Introduce yourself and your Record Store Day release?
Hi there, my name is Joanna and I am the evil trans-gender, autistic, super-villan behind the musical personality that is Saint Ergo.
What are the main takeaways of the release? How do you want people to feel hearing the album?
I really have not done anything the easy way in my life and releasing a “debut” album at the age of 53 is not a “proper career arc” for a musician. I have been performing, writing and recording for as long as I can remember, I am old enough to remember recording on tape! I have tried to have a career for a long time but I was unwilling to sacrifice the people around me and the child I was raising to pursue “the dream.” That is one aspect but the other is that it has taken me a long time to find myself and to be comfortable in my own skin, comfortable to be properly vulnerable in front of people without projecting an air of perfection. Music is not about perfection but it is about everything else, feelings, story, history, humanness, etc and it took me a long time to finish anything. If I could put a pin in the timeline, this album has taken me about 10 years to finish and I have given up more than once. I have really tried but being someone with a disability, AuADHD, I have struggled with getting support, getting money and finding my way through the quagmire of my own brain. Add on the factor that i am late in life, coming out as trans-gender, it really had to take this long.
The album is called Lived Experience because all the songs are stories taken from moments in my life. Each song expresses a pathway from pain to healing without being deliberate, it was the emergent theme that came to be as each song was finished. I would love people to take away something that affirms and holds a glimmer of: “my own struggle is real but I can find a way through.” So many beautiful people in my life have exited this world prematurely and I am grateful that I have managed to find a way of holding on. There is a gentle reminder in this album that leads to a place of at least contentment, a place that no-one can challenge because you can know yourself and you can choose to hold yourself together if you want to. The people around us are the treasures in our life and really the best we can be is to listen without solving, acknowledge without judgement and love without transaction.
Who are some of your go to Australian artists? Who should we have across our radar?
Gosh, there are so many but Bec Sykes, Re.me.dy, Moze, Sienna Thornton and of course, Velvet Bloom are just a few of the artists I think need more attention. I say Velvet Bloom because the wonderful Maddy Herbert agreed to sing the duet on Bodies In Motion and it was such an honor to have her bring her energy and craft to helping me finish what I think is a killer song.
All your releases are across Bandcamp and Physical formats only? Tell us a little bit about the importance of this and why?
It’s really a grand experiment on my part and there are challenges that I didn’t anticipate. Much of the PR available has really morphed into playlisting, presaves and leveraging the streaming infrastructure. I had also forgotten just how expensive physical media is to produce. My reasons are threefold.
1: I don’t like how streaming has devalued the music experience. It is ultimate late stage capitalism where the expectation is that music is just another widget that technology has made cheaper and easier to produce. It has become absorbed into the commodity market and relabeled as “content.” This aint fucking content. It’s HARD to produce well crafted, emotionally driven music.
As a side note, I am not afraid of AI taking over music. I think AI has shone a spotlight on the true value, we as a society, have decided music should be. I have heard quite a bit of it and objectively much of it sounds amazing. However, it is not music. It is truly “content” and will only ever be derivative of the existing canon of creativity out there. That being said, I would rather AI do my dishes and vacuum my floor than dilute the already piss-poor monetary compensation offered for our creativity.
I don’t necessarily have anything against streaming as a technology, as much as anyone can be angry at a cloud for raining on them but for me, it made no sense because I feel that what I have made is something that needs to be physically grasped as it is as much of the body as it is of the ears and mind.
2: I love the experience of reading liner notes, being intentional about the music I am pulling off the shelf and enjoying. Soaking myself in that place and to be honest, I want to have others experience that when listening to what I have made. I have previously released music on streaming platforms and there is a loss of intimacy that I am experiencing from the numbers and the stats that are returned. They are also hard to trust as they are not accurate. They are deliberately complicated and hard to have any sense of connection with. I am a gen-xer and while I have grown up fully immersed in the world of tech, I know what it feels like to have experienced music for the first time in physical format.
3: Having said all that, why can I have both? I wanted to create a sense of exclusivity and honestly I want people to have to work for it a bit. That will reduce my audience reach but it will increase the emotional value of the experience for both the person who chooses to seek out this music, and for myself. I get to know that it’s not just a random playlist discovery, or shazamed in a shopping centre. It;s someone who has shared this music and someone who has put work into finding it. There is a sense of the spiritual in that for me.
Could you pick a favourite release from Lived Experience? Which one and why?
Well, you are asking me to be a bad mum and tell you which is my favourite child. LOL But seriously, I love them all for their own reasons. I think the song that has the most word-juice I have ever squeezed is Lullaby of Home. The bridge is some of the most beautiful words I have found to express a lifetime of experience. “Hold her close, until her limbs stop shaking. Let our tears heal like the finest heartbreak wine. It’s gonna be alright.”
Are there any artists that inspire you or have influenced your musical journey?
I had to come back to this one as in some way it is the most complicated part of this. There are many influences but I haven;t really ever shared this part. I grew up listening to my dads record collection as it was all I had access to. The James Last Orchestra, Abba, Deep Purple, James Galway, (which I really hated at the time, it was too noisy.) but mostly I was cooped into playing piano at church for the worship. I don;t really think I liked doing it but people loved it and it gave me a great sense of validation. I needed to be liked. I have chronic dyslexia and sight reading music I have really struggled with, but my ears have always been good. I would get someone to play it for me and I would just remember it and have a chord chart with the lyrics in front of me.
I had also secretly discovered I loved reggae and really enjoyed listening to local Maori folk playing reggae together in back yards. I was occasionally asked to join in and I liked it but it was frowned upon internally as “not being very christian.” I think my curiosity eventually overridden my need to be a “good little christian” and finally getting to hear albums like the self titled Tracey Chapman album in the back room of a creepy hifi store, with 3 old autistic men playing it for me on speakers the size of a tardis and then Paul Simon’s Graceland had a profound effect on me, both from a songwriting perspective, but also from a sonic, audiophile perspective. My first ever secular CD I bought was Graceland. I think both those albums changed my life.
Do you remember the first record or CD you ever purchased?
This is almost the biggest music cringe moment for me. Back in 1986, I was 14 and my first cassette I bought with my own money was Petra, Back To The Street. If you don’t know this band, they are a christian rock band that started in the late 70’s with, in my opinion, a very deliberate “mission” to convert or at least prevent youths from being corrupted by “secular rock music.” It was a terrible album but I was hair deep in the koolaid and I thought it was magic. I think hearing Dire Straits, Money for nothing cured me of that but that’s another cool story.
Could you pick a favourite Record Store in Naarm/Melbourne, or one you love visiting?
My most recent favourite record store discovery was Tara Records out in Geelong. I loved just chatting to the owners and the people who worked there as it was really clear they were both musicians and lovers of music. I really love visiting Captain Stomp out in Ferntree Gully and one of the record stores I am excited to visit is Feminsta Vinyl out in Coburg.
What are your plans for Record Store Day 2026? Where will we find you during the day?
I am hoping to be performing some of the songs from my album in a store but I don’t quite have a confirmation of which one. As plans firm up, I will let you know.
Follow Saint Ergo on Instagram + check out her music on Bandcamp
