Jen Cloher’s on the phone from somewhere between continents, sounding both amused and grounded, like someone who’s learned that candor is the only thing left worth trying. “I remember having that moment,” she says, “where you wonder whether you’re really willing to go in that deep.”
The depth in question is Jen Cloher, the Australian songwriter’s self-titled record from 2017 — a stark, poetic dissection of distance, politics, and partnership. The partnership, of course, is with her wife, Courtney Barnett, who at the time was touring the world while Cloher stayed home, writing about the loneliness of loving someone always in motion. “It’s really just a long-distance relationship record,” Cloher says. “Weeks and months apart. Trying to figure out how to do that.”
In other words, it’s not a breakup record, which almost feels radical. “I think that’s what’s interesting about it,” she says. “It’s not about the end of something. It’s about being in it.”
She insists the album isn’t about Barnett so much as it’s about herself. “It’s my experience of that relationship,” she says. “It’s centered on what it’s like to be a musician — how you hold onto your identity when the person you love is onstage somewhere else every night.” The result feels both personal and universal, full of dry humor and quiet defiance.
There’s a moment on the record when Cloher sings, “The Australian dream is fading,” and it lands like a confession and a headline all at once. She laughs when asked about it, but only briefly. “It’s a global thing,” she says. “We’re discovering that the earth’s resources are limited, and if we don’t treat the natural environment with respect, the dream will fade. All financial markets, all industry — none of it exists without the planet.”
You don’t usually get eco-economic fatalism in singer-songwriter confessionals, but that’s the thing with Cloher: she zooms out. The personal and the political coexist because, as she puts it, “it’s a funny time to be on this planet. The last few years, everything’s changed — politically, socially, globally. You can’t really ignore it. You can’t pretend it’s not going on.”
When Cloher sings about marriage equality on “Analysis Paralysis,” she isn’t speaking in abstractions. Australia was, at the time, holding a non-binding postal poll to “gauge” whether same-sex couples should be allowed to marry — a bureaucratic absurdity so expensive it could’ve funded an entire arts council. “It was a hundred-and-twenty-two million dollars to ask a question everyone already knew the answer to,” she says, equal parts weary and incredulous. “We’re taxpayers. We pay fines. We live under the same laws. We should have the same rights.”
It’s not bitterness — more like civic exasperation. “A lot of ordinary people just thought it was stupid,” she says. “But the silver lining was that it brought communities together for the ‘yes’ vote.”
That blend of fury and hope runs through the whole album. “The personal is political,” Cloher says, “and when you’re in a same-sex relationship, your love life is political.”
Elsewhere she’s quoting Sonic Youth — literally. The song “Strong Woman” echoes Kim Gordon’s battle cry from “Kool Thing”: Liberate us women from white male corporate oppression. Cloher resurrects it not as nostalgia but as unfinished business. “I just wanted to remind people of that song,” she says. “Kim said that thirty years ago, and it’s still relevant.”
Cloher even wades into American politics on “Forgot Myself,” written in the long, anxious shadow of Trump’s first year. “I was cautious,” she admits. “I’m not an American. But I was curious — how did it happen? What shifted over time?” She researched, observed, wrote. “It’s affected the whole world,” she says. “Particularly the Western world. We all felt that shock.”
By the time of this conversation, she’s on tour in the U.S. with Barnett and Kurt Vile, playing grand old theaters — an irony not lost on her. “It’s funny,” she says. “There’s no separation of church and state anymore.” Barnett plays guitar in Cloher’s own band, and now Cloher is opening for Barnett’s tour with Vile. “It’s the first time I’ve been out on the road with her playing her shows,” she says. “These are my first shows in America, and I’m walking out onto these beautiful stages. It’s like a tour of your most elegant theaters. I couldn’t have planned it better.”
The album itself feels like that balance: elegant but lived-in, intimate but observant. It’s a collection that moves easily from love songs to manifestos without changing its tone — warm, wise, slightly unimpressed with the state of the world but still hopeful enough to write about it.
When she says the record is her most honest, she’s not bragging. She’s acknowledging that honesty comes with risk — that writing about the person you love while they’re on the road, in the middle of a marriage-equality debate and a global political panic, takes a level of openness most of us never attempt.
Jen Cloher doesn’t flinch from that. She documents it, sings it, and then quietly gets back to work. Because if the dream’s fading, she’s still the kind of artist who insists on keeping the lights on.
Listen to the interview above and then check out "Forgot Myself" below!
