Lisa is an Australian singer-songwriter, although born in the UK, grew up in Albury, New South Wales. Lisa was a contestant on the 2006 season of Australian Idol where she finished sixth. Her debut extended play (EP), Said One to the Other from 2007 topped iTunes in Australia and she signed with London-based publisher, Little Victories, a subsidiary of Sony/ATV. By 2008 Mitchell had relocated to the UK where she recorded her debut studio album, Wonder (31 July 2009), which peaked at No. 6 on the ARIA Albums Chart. She won the 2009 Australian Music Prize of $30,000 for the album. Mitchell returned to Australia to live in Melbourne.
Her second album, Bless This Mess from 2012 reached No. 7. In March 2015, Mitchell's last single "Wah Ha" was remixed by electronic trio Seekae. Her third album Warriors was released in 2016 and debuted Top 10 on the ARIA Albums Chart.
At 31, and with six years between albums, the shift from ingenue to powerful truth teller and weaver of magic is complete. Her new album, which is out now “A Place To Fall Apart”, is a transition that calls to Mitchell’s Celtic origins, whose roots can be seen, heard and felt across her latest body of work. This is an album that breathes, and a listener can almost sense Mitchell’s ancestors breathing alongside it.
And so, we return to a quote from Lisa: ‘I recommend supporting your own unravelling’. Ostensibly a specific direction to the listener to unlearn the legacy of white privilege that exists within white settlers on stolen Aboriginal land, it is also a plea for surrender. Surrender what you think you know about history. Surrender what you think you know about power. Surrender what you think you know about yourself.
This theme of embracing humility and dismantling oneself in order to grow and do better in the world is the clarion call of Mitchell’s work. When she returned to Australia after years spent living in London, she committed herself to learning about her own place as a settler in Australia, and her responsibility to address that not just in her work but in her daily practice of living. She enrolled in Indigenous Studies, learning about the languages, history and traditional Cultures of the lands she was striving to tell stories on. Motivated by this unravelling of self, she began to explore her Celtic history and to study the Scottish Gaelic of her ancestors.
Once you’ve allowed yourself to be unravelled by Mitchell, you’ll want to return again and again.
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