M & J Find Beauty in the Love That Didn’t Work Out
Punk Head: You set out to write a love song and somehow ended up writing “Not a Love Song.” At what point did you realise the song had changed underneath you?
M & J: We were about halfway through trying to write a straight-up love song and it just felt off. As I ‘set out’ with intent to write a love song that day but my personal life wasn’t allowing that to flow :) it felt like lying. As soon as I thought "this is not a love song day” everything clicked — that's actually what we were both feeling that day too, so we scrapped the happy version and kept the honest one.
Punk Head: The song comes from unrequited love, but there doesn’t seem to be much resentment in the way you describe it. Was that important to you?
M & J: Really important. We didn't want it to be a pointing-fingers song as an honest look at some situations shows that it just wasn’t bright as much as you want to be right… That's why we wrote that line — “you don’t get to choose who you love and who you lose, you only get the feeling of falling in love or fighting the blues” It's sad, but it's not angry. It's just how it went down but there’s still a sadness and void through the song but a hope that that’s to come via the final verse.
Punk Head: There’s something quite Australian about the way M & J balances emotional songwriting with beaches, bush, flora and fauna. How naturally do those two sides of the project fit together?
M & J: They just go together for us. Most days we're out somewhere around Sydney with a camera — beach, bush, whatever. If we're stuck on a lyric we'll go for a walk and usually come back with a photo and a line. Thanks for noticing that connection it’s important the photography of the natural Australian landscape to us. Sometimes we try to juxtapose the image with the content of the song so somewhat of a surprise, is kept.
Punk Head: You take all of your own cover-art photographs. What makes an image feel like an M & J image?
M & J: Like us, quiet and a bit lonely but still beautiful to someone haha hopefully….it’s usually serendipitous that the right image comes along about the same them as the song (bizarrely) We never really plan the covers, we just shoot what we see when we're both out walking. If we look at it and go "yeah that's the one" then it becomes the cover and sometimes it feels predestined without getting too woo woo ✨
Punk Head: There’s a difference between writing about something that happened and writing about something you desperately wanted to happen. Does that distinction change the way you approach honesty in songwriting? In other words, can an imagined future be just as emotionally real as an actual memory?
M & J: Totally. Sometimes what you wanted to happen lives in your head so long it feels more real than what actually happened. I think through a combination poetry books, film songs all of those mediums combined form some image of what we think perfect love in our future may look like and that’s the exciting part of life, that you never know what’s around the corner, but for now ‘this is not a love song’ :)
