Crossing The Line
(The Drum Media, March '03)
starting from the title of singer/songwriter charlton hill's debut album, waterline, it seems the theme of h2o is constant throughout lyrics like "where rivers stop and mountains fall into the sea" in first single 2's company and "i'm in too deep, don't let me drown" from second single deep, as well as evocative imagery on tracks like don't sail and raincloud highlight this. but hill says this was not a conscious theme, it says something that he realised afterwards.
"i group songs for their emotional content, looking at it as a whole, then i realised it was well and truly there," he says. "i think it came about because being away from australia when i was writing a lot of the songs, and perhaps with my upbringing near the coast and surfing and all that sort of stuff, it was very easy to be drawing on natural references and metaphors to do with water. and water's really, totally, important to me. if i'm away from it too long i start feeling really strange. i guess a lot of people that have lived on the coast who have moved inland someimes get a bit edgy and wonder what the hell is going on. in london i used to have baths a lot [laughs] if i freaked out and fill up a bath and go under water and hold my breath for as long as i could, and it was a very calming experience.
"it is a big part but the reference to the waterline itself is an invisible social line that i felt i had discovered, that is there for all to discover. in taking my travels and breaking away to do what i wanted to do i was finding a part of myself that perhaps was always there, but i hadn't delved into, and feeling now that i've delved beneath that surface that there's no turning back. it's a life choice to go this way so i've crossed that line that i speak of."
did you know you were crossing that line at the time?
"i guess whether i felt i crossed it or not was something that became apparent later but i was certainly fighting for something within myself and with these things happening to me it was an evolution occurring. i knew that something was happening as i travelled and as i did these things i certainly feel like a different person now that i've found out what i want to do with myself, why i wake up in the morning."
the travelling hill is talking about is when he spent two years in london eking out a living as a muso. it was here that the majority of the essentially guitar pop songs on waterline were written. "there are a couple written here before i left. looking back over all the material that i wanted to include in the album i needed to include a couple almost pondering the very early investigations into the waterline. the album is therefore a journey as a whole, from posing some of the concepts, experiencing some of the concepts and then looking back on how those concepts changed me, or my views changed on them," hill states.
but for all the talk of water, it was actually fire that started hill's journey as a singer/songwriter and to london. bushfire in fact, being the devastating one of 1994 in sydney. hill was away on a short trip overseas at the time and returned to find his family home had burned to the ground, and the only possessions that remained were basically in the suitcase he took away with him. "it set the seed for a massive change in me," hill recalls.
"i look back now it was a great thing to deal with. i like who i am now after that happening. all the things that you hold dear of material worth, or even on a financial level, are so empty when you think about it. and it shows that whole thing of you can't take stuff with you when you go and it's like well, if you're living like you could go tomorrow then it all makes sense and everything's a hell of a lot easier."
not only as a person did losing everything change things, but also his musical outlook. "if anything it showed me that i had something to say myself quite specifically," hill explains. prior to becoming a solo artist, hill was in a band but still would be continually writing lyrics and poetry and such. "i actually loved the camaraderie of a band and played bass for a long time and enjoyed that sort of role, but i think it was around that time that my music was coming on really strongly. i was realising instantly that it wouldn't work if someone else was singing or projecting the words i was putting down.
"even part of me, if fate had turned a certain way and i'd found the right people bandwise, could have continued on in that way but it was just i eventually found it too difficult to find anyone who seemed as obsessed as i was with what i had to get out, so by default i became a solo artist. i think my attitude was set at that occurrence and it certainly shapes who i am now."
- mark neilsen