Place As Elder

I’ve just released a rather beautiful convo with a Scottish folk singer Quinie, aka. Josie Vallely…

…and I’ve been thinking about something she said during our interview.

She said that sometimes before getting up on stage she panics, feeling her mind turn blank, trying to remember all the words to all the songs simultaneously and realising that she cant.

But her body knows the songs. They’re stored in flesh and bone and sinew and movement and it’s about trusting that they’re there, not in her brain but, in her big toe perhaps as it taps along to the beat.

Embodied song remembrance.

This comforted me greatly because podcasting involves a similar oh-shit ritual prior to pressing record.

I said to Jord before I jumped on the call with Josie: I’m cooked, I’m toast, my questions have given up the ghost, my brain is feathers and dust motes.

I can’t do it.

Most of the time my worst fears don’t transpire and I hear myself saying the words and asking the questions because it turns out my body had tucked all that research and planning away inside a cheek pocket.

But it’s not like I end the interview on a massive high either.

Excited to release my guests wisdom, for sure. Relieved that it’s over, no doubt.

But often pretty jangled.

After an interview I replay the questions I asked, that turned into comments, that curled up and died mid-sentence.

And the stutters.

And the almost certainly preventable technological staggers.

The way it’s so effen hard to guide a conversation with grace and clarity so that details are revealed in a logical sequence and everyone listening gets it. Such art! Such skill!

I fret that my guest wasn’t able to get to the heart of their expertise because I knocked them off course.

And I kick myself over how fast I speak sometimes; the break-neck sprint of a prey animal running for its life – because the truth is, when that recording light is flashing, I’m in fight or flight. 

Quietly soiling myself pre-interview, and Quinie and her pony Maisie looking majestic via Anthony Rintoul.

As a kid I was a blackbelt at evading public speaking, able to slip the teacher’s gaze as it roamed the classroom looking for the next student to call up. At uni, studying film, I remember making a short film with my friends and suddenly finding myself in front of the camera in one of the scenes, stiffening like a two day old corpse in performance rigor mortis. I am not a natural front person.

Yet here I am podcasting, deliberately plonking myself into discomfort. Why?

Oh look, there are lots of reasons, including all the noble ones like believing whole heartedly in the power of honest conversations with kind, clever people, and the compulsion to air and share a plethora of thoughtful perspectives.

However, a big personal reason I do the podcast is to grow.

I realised — upon approach to middle age, ha! — that when you push your edge and pursue growth it can actually, feel you know, gnarly.

That there’s friction as old parts of you rub up against emerging parts of you, almost like going against your own grain. 

I’ve always avoided this kind of discomfort, sheltering beneath the canopy of my existing competencies.

But (as I tell myself in an oratorial voice) if I want to learn anything, if I want to mature as a human and hone my craft and get comfortable being heard, there is no way around the terror of trying, of failing, of trying again, of the tedious middle part where nothing much happens, of the giddy breakthroughs, of the crippling self doubt, and of the vertiginous truth that I’m just a speck on a dot on a ball of water and rock hanging in space, so… spose I better make good this little, unlikely life.

The other beautiful secondary benefit of feeling the terror and doing it anyway is that even if I fuck up spectacularly, it becomes a permission slip for other folks to flex their crazy foolish and probably excellent passions too, without having to be perfect.

As you’ll hear in Josie’s interview, following your curiosity can be absolute chaos, generating more questions than answers, exposing old slumbering discomforts it’s safer not to wake.

But we both concur that a key life skill for modern earthlings is to hold this complexity, expect a bit of chaos, and invite others along for the ride.

So please come along for this particularly spirited ride with Scottish folk singer, amongst many other things, Quinie.

Quinie’s album Forefolk, Mind Me was named best folk album of 2025 in The Guardian, and her music strums the vagus nerve in really magical way, performed largely in unaccompanied old Scots, striking deeply buried ancestral chords for us second peoples, for me at least.

Josie is one of those all-terrain guests who was willing to cover lots of ground, including making slow art in a fast paced world, the right to roam and take and make — and her tricky reckoning with doing so in Australia — coloniser anxiety, messy ancestry, how to make place your elder, and what it means when tradition kind of bores you… she even sings a little song about crows.

🎧 Head to iTunes, Spotify or your favourite podcast diner to feast on the interview.