Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise, given southern singer-songwriter Jenny Mitchell’s talent for storytelling.
But Lucille Ball in Dunedin’s Good Earth cafe?
Among the many questions is how Ball ever crossed Mitchell’s radar, given the trailblazing star of black and white television had passed from this world some time before the alt-country artist was born.
Some or all of this also bemused Mitchell’s dad, Ron, although in his case he was taken aback that anyone might be unfamiliar with Ball.
"It was funny, because when I told my dad he was like ‘how do you not know?’," Mitchell (23) says, with a laugh.
That’s generations for you, even if this particular divide has been narrowed more recently by the Aaron Sorkin flick Being the Ricardos.
Anyway, it all makes perfect sense when unpacked just a little.
So, there’s a song on Mitchell’s new album — Tug of War, which is out on Friday — called Lucy. It was released as a single a couple of months back.
And it’s about Lucille Ball and Jenny Mitchell, and their jealous friendship.
The whole thing started back when Mitchell was doing gender studies at the University of Otago, during the course of which she picked up a film and TV paper. As part of that she had to choose a show to write about and ended up with I Love Lucy — Ball’s long-running sitcom from the 1950s.
It struck a chord, particularly the striving of Ball’s character to become an entertainer.
"Then, actually, I had a dream, which sounds cliched and ridiculous, my songs don’t often come like this, but I was just dreaming that I had met her," Mitchell recalls.
"In my dream we were at the Good Earth cafe and we became friends and she became jealous that I got to travel around playing music and I became jealous of her stable home life, so that’s where the song came from."
In the soulful, wistful track, Mitchell and Ball are in conversation, comparing the relative merits of their lives. In the end, the song carries a hopeful message emphasising the power of gratitude, challenging the idea that "We never quite have enough", the beautiful instrument of Mitchell’s singing accompanied at first by gently plucked guitar, then a melancholy chorus of strings and banjo, lifted by a ruminative viola.
Mitchell still has big wraps on the small-screen comedienne, whose on-screen character was ground-breaking for its time and whose production work away from the camera created opportunities for other women.
"I was clear she was a pretty incredible woman."
Strong women — and their travails — is just one of the themes running through Mitchell’s new album, her third full-length.
It’s a portfolio of work that’s been caught up in the maelstrom of pandemic and has been changed as a result, the world using that extra time to share new insights with its creator.
Tug of War follows 2018’s Wildfires, which took the 2019 Tui for Recorded Music NZ Best Country Music Artist. The new album has already contributed to the trophy cabinet before its release, early single Trouble Finds A Girl picking up the APRA Best Country Music Song Award last month.
Further endorsement that this is next level stuff comes in the form of a date in this year’s Dunedin Arts Festival, in October, for which Mitchell will be accompanied by a full band, and her sisters singing backup.
The single Trouble Finds A Girl was written together with sister-in-country-music Tami Neilson, inspired by the #metoo stories of women in the music industry.
It steps off in a different direction to the one Mitchell originally imagined for Tug of War, the fingerprint of which remains in the gladdening album opener, If You Were A Bird.
"If You Were A Bird was what I thought the whole album would be about, it’s just a love song, it’s very simple," Mitchell says. "So, about finding new love, and I thought I would write this album about just that, and then my life had many different ideas about how the last couple of years were going to go."
The trickier terrain — throw in a relationship breakup — all appears to have contributed to a richer final product, including Neilson’s ridealong. She’s most certainly another of the incredible women as far as Mitchell is concerned.
"I still get goosebumps when I hear her voice come in, in the second verse," she says of the song.
Trouble was released early, ahead of the album, as a shot across the bows of the Australian music industry following revelations of sexual misconduct and sexual assault there.
"I remember when we wrote the song, it was early last year and there was at the time a lot of stories about sexual misconduct," Mitchell says.
"I remember saying to Tami ‘we need to release it now, this would be so poignant now’, but unfortunately, it is always relevant and that’s what I have realised since writing it and releasing it even."
Both that song and the track that follows it on the album, Somehow, sum up the difference between this album and her last, Mitchell says.
Somehow tackles the mental health struggle of someone close to her.
"So, those are two subjects that are heavy and even the sound of them is darker than what I have done before. I would say that is a key difference with this record, I have been a bit braver with what I have been writing about, and part of that is, I guess, just me growing up and feeling like, actually, these things are important for me to talk about."
Having Neilson in the room lending her courage was also pretty useful, she says.
"While I was at Otago, her album Sassafrass just blew my mind and I still listen to it all the time, and all of that is about feminism and women’s rights and stuff and I just loved it."
Neilson too was the subject of gender studies essays back at uni.
There’s a lot going on in Tug of War then, maybe not unexpected for an album of that name.
And some of it seems close to the surface talking to Mitchell, her voice appearing to catch at various points discussing the long, patient process of bringing it to fruition, talking about the people it touches on and the help and support she’s received along the way.
On the computer screen, courtesy of the standard internet portal — the Gore girl’s been based in Wellington since last September, after her several years studying in Dunedin — Mitchell looks no older than her 23 years. She’s wearing a cream turtleneck against a cream background, which only works to highlight her trademark tresses and those deep brown eyes.
But it almost seems as though she should be older, given she emerged on to the national consciousness aged just 14 when finishing third in TV show New Zealand’s Got Talent.
What it does mean is that Covid has been thrashing its wrecking ball around some important years for a young artist with momentum.
And that gets its own mention, in the song Make Peace With Time, prominently placed just one track into the album.
"It’s been interesting," she says in understated style of the album’s long gestation.
Recording for some of the songs began back in 2020.
"That feels now like a different time."
But Mitchell admits to having had some moments.
"I was so worried, like everybody. I didn’t know if people could be musicians anymore. I spent so much time on the road and obviously it all stopped and I felt really lost — realised how much I tied my value or productivity, or whatever you want to call it, into touring and that’s what filled my cup and made me feel like I was doing something for the world."
Mitchell is back in that world now, having jetted off to Australia to tour in the lead-up to Friday’s album’s release. She’s in the Bathurst City Hall tonight and at Sydney’s The Factory tomorrow.
They’ll no doubt hear the messages carried in Mitchells’ work, but they need not fear being on the sharp end of a polemic.
What they’ll experience is a singer-songwriter at the top of her game, experimenting with styles — with undoubted success — and extending her palette into new spectra.
Examples include the dark Americana bluegrass of Somehow — evoking the Union Station output of Alison Krauss — which Mitchell takes on from the opening beat, accompanied at first by banjo alone. It’s music that asks questions about vocal range, but Mitchell has the answers.
"This one was written on my sister’s baritone ukulele so definitely didn’t sound like it does now," she admits.
"I grew up listening to that kind of thing but I have never really properly gone into it."
In fact, she was not initially sure it was a "Jenny song" and was a little bit scared of it.
"It’s weird how that works because now it feels very much a Jenny song. "I think maybe that’s what growth feels like. I want to try different things."
In the same breath Mitchell’s crediting others again for their contribution, this time producer Matt Fell, who is back after working on Wildfires and clearly a wizard of subtle accompaniment.
"I write the songs and everyone says how creative I am but watching him do his stuff, he is the ultimate creative."
Their collaboration relied on fibre optics, as he’s Australia based, but it sounds like that didn’t inhibit the closeness of the working relationship very much.
Sound files flew back and forth across Te Tai-o-Rehua, both between Mitchell and Fell and the other artists recording tracks in their home studios on a range of instruments — upwards of a dozen musicians are credited in the liner notes, and then there’s the choir for Trouble Finds A Girl.
Change keeps coming through the track listing, Snakes In The Grass taking a leaf from Eilen Jewell’s uptempo swinging rockabilly
"I suppose if you look at the album as a whole, the banjo is what is probably the most common sound that links everything together," Mitchell says. "It is not in every single track but the banjo and then the strings ties it all together.
"And I knew that would be a really fun banjo track," she says of Snakes In The Grass.
The banjo wizard called upon to bring the twang was nimble fingered Australian Rod McCormack.
His brief, Mitchell says, was to just have fun with it.
"You trust these people because they are awesome, you can say ‘you have a go, it doesn’t have to sound like anything else, you just do your thing’."
Though banjo helps to anchor the album in the country camp, the songwriterly material here could work just as well with various treatments.
And indeed Mitchell is thinking about where her sound could go next.
"Yes, I think that’s an unfortunate curse of making records, you are almost always thinking about the next thing ... I am not sure what the next chapter will look like but I know that I really enjoyed, I guess, pushing the boundaries of what country music is.
"I still feel like this is a country record," she says quickly, "I feel like it is when I listen to it."
But she’s no longer concerned about stepping outside the box.
If it sounded right, it was in.
"I will definitely continue to do that and I find that really inspiring. If you made the same stuff your whole life you’d be a bit bored."
It holds out the prospect of plenty of new fans, but there is also reassurance for those who value the South in her music.
It’s here in particular in closing track, The Bush and the Birds, which alone is being released only on the hard copy album at this stage.
"That’s a song I didn’t think would ever be on the album. It’s a very personal song, but I realised after playing it a couple of times that lots of people had a dad or a granddad like the person we were singing about.
"It is a song about my dad’s dad who passed away a couple of years ago at a wonderful age and had a wonderful life — did all the things. I actually wrote it years before and played it for him, wrote it literally as an ode to his life and all the things that he taught us about loving nature and loving the outdoors, and birds. Then when he died it ended up being part of that grieving process, I guess, for the family."
It references the family farm, and the shelter of a mountain and was played at the funeral. Then, for the album, Mitchell family friends the Raihania whanau were approached to add their special touch.
Their korero, "Ma te wa e tutaki ano tatou, tangata maro runga te maunga", is read on the track by Mitchell’s Aunty Jill.
Mitchell translates it as "we’ll see you again mighty man of the mountain".
The exciting thing for her now is the opportunity to tell that story and others in person, to live audiences.
"I can’t wait," she says. "The few shows I have done have just been so special." The emotion rises in her voice again.
"I have worked on this in my bedroom in Dunedin and now up here in Wellington, I have just worked on it for years."
She loves that creative process, the writing, the recording, she says.
The album
- Tug of War is out on Friday. Pre-order from www.jennymitchell.co.nz.
The gig
- Jenny Mitchell plays Knox Church as part of the Dunedin Arts Festival on October 19.
- She then plays Gore’s Woolshed on October 20.
