Why Sing To You When They Can Sing With You?

In 2016, at the Her Sound, Her Story event that launched Melbourne Music Week, Danielle 'Mama Kin' Caruana came on stage with her daughter, Banjo Butler, singing Kasey Chambers' Not Pretty Enough. "To sing that with a 13-year-old girl was powerful," Caruana recounts. But, recently listening back to a recording of it, Caruana experienced a strange, beautiful phenomenon: she couldn't tell which voice was her daughter's, which was hers. "That's the joy of singing with other people. You start to lose the edges of your identity and you become a part of one thing, of this one whole."

The desire to be part of a greater whole is the driving force behind Caruana's latest project, Mama Kin Spender, who are set to release their debut LP, Golden Magnetic. It's, ostensibly, a collaboration with Tommy Spender, who produced her last Mama Kin LP, 2012's The Magician's Daughter. Old friends, the pair decided to collaborate when they felt that their own respective projects had stalled. Caruana, in particular, was yearning for something beyond the familiar cycle of writing, recording, touring. "I needed it all to be a little deeper, to have a little more juice to it. To have a whole other level of connection," she says.

The formative moment of Mama Kin Spender's birth came when Caruana sent Spender a video of Rufus Wainwright performing Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, in 2016, with a 1,500-person choir in Toronto. "It reduced both of us to tears immediately," she says. "After that, we decided to explore what we were feeling. And, on reflection, it was that we didn't want to tour to places anymore without connecting to [them] on a deeper level. And, also, that we both have a deep, long-standing love for choirs and singing with other people. In that moment, we had a lightbulb moment."

The plan for their new project: him on guitar, her on drums, both singing, with choral arrangements. Bringing it to stage, they upped the ambition, assembling a choir for their shows. "Before we go to a place, we find a choir in that area. Our choir director works with their choir director for six-to-eight weeks before we get there, learning the material. We roll in the day before, we do a four-to-six hour workshop/rehearsal, then we perform with the voices of that place," Caruana says. "It's a big idea, there's a lot of moving parts. It's amazing that it's coming together... I have to keep my shit together onstage, remember to keep playing drums. We've sung with groups from 16-piece to 45-piece choirs. It's fucking amazing. It's so freakin' cool. I wish I had a great word to express what it does."

Growing up in Melbourne, Caruana went to Catholic church each week with her Maltese family. They all played music - all six siblings - so hymns were the highlight of the service. "I was that crazy person in church, as a kid, who just belted my guts out," she recounts. "I just loved it, so much, to sing with all those people; I'd come out feeling so high."

Caruana feels that same high when performing with Mama Kin Spender. "It's actually proven that singing releases oxytocin, a very particular hormone that creates a bond," she says, "[and] in a life in which it's really easy to feel adrift and lonely, because you so rarely feel present with people, this is a balm to all of that."

And, in turn, their local-choir set-up makes good on Caruana's hope for "connection" with audiences. "When we go to Bellingen, we're not just singing our songs to Bellingen, we're singing our songs with Bellingen to Bellingen," she offers. "That was our first show, playing to about 800 or 1,000 people at the Bellingen Music Festival, with a local 20-piece choir. At one stage I said to the crowd, 'Stand up if you know a person in the choir,' and I reckon 70% of the [audience] stood up. This small country town was so freakin' proud that their people were onstage and we were a vehicle to make that happen. The connection that happened in that place, and the quality of the connection in that place, it was like: that's why I do music."