A Long Fight For The Good - Renee Louis-Carafice
Author: Melanie Selby (photography by Rachel Swenie)
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The music is itself quite remarkable, but it's real life which provides the incentive and inspirational back story. In 2003, on her 22nd birthday, Renee-Louise was institutionalised at Auckland's Te Whetu Tawera with severe depression. Against her will she ended up in the high security mental institution, due to an "unfortunate turn of events".
Renee-Louise spent one life-altering week in Te Whetu Tawera.
"Basically it was a situation where if I didn't prove myself to have shown improvement within seven days, they could keep me there for any amount of time. Legally my rights went out the window. There's a whole contradiction there - how the hell are you going to pull yourself together when you're under that pressure of, 'I may never get out of here'?
"That seven days felt like a lifetime and it also changed absolutely everything in my life," Renee-Louise says honestly.
Renee-Louise spent one life-altering week in Te Whetu Tawera.
"Basically it was a situation where if I didn't prove myself to have shown improvement within seven days, they could keep me there for any amount of time. Legally my rights went out the window. There's a whole contradiction there - how the hell are you going to pull yourself together when you're under that pressure of, 'I may never get out of here'?
"That seven days felt like a lifetime and it also changed absolutely everything in my life," Renee-Louise says honestly.
In the course of that week Renee-Louise wrote an entire album of music, a good portion of which made it onto her July 2008 release.
"The album's called 'Tells You To Fight' because of what happened in the mental institution - after a few days of just feeling like my life was over, this fighting power came out of me. It was like, 'You know what? I'm going to fucking fight my way out of this and way beyond this situation to being in a really good place in my life'."
Renee-Louise rebounded, finding herself with an album of important material, but no funds to record. Talking with London-based Kiwi engineer Nick Abbott, a good friend, the pair concluded that to record the perfect album together, they'd need at least $25,000. According to Renee-Louise the two of them have been "scheming for years".
"We've got all the people and all the support - the musicianship and engineering - but we have no money and as far as funding went, that was a dead loss. The radio stations and the funding departments wouldn't put any money into it. They wouldn't take a risk because New Zealand is such a small place, you need your music to be marketable and I was always straying quite far from that. Like, this is not a pop song - I'm looking for it to be challenging and they don't want it to be challenging."
In 2005 Renee-Louise gained the break she was after, literally. She was one of two to win $25,000 in the Nescafé Big Break programme aimed to help 16 to 24 year olds kick start their big idea or dream. Renee-Louise wanted to produce her album, to help improve people's understanding of mental illness through music.
"The wonderful thing about that arrangement was that Nescafé Big Break was crediting me for who I was and what I'd done, and the story behind how hard I'd been working on things - what it meant and the challenging nature of it. I'd been struggling so long and no one else had helped me, but they gave me money for what everyone else refused to give me money for."
Renee-Louise used the cash prize to record her debut album at Steve Albini's (Pixies, Nirvana, the Breeders) renowned Electrical Audio studio in Chicago. She is a huge fan of Albini's work with Magnolia Electric Co. and his own band Shellac.
"If you listen to anything recorded in that wonderful studio, with the techniques of the analogue recording system and the drum system they have, you can hear it's been recorded in that space and it just sounds absolutely beautiful. And you can hear that on my record too, so it's cool to be part of that club."
The album was recorded in 10-days, back in November 2005, with another long-time friend and collaborator Ben King (Goldenhorse) on electric guitar and production and Nick Abbott engineering.
"Ben came over to help produce and also play electric guitar parts on most of the songs that he'd really beautifully put together for the album. Basically, in the studio it worked with me doing everything I could on piano, on little keyboards and on guitar, and then telling Ben what to do on top of that."
Two Chicago musicians who were recommended to Renee-Louise also lent a hand to the recording - bassist Matt Lux (who plays in Iron & Wine) and Angel Ledezma on drums. She hadn't met either before, and of course they weren't at all familiar with her music - but they have carried on to be her full time band in Chicago where she now lives.
"They would come into the studio, hear a song and start work on it. Both of them had such a great understanding of what I was doing and the band chemistry was so strong that it formed really wonderful songs."
"They would come into the studio, hear a song and start work on it. Both of them had such a great understanding of what I was doing and the band chemistry was so strong that it formed really wonderful songs."
Now, more than two years after the recording, Renee-Louise is releasing 'Tells You To Fight', a poignant, rousing folk rock album that really gets under your skin with its careful arrangements and lyrics. The hold-up again harks back to the cautiousness of the NZ music industry - this time finding someone willing to take a chance on releasing the album.
Nigel Braddock of Monkey Records first met Renee-Louise years ago when she performed with Steve Abel and Ben King at the Odeon in Auckland. Braddock was the sound guy.
"He always said, 'One day I'm going to get a record label together and you can be on it okay?' And I said okay. It's another thing that was a plan from way back that eventuated," she reminisces.
She says she needs the NZ release to help her progress things overseas, but Braddock is a believer regardless.
"I thought she had a great voice. Her songs were unusual and compelling and she had a striking stage presence (at that stage she was playing in her band Operation and they all dressed up as doctors and nurses). Around that time, I had upgraded my home studio and had just finished recording albums for Peachy Keen and Eightfold, so I was on the lookout for the next project."
As luck would have it, Braddock heard a track from her earlier this year and learnt through a friend that Renee-Louise had a finished album ready to release, and that she'd had interest from another local label but had been sitting on it for a year.
"A few emails and a couple of phone calls later and she agreed to sign to Monkey and tour here in August," tells Braddock.
"I'm heading over to Popkomm in Berlin in October, looking for distribution for Monkey Records, and Renee-Louise's album is definitely a priority while I'm there. We've also talked about trying to get something happening in the US, which would make sense considering she's based in Chicago. Renee-Louise has got a great album, she has a really interesting and inspiring back story and she's an engaging performer, so I think things could go quite well for her both here and internationally."
The album is not made up solely of Renee-Louise's "hospital songs" - and she doesn't want people to categorise her as "the girl who was in a mental institution".
"I have a lot more to offer than that and I wanted to be able to continue after the first album with stuff that's different. So I put in other songs that I thought were also worthy of being included. But being songs written by me, they are all songs about suffering and feeling crazy and they all tie together really well," she explains.
Renee-Louise fell in love with Chicago while recording the album and has been living there since. She regularly gigs with Lux and Ledezma and "a bunch of teenagers called the Dead Superheroes Orchestra who play strings behind me". She plays smaller shows alone, as she will on tour here.
"But I do a one-man-band kind arrangement where I'm not just strumming an acoustic guitar; I'm sitting there playing a lot of things at the same time - making a lot of noise for one person."
She has also tried her hand at rapping and features on Chicago band Yoome's August-release 'The Boredom of Me'. By day she works in an incense factory owned by one of the producers of the Flaming Lips and also belongs to a punk bike gang which takes up a lot of her time.
"My two hobbies are music and making bicycles, so I do that. I live in Chicago but my life is really simple and boring. But then I keep in mind, 'Hold on a second, a few years ago it was looking like I wasn't going to be able to really do anything', so it's big for me."
