were showing the way?

Yeah with $600 Short On The Rent I was playing the riff everywhere. Everywhere I went. If there was a guitar there, I’d just muck around with the riff and it meant that I sort of wrote the song in lines and lines. Not necessarily as one cohesive, long verse. It was just line by line.

Along with the lockdown I believe you had a major relationship breakup and went through your first experience of depression at its worst. Did the songs on this album provide you with comfort or catharsis, or is it more complicated than that?

The songs helped me process. Some of the songs highlight to me how dark it had actually gotten. For example, $600. By the time I finished writing $600 on reflection of what I’d written and put together I thought, ‘things are not great.’ The song helped expose that for me. I don’t know, it’s just this wonderful thing that writing does for me… it helps me process my life.

The Last Drinks as a band has been together with the full line-up for at least 10 years now and there’s the previous history as well. When you’ve had that history what’s it like to bring songs to them and see what they do with your ideas, especially when they’ve emerged from a tough time?

It’s terrifying and beautiful. It’s terrifying to put those thoughts out and go, ‘yeah, this is what’s going on for me.’ Particularly with the people that know and love me so well, you know? We’ve got a real camaraderie in the band and as you say, the band’s been around for a long time and a couple of the members have been there from the start.

We’ve spent a lot of time together and we know each other really well and there’s a lot of love and respect there. So to actually be like, ‘here’s how I’m feeling,’ because I’m actually quite a private person if it wasn’t for these songs, I wouldn’t be expressing these feelings out loud very easily. I mean, not that it’s particularly easy to do it this way, but it’s still a way for me to be able to say how I’m feeling.

So to show them the songs – particularly a couple of them – it was not easy to also then see how they reacted to the songs being performed to them because they’re listening to one of their mates saying, ‘I’m having a bad time.’ It’s terrifying to do that, but it’s also beautiful because I feel very held by them. And it’s definitely a safe space for me to be vulnerable.

What about performing these songs? I guess it’s something you would have encountered before – are there moments where you kind of forget the pub or club or festival stage and go back to where you were?

Yeah, I do. I still do that with some of the other songs. For me, it’s the final part of the process, to give the songs away. And so that’s what I’m doing when I’m performing them. But there’s still some parts of each of the songs that I hold for myself and when I sing them, I get taken back to the moment that I was writing about.

After the Australian tour, are there plans for abroad?

We’re in Europe in July and then again in October. The year is pretty chockers really, though there is a little bit of downtime between August and October. I think we’ll probably have some more Australian shows in that time. It’s a very full year, it’s very exciting. It’s like if I stick my head up out of everything that’s going on and look forward it’s very exciting. For the moment it’s super busy with all the stuff that goes around the release.

All the talking about it?

All the talking about it! You know, honestly, I started doing interviews for this album about a month ago, but they’ve really started to heat up now. And it’s awesome to hear people’s responses to it, the questions that come up around it and what people find to be interesting aspects of it. People ask me about what it’s like to bring the songs to the band and I guess it must be something where they recognise the vulnerabilities in music and then put themselves in that position.