Sparrow Folk is a glam folk collaboration by two local ladies, Catherine Crowley and Juliet Moody, who met through a mutual love of theatre, and found a common passion for performance through a serendipitous collection of coincidence. The duo won the ACT division of Exhumed in 2013 – a nationwide search for Australia’s best never-weres, courtesy of ABC Local Radio across the country. Their music sits in a comfortable intersection between melodic folk and fun-poking comedy…as you’ll see in their ‘Ruin Your Day’ video, that has gone viral across Australia.

Through their sweet harmonies, simple melodies, and honest satirical lyrics, Sparrow Folk invite you in to their musings on the realities of modern life, specifically life of two Canberra women; not as sex object or broken heart, but as human. Cathy and Juliet may have been accidental collaborators, but their collision has resulted in a refreshingly honest confluence, of femininity, motherhood, local flavor, humility, and a healthy dose of pinch ‘myself I’m dreaming’.

So is the album any good?

The thing about ‘novelty songs’ is they can be a way of shielding the singer from honesty, turning everything into a joke to avoid facing feelings. I think this is what Sparrow Folk have negotiated with deft skill on The Fox and the Lark. Yes, these songs are funny, but the laughter is born from familiarity, that ‘I’ve been there’ moment.

The album is a lot of fun, although at points the deliberate comedic interjections fail to capture the spontaneity of a live show – it’s great that the album seeks to replicate the live experience, however I feel the irony and cleverness of the lyrics don’t require reinforcement by the interrupting “what?” and “really” of feigned surprise. This is just a little quibble though and all in all this is a strong first album from a promising local pair.

I had a lovely chat with Juliet on Monday – learning the story of Sparrow Folk.

I’m a ABC666 listener, so the first I heard of you guys was when Exhumed was happening. I know the premise of the competition was “not the has-beens, the never-weres”, what was it that inspired you to put your hands up to enter?

It was quite interesting. Cathy and I have been friends for a long time, and we’d done a few theatre shows together, but we hadn’t connected until a couple of years ago that we were both musical and we loved singing. So we were in a musical theatre show together and decided to try writing some songs together. We got a set of songs and decided we would get all of our friends and families together and crowd out Cathy’s backyard, and put our songs out there. So that’s how Sparrow Folk was formed.

Things were interrupted when I had my fourth child; after having Ollie, I’d taken some time off and we hadn’t done anything for Sparrow Folk for about eight months, and we heard about the competition and we thought ‘Maybe this is a good way for us to get inspired again’. We had no idea that we would get through, but it pushed us to record a demo of our music and think about where we wanted to take Sparrow Folk.

We were stunned to get through to the finals, let alone win! And there we were playing our ukuleles, up with all of these amazing bands that have been doing this for years in the Canberra scene, and it was literally our second performance ever to win the Exhumed.

Since then we’ve just accumulated this really lovely fan base who’ve really rallied us to go ahead and record. We decided to launch a Pozible campaign last year, and it was funded within a week! It’s just been an incredible ride.

Are you looking to give up your day jobs, and make this your career?

Well certainly. At the moment it’s still a sideline. Really it was a chance for us to share time together creatively, initially. I guess everyone who’s got a creative pursuit has a dream in the back of their head that it’s going to take off, but really we saw there was quite a void in Canberra music – it seemed to be really male dominated, lots of cover bands. And even in the comedy music set, which we kind of fit in to as well, there seemed to be a lot of men out there, which is fantastic but they obviously have different things to say than what women do.

I guess we just thought this was a niche where there was a space, and it formed into this new musical genre, because we weren’t quite sure where we fitted. We weren’t really traditional folk, and we weren’t straight comedy. So we decided that since we like to be a glamorous, and get dressed up, let’s create ‘glam folk’.

Obviously comedy is a major part of our set. Cathy and I are both really incredibly busy. Cathy is still working as an actor and doing all of her other pursuits, and me with the four kids, life is so crazy and stressful. And I think it’s that concept, if you don’t laugh you’ll cry. A lot of our music is obviously written about comic situations, but we try to write about things that have a bit of a message behind the comedy as well. We’ve tried to keep our own identities in the music instead of full-on characters, because everyone’s got a story to tell.

Popular culture is so dominated by male voices, it’s so nice to have a fresh feminine perspective on life. What issues do you talk about in your music?

One of the big issues for me as a mother was, I find that there seems to be so much pressure to keep up this image that we’ve got it all together and motherhood is so fantastic and fun and beautiful, and yes it is that, but reality is it’s quite often, self doubt, self deprecating, stress, anxiety, and it was quite refreshing to write songs about motherhood and about being a woman that weren’t necessarily celebrating what it is to be a woman, but acknowledging that it’s funny too. Because if we don’t laugh about the crazy things that happen, and our failures. That was refreshing to be able to say that too. I’ve got four kids, but I fail just as much as I succeed. My heart’s in the right place, but it’s busy. We do forget to do things for our kids, and we do embarrass them. But that’s what it’s like, and I think probably some of our appeal is that people find us accessible, easy to relate to. We’re not standing there saying ‘We’ve got it all, we have all the answers’, we’re saying ‘Come on, let’s be honest with each other, it’s tough and it’s okay to make mistakes.’

When you first started playing together, did you ever anticipate albums and audiences, or was it really just about fun?

We always joked about the fact it was just our excuse to hang out together and to give us some space from all that comes with family life. I never would have thought that there would be an interest there to produce an album. It started as an EP, but we ended up going well over our Pozible budget, and people asking for songs to be recorded that we decided to do a full album. Honestly, this has far exceeded what we ever thought. And it just keeps growing. We’re heading off to Adelaide Fringe to do two weeks there, we’ve been asked to do Tumba Fest, and National Folk Fest, it’s been really exciting.

Where did you record the album?

We recorded with a local sound engineer, Dax Liniere at Puzzle Factory Sound Studios. He’s originally from Sydney, but luckily for Canberra we’ve got him down here now. It was great fun working with him, he had a really good understanding of the fact that our relationship is a big part of the music. So we recorded it all live rather than doing it separately because we wanted to capture the way we play off each other during a song. We think that’s one of the beautiful things about performing live, how we interact on stage.

Is the album all just two voices and two ukuleles, or did you bring in some session musos to flesh out the sound?

There are songs on the album that are just us and the ukes, and we were conscious of not overproducing it. We wanted to ensure that the experience people got of listening to what we did in the studio was similar to what they’d see live. There were also some songs we’d had dreams of building a little bit so there are some friends we invited along to come and have a go, and luckily we’ll have a few extra people playing on Friday night too. So it will be a bit of a bigger nest for us on Friday night.

So tell me about the launch, is there truth to the rumours it had to be rescheduled?

We are launching our album this Friday. It was going to be at the Polish Club, but because of the fire it obviously can’t be. So we’ve trotted a few steps down the road to the Turner Bowls Club, who are very lovely to open their doors up for us., so we’re very very excited. We’ve got some Canberra identities who we feel fit in to what we’re trying to say. So we’ve got The Cashews coming along, and Bec Taylor from Fun Machine is going to a solo set, and of course the lovely Adam Shirley from triple 6. And the Brian Taylor, the love interest will be there apparently.

So tell me about the release details? In stores, online?

It will go on iTunes, and people will be able to purchase it through our website as well.

What about local music stores? Any offers to stock it?

We literally received the CDs last Friday, so we haven’t had the chance to get it on shelves. But we’ll see.