Karise Eden

Powerful, engrossing and bold, Karise Eden’s new album Born To Fight captures the spirit of the singer who shot to fame at the age of just 19 and soon grew into a woman more than ready to take on the world. Karise knows there’s strength in her vulnerability, she’s been there and she can plumb those depths. But since releasing her second album Things I’ve Done (2014) she realised she wanted to make music that showed her fiery side and her passion for blues, rock’n roll and even a great power ballad. “I’ve always been singing sad soul songs and I thought, just for once, there’s another side of my personality that’s never been shown on camera, my off-screen sass and who I am as a person, and that’s a lot of what poured into this album,” she says. Over the past three-and-a-half years, Karise took time to focus on being a mother. It’s time she needed, and time she valued, but she began to feel there was a boldness buried inside her that needed to come out. It wasn’t just psychological. Karise was physically discovering how to sing in new ways. “I think my vocal range has become quite a bit lower since I’ve become a mum. The bottom end of my register has gotten thicker and a lot richer. I find there’s a lot more confidence and strength in my high notes but I’m just able to push and pull from all these new found little things all of a sudden,” she says. Teaming up with Melbourne producer Jan Skubiszewski (Dan Sultan, John Butler Trio, ILLY, Ella Hooper and The Cat Empire) Karise started to explore this fuller sound in his Red Moon Studios in Victoria’s Macedon Ranges. She used imagery to explain how she wanted the music to sound. She imagined the American desert - a mysterious and haunting landscape - and the kind of music that wouldn’t be out of place in a classic spaghetti Western. “I pictured Clint Eastwood in his Westerns, but as music,” she says. “It’s beautiful, yet it’s a bit scary. It makes you feel haunted, yet loved and scared and caressed all at the same time. It’s just got this eerie vibe about it.” As a musician, Karise still enjoys the element of surprise and the chance to take an unexpected turn. Just when you think you know where the album is going, Karise will throw a curve ball. A blues song will morph into a synthesiser breakdown, or a Motown-inspired track will be followed by a song that Meat Loaf would kill to have in his arsenal. But it always comes back to the song. “I only sing songs that mean something to me,” she says. “I’m still young, I’m still here and I’ve got a lot more life and power in me.”