Alice Night - Hell or Heal (Mullumbimby)

With Hell or Heal Brisbane-based songwriter and poet Alice Night celebrates a return to the raw essentials of her songcraft. On this album every song is allowed to stand bare-boned and unadorned, exposing the essence of their story.

The album title (taken from the song Burn Your Lies) refers to the inner hell that can be our experience when we deny the healing work required from us as individuals and as a culture. This theme runs through the stories at the heart of Hell or Heal. The songs address body-image, addiction and wellness, self-respect, life and death, poetic activism, friendship and love. All are delivered with the intensity and emotional honesty that have become Night's hallmark.

Each song is rooted in the realities surrounding Night and the people she knows and loves. Nectar was written to be sung at a friend’s wedding ceremony, Jelly Bean Tree is a reaction to dangerous drug use by Alice’s closest friends, while the lyric of Coming Home was written by a dear friend in the days before her death (which Alice then set to music). Another song, Masks, was totally improvised (and thankfully recorded) while the sound engineer was still trying to find the "right sound". It is the perfect illustration of the naked humanity and presence that Alice Night worked to capture on Hell or Heal. ‘It is not a perfect album’ she acknowledges, but nor is it trying to be.

This event is one of four official album launches in Australia before Alice heads over to Europe for an artistic pilgrimage of sorts.

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Alice Night website

art + honesty = alchemy