Renowned for her powerhouse vocals, raw vulnerability and evocative storytelling, multi-award-winning artist Carla Geneve returns with a new double single, ‘Guard Dog / Move Dirt Around’, out today.
Written around 2021, the two songs come from a time when Geneve was, in her words, “angry and sad and scared.” With little to lean on beyond the people she loved and her ability to laugh at things, she turned to humour as a shield. The result is a pair of tongue-in-cheek songs that thinly veil her frustration at having to exist in a world that felt pointless and hateful.
“All I really had was people I loved, and the ability to laugh at things,” says Geneve. “The songs are tongue-in-cheek, thinly veiled humour covering how pissed off I was.”
‘Guard Dog’ is a song about safety, defiance and unwavering trust in the people closest to you. Its inspiration came from Moose, a big Pitbull Geneve cared for while fostering dogs. After an operation to make his face less droopy, Moose was left with stitches around both eyes that gave him the look of an adorable Frankenstein’s monster.
“I loved walking him at night because I’d never felt more invincible than when he was by my side, scaring the shit out of everyone,” she says. “When I wrote this song, I felt unwelcome and unsafe in the world, and almost everyone was out to get me. Whether or not that was true was irrelevant to me at the time. I trusted and loved my friends. They protected me. They were my big scary dog, and they made me feel like I could take on anyone or anything.”
‘Move Dirt Around’ takes its name from a piece of off-the-cuff philosophy from Geneve’s mother, a very optimistic person.
“I remember my Mum once saying to me as a kid that if you think about it, all humanity ever really does is take piles of dirt from one place and put them somewhere else,” Geneve recalls. “Plastic is dirt, food is dirt, buildings are dirt; we just got good at moving it around. Very profound of you, Mum. Makes me think of a FIFO Sisyphus.”
“At the time of writing, the absurdity and contradiction of living was clearly at the top of my mind, and what she said really summed up the deep and seething hatred I had for the world and everything in it, leading me to write this miserable little song.”
Time has softened her view. “I actually quite like the world at the moment, and absurdity can be quite beautiful if you think about it,” she says. “At the end of the day, not getting too caught up in the shape and location of the dirt is a good policy.”
Stream / download ‘Guard Dog / Move Dirt Around’ here.
Fri 9 Oct – Brunswick Ballroom, Melbourne
Sat 10 Oct – Bridge Hotel, Castlemaine
Sun 11 Oct – Ed Castle, Adelaide
Sat 17 Oct – The Rechabite, Perth
Tickets and further tour details via carlageneve.com
