Musician Carla Geneve only released her third album Don’t Be Afraid late last year, but she’s already got new music to share with a double A-side single featuring new tracks Finally Broke Me and I Still Think About You.
You can the live experience of Carla Geneve this Thursday at Mojo’s Bar in Fremantle, before she heads off to play shows in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne.
Written in the exhausted comedown of a long tour, Finally Broke Me captures the moment the chin-up finally gives way. Speaking on the single, Carla shares that the song is one she wrote many year’s ago.
“I wrote Finally Broke Me after a tour where I just didn’t have any energy left for enjoying life. The lyrics are pretty self explanatory. Life is often cruel, and keeping your chin up is possible, but there comes a time when the final straw is the heaviest, and you feel yourself giving in purely from exhaustion and apathy.”
The song travelled with Carla for years before it was finished, played half-formed in bars around the country until she brought in long-time friend and collaborator Eldar Ekic to complete the chords and the bridge.
“I don’t often feel the way that I did when I wrote this song in 2022, so it’s nice to look back and rewrite the end with a friend. We adjusted the lyric to be less defeated and more dignified.” Geneve said.
Its companion track, I Still Think About You, sits on the other side of that exhaustion, in the strange quiet after the pain has loosened its grip.
Carla explains: “This song is about the strange feeling of moving on from something painful that has dominated your everyday life. When experiencing something really difficult, I couldn’t comprehend that I wouldn’t spend every day, every hour, for the rest of my life thinking about it. It felt like it was a part of me, and I was resigned to living alongside that pain forever.”
“When writing I Still Think About You, I was still dwelling on those events and thoughts, but they didn’t feel so painful. More of a daydream about a nightmare than re-experiencing suffering and hyper-analysing it. It felt like thinking of those things was more of a habit than something I needed to do, because it didn’t hurt as it did before. Looking back now, I realise that this was part of the greater event, the one that takes longer than anyone wants it to. It was an important part of moving on.”
You can see Carla Geneve at Mojo’s Bar on Thursday 16 July. The following night she’ll be playing Junk Bar in Brisbane, before heading to Bootleggers in Sydney on 18 July. The final show in this mini tour will be at a secret venue in Collingwood on Saturday night.
