For ARIA-winning Melbourne-based songstress Clare Bowditch, the
journey towards happiness, both personal and professional, is one she
laughingly describes as “ever evolving, always ongoing and something I
reckon I’ll be doing until the day I die!”

On the eve of the release of her fifth album, The Winter I Chose
Happiness, the singer, songwriter, recently qualified life coach and
occasional actress is juggling interview responsibilities with
checking out of her Sydney hotel, bundling her luggage into a taxi and
heading home to her husband, fellow musician Marty Brown, and their
three children.

“I don’t really think it gets any easier! My life is hectic, but today
I can tell you it’s hectic in a way I love, though I don’t necessarily
know on any given day if I could give you that answer. I have the same
little voice of negativity and negative criticism in my head that you
have and some days I’m better at shutting it up than others,” Bowditch
laughs.

For Bowditch, The Winter I Chose Happiness is a concept album of
sorts, though she adds that she’s “a bit hesitant to use that phrase,
given what it conjures.”

Her fears are fair enough – many ‘concept albums’ are indeed tedious
or self-indulgent, little more than an artist’s excuse to luxuriate in
their own perceived brilliance, but The Winter I Chose Happiness is
very much a truthful chronicle of its creator’s attempts to explore
and define what ‘happiness’ means to her.

“Do you think Australians are good at choosing happiness? Do you think
it’s even possible to choose happiness? Can I personally ‘choose’
happiness? And, if I can, how do I do that? I had questions like that
floating around in my head while I was writing and even before I was
writing. I think the big sort of light-bulb moment for me, if you
like, was that realisation that it really can be a choice,” Bowditch
muses.

“Once you realise that it’s something you’re thinking that allows you
continue in the falsehood that happiness isn’t achievable or
attainable, you’re actually in a really good place because you can
move forward. It’s important, I’ve learned, to realise that you do
have power, you do have the power to change things and to make a
choice.”

What, then, of the album’s poetical, self-referential title?

I ask Bowditch whether it’s a literal reference and whether or not
there was, indeed, a winter during which she chose happiness.

It leads us into a discussion that veers off on many tangents – study,
post-study life, literature, art, music, the disappointments of life
and love, the difficulties of finding oneself in situations that are
beyond one’s own control – before eventually leading us back to the
question itself.

“It was kind of floating around, this title, but I had different ideas
and different titles floating around at different points. Was there a
season? Yeah, there was, but I wanted it to be clear that the kind of
happiness I was talking about was not some sort of hippy dippy floaty
notion of being happy that didn’t reference or include pain or
suffering,” she says.

“I honestly went into writing this album with zero … I don’t know …
zero preconceptions or preconceived notions or ideas. And, sure, that
was scary at times, but it also made me brave. Wally, or Gotye to most
of the world, and I wrote ‘Are You Ready Yet?’ and I think that was a
bit of a lightening rod – it gave rise to a lot of other questions and
wonderings about happiness and what it is and whether we’re entitled
to it, how you attain it, how you maintain it. So much stuff and so
many questions!”

Also important to Bowditch’s particular creative journey while
crafting this album was an unanticipated discussion with her GP, a
woman she describes with obvious warmth and affection as “my wonderful
hippy doctor lady.”

“Most of us are so busy and stressed that I don’t know we even think
about happiness. After I went to see her with the flu for, like, the
tenth time in the year, she said to me: ‘Don’t you realise that we’re
born to be happy?’”

Bowditch pauses, laughs, and then continues.

“And, to be honest, I think I just sat there, staring at her a bit
stupidly. The challenge for me came when I began consciously observing
what sorts of thoughts I was creating and generating in my mind, what
sorts of stories I was telling myself, and sometimes that was just
really bloody strange!”

There’s more laughter and a little humorous self-mockery before she
finishes her thought.

“To me, that happiness was a choice was a really revolutionary idea!
You would imagine, wouldn’t you, that it would be a pretty profound
realisation, right? And it is, but it’s not like a bolt of thunder. It
doesn’t happen at once, it’s a slow, creeping thing that comes in
moments. Then the moments disappear for a while and sort of rear their
heads again when you least expect it. I mean, I had months of not
writing, not touching an instrument, then I’d be in the shower and
three songs would come. It’s like that – intangible and hard to put
your finger on.”

Writing the album, too, was similarly a process that Bowditch
describes as “largely kind of beyond my control and yet, in lots of
ways, also very much about making particular decisions and deciding
that it was okay to just follow my muse.”

“Can something be controlled and yet uncontrolled at the same time? I
don’t know! Do you know what? I think it kind of was the extraordinary
privilege of touring with Mr. Leonard Cohen that taught me a lot about
humility, and longevity, and many other important lessons. Standing to
the side of the stage, every single night, and watching him perform,
soaking in those words, soaking in that atmosphere, just sort of
basking in him, and the way he is, that really was very life-changing
for me as well,” she admits.

“There was a whole lot of stuff I had to get through before I could
create this album in a way that felt truthful and dense and so that
there was a whole lot stuff in there that was genuine, heartfelt,
beautiful and would really enable me to truly connect with people. The
winter wasn’t just mine. I think others have had their own winters or
are still on the journey, just as I am. That is what matters most to
me, really, when everything else is stripped away – having
conversations like this, forging an honest dialogue and connection
with people.”

The Winter I Chose Happiness is out now on Island Records through
Universal Music Australia. Clare Bowditch plays at the Old Museum on
October 11.

Heidi Maier