Getting Better at Both Worlds

(or how I became captivated by Jo Schornikow’s music)

When we were working on the first issue of Rolling Stone South Africa I suggested that my first piece be about Zonke, an artist and songwriter whose talent, particularly as a hitmaker, was going unheralded because she was a woman, at least that was my sense. During our interview in a swanky hotel in the Johannesburg suburb of Hyde Park I asked Zonke for her thoughts on the industry’s failure to recognise her as the writer of a whole heap of number ones for other artists. “I feel like even if I had written one hit song, if I was a guy I would have been on the cover of every magazine,” was her emphatic reply. 

I loved the fact that I was able to use that December 2011 launch issue to profile Zonke’s multilayered career in a four-page spread, sandwiched between stories on Red Hot Chili Peppers and Lil’ Wayne, and featuring a photograph by my talented friend, Nick Boulton. It reflected a purpose I had always had, in both my political and music writing: to foreground women wherever possible.

So, dear readers, it is with some discomfort that I share with you that the only reason I discovered the music of Jo Schornikow was because of her partner, Matthew Houck, who goes by the name of Phosphorescent, an artist who I have long loved. And it is only because he has a new album coming out on April 5th that I first saw the name of the Australian artist, now living with Houck and their two children in Nashville. In a notable moment for an artist with such a self-contained sound, it has been revealed that Phosphorescent’s upcoming Revelator (watch the video to the evocative title track here) will be his first album to contain a track written by an outside artist: the Schornikow-penned “The World Is Ending”. I had to discover more.

One of the first tracks that I listened to was “Lose Yr Love” off Schornikow’s most recent album, 2022’s Altar, and I was left quite breathless. It wasn’t just music that drew me in, swirls of synthesisers delivering a sparkling pop melody, or the lovely tones of her Australian-accented voice, layered to emphasise the three words of the song’s title. It was also the way she used the ocean to convey losing someone, thereby bringing together three aspects of the profound loss experienced by my own partner and I when my brother-in-law went missing at sea, his last known position in the middle of the Indian Ocean, in maritime safety waters overseen by Australia. How we wished we’d known the ways of that water.

“How’s an ocean part- just split in two? 

Guess there’s more to this than I ever knew 

To the ones keeping the dream alive; 

To the shipwright and the polar ice 

I’m calling out red light, 

Guess I’m calling out to your reflection 

Call on the the moon and her tides 

Don’t you wish you knew the ways of water?”

“'Lose Yr Love' grew from a real-life nightmare of losing someone,” Schornikow said in a press release that accompanied the song’s video (which itself evokes a long-held personal nightmare: losing, in a moment of a turned back or dropped attention, one of my four children when they were young). Says Schornikow: “The song explores the fear before the fall-out, before finality. It's a quick and awful spiral, but also a natural counterside of love. I think we found the beauty that exists in this incredibly bleak space.” 

Altar is the sound of a meticulous observer of small (the dronelike “Spider”, the music of which reminds me of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ Ghosteen) and big things (“Patient”, a slow-beat enchantment of a song) and it’s also the sound of an artist who could easily draw the same number of listeners and streams and packed touring schedule and, yes, devotion that is given to artists like Phoebe Bridgers (and her “supergroup” trio boygenius). Have a listen to “Plaster” to hear what I mean. The song - which Schornikow has shared is about the “idea of magic in plain sight, and the dual giddiness and loneliness of moving to the other side of the world” - once again places her expressive voice centrestage, soaring amidst an expansive palette of sound, and when she sings “sending me back to Australia”, she stretches out the name of her home country in a way that ensures that those of us who live with our hearts in two far flung places (in my case South Africa and the Netherlands) are right there with her. It’s a high point in a standout  album that closes with the title track, another masterfully layered song that builds and builds, fuelled by images that linger long after its final notes have been played.

Here’s the thing about Schornikow: she’s a musician’s musician, an instrumentalist with the kind of generosity and musical gifts that see her play keys, not only regularly with Phosphorescent, but also with artists like William Tyler and Sunny War, contributing piano, hammond, mellotron and more to the punk-folk artist’s album Anarchist Gospel. I learn this (and lots more besides) by scrolling through Schornikow’s Instagram feed which is full of disarmingly frank and funny posts that make you really want to be her friend (she captions a photo of herself with a baby on her arm from August last year thus: “Here i am, balancing music n mum stuff. Always trying to get better at both these worlds” and I want to call her up and say, yes Jo, even though my kids are grown up and I am a writer not a musician, I know just what you mean).

She’s also an organist who first started playing the instrument professionally at 16, when her grandmother convinced her local church to let her play pipe organ during services. She studied jazz piano at college in Melbourne and, after hearing the sounds of a pipe organ while at a yoga class at Woodland Presbyterian Church in Nashville, she let it be known that she played the instrument and is now the church's music director and organist. You can see her playing another track off Altar, “Visions”, on that very organ here and, on the country-tinged confessional and matter-of-factly downbeat “Wrong About You”, you can almost see her in church, bringing to life an instrument she loves. It’s stirring stuff and, although she now lives in America, I find it easy to discern a thread that connects her to Australia’s best and most enduring pop group, The Go-Betweens. It’s there in the sometimes sombre, always visual lyrics, matched with memorable pop melodies, that Schornikow so skillfully brings together. Watch her unadorned OurVinyl performance to see what I mean about this special kind of songwriting.

We have booked to see Phosphorescent at Utrecht’s Tivoli venue in August this year and right now the show page says the support act is not yet known. I, of course, am hoping that it will be Schornikow who fills that slot.

I leave you with this dear reader.

One of the most famous Australian singers is Kylie Minogue who, like Schornikow, grew up in Melbourne. She’s the biggest selling female artist ever in that sprawling country and is as mainstream as artists get, purveying her radiant pop with seemingly unstoppable force. But I will never miss an opportunity to remind you that it’s her voice that you hear on the black-hearted  “Where the Wild Roses Grow” off Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ 1996 record, Murder Ballads. The song is up there with Cave’s best duets which, for me at least, include another track off that album, “Henry Lee” , featuring PJ Harvey, and Cave’s version of “What A Wonderful World” with Shane MacGowan. We had a VCR of the video of the 1992 single and we could never get enough of watching it, even - perhaps especially for - the cheesiest moments when, like school kids acting out a song, two of the best outlaw singers the world has given us look up to the sky and then shake hands to illustrate the classic lines,

The colours of the rainbow
So pretty in the sky
Are also on the faces
Of people going by
I see friends shaking hands
Saying, "How do you do?"
They're really saying
I love you

They're really saying, "I love you"