EP Feature | Princess Liar
On being a circuit breaker, Disney moments and finding a healthy outlet for anger
Noah chats to Julie Montan on all things Princess Liar and a healthy fascination with snakes as Tell Me The Truth Do You Love Me Or Not has only just been hatched.
Firstly, congratulations on the release of, Tell Me The Truth Do You Love Me Or Not. I feel there is quite the backstory to what you have made so please can you fill us in so we can fully comprehend what it is.
When pretty words are reduced to catchphrases it makes me really sad. The album I’m about to release ‘Tell Me The Truth Do You Love Me Or Not’ takes it’s title from Track 2 on the album ‘Tell Me The Truth’. The lyrics start: “who woulda thought I’d be so offended by his pretty words, his pretty words….” Originally the song was called ‘Silver Lining’: pretty words spoken to me to assuage the impact of epic deceit, only to be contradicted in his next breath.
Apparently, I overreacted but this is what happened: “Icicles turned to lava Antarctica to Africa….”.
‘Tell Me The Truth Do You Love Me Or Not’ is about hypocrisy and the fury it engenders when someone you trust lies to your face and then denies it. Deflecting is different to self defence, but similarly it happens on autopilot; it means making your partner carry the emotional burden of the harm you inflicted, plus a secondary harm; the guilt of overreaction - theirs - which weighs heavy I assure you.
This is a dark and twisted pattern that relational beings repeat, because the ‘originator of the lie’ cannot ‘own it’, and/or be sincerely contrite about harm caused.
When a woman expresses her fury for injustice, a whole catalogue of condemnation fires back at her (may I point out that self defence is not a crime). The news for all of us who identify as ‘contra-indicated to bullshit in any form’, but especially the form told to our face, is that songs can be powerful missives of redemption. When you use the force; as Princess Liar does, nature exacts her retribution on your behalf as Karma would. Nature sees, hears, believes, and by the power of her perception, the perpetrator’s stranglehold over you, is cut. With bio-toxin gone you can convalesce; circuit-break, change.
Music is medicine. All actions have equal + opposite reactions, choose your reaction wisely. Choose catharsis.
This project is a personal one for you under the moniker of Princess Liar. You have described it like being, ‘a justice warrior’, and you are, ‘subscribed to a life of owning my shit, breaking circuits, healing’. Can you elaborate more on how you came to this way of being?
Princess Liar emerged out of me fully realised, to stick up for women, nature, kids and anyone else who can’t break cycles of prodigious shutting up in the face of toxic lies told to our faces. From the climate crisis to interpersonal relationships and raising children, these songs are magic bullets to the destructive domino effect of denial and as music is divinely retributive - so this is.
Princess Liar has come out of nowhere, but she’s been here all along. Enough is enough. 6 visceral tracks the most lyrically violent I’ve ever been.
I have not used the pretty part of my voice on this one; this is dark subject matter; very bad men doing very bad things….
At the front end it took less than a minute to make this record. 2 years and 10 months at the back to get here. Lots of life in the way, including our mixing engineer falling off a ladder breaking multiple bones which waylaid him many months. From advent to delivery, it’s been a journey up the snakes and down the ladders of……. trusting I’m going in the right direction….
When I realised there was a pattern at play; that I would sooner hurt myself, before inflicting pain on anyone who had hurt me I knew I had to change, not me, but the whole energy field that supports the attitude that women are hysterical and have no basis for self-preservation while tacitly allow men the right to be selfish and self-preserving. Society does not provide a healthy outlet for anger, other than through art, theatre, music, where historically we have processed our emotions constructively, safely, and changed the world in the process. And now the final nail in the coffin is neoliberal capitalism’s new addition to the omniscient harem of bad ideas ‘AI’; which will all but destroy what we have left in the arts, but that’s another story.
Self infliction is something that martyrs do and are encouraged to do, to keep things nice for everyone else; not rock the boat, suppress/deny their shadow, to shame, victim blame, avoid facing the cause of unhealthy patterns; all bedfellows of the same martyr story and no friends of mine. I’m not saying it’s good to inflict pain on anyone, absolutely avoid at any cost, but it’s especially not good to inflict it upon yourself. No one really talks about the fact we ought to love and protect ourselves, not be martyrs, cast our pearls before swine and waste our good things on people who will not appreciate them. But we swoon over people and divest our self love to them. And when we do that, love can get really toxic if its not worked through person-to-person respectfully. It hit me that I needed to stop letting men treat me like shit but it was happening as if by autopilot because my self esteem just wasn’t up to the task of meaningful self-protection. I know how intergenerational patterns play out and I didn’t want that for my daughter - it’s a tough world for girl children - so someone had to be the circuit breaker and that someone was me.
Can you tell us about the Princess Liar band. You have some very talented people involved such as, Mia Schoen (Powerful Owl, New Estate, Sleepy Township), Siahn Davis (RVG, Crash Material, Jazz), Hilary Hutchinson (Davo), Jules Pascoe (On Diamond, Jazz Party, Jaala), Helena Plazza, Tom of Coburg and more! How did it come together?
The origins of Princess Liar are a sequence I like to describe as “Disney moments”. Disney because it’s a story with a Princess as a central character, but not in the traditional sense of a mainstream royal beauty, who is more down to earth than her position allows, and through heroic rebellion finds her male mainstream royal counterpart - no - that was a joke. This is not love and romance in the mainstream sense but love as a paradigm shift.
Even though I say Princess Liar is my ‘character’ she is not performative. She is one who has re-prioritised, re-imagined the best human she can be but doing the opposite of what polite society expects of her.
By consistently advocating for herself and defending, nature, kids, the planet while calling out very bad men who have been exacting power freely and freely extracting from the kingdom whatever will make them and their mates rich, she becomes noble. She is the people’s Princess ha ha. Anyway, I haven’t answered your question.
We came together through a combination of magic and grass roots community effort, to help me rise a band out of nowhere - but for only a short time as I had to back-load me and all my possessions onto a truck headed for FNQ. The genealogy of how we connected through the local matrix goes something like this and I hope I am remembering it properly: I asked Pat Telfer first, then Myka Wallace, she recommended Nat Grant who suggested some drummers. As I was searching for them, I remembered Mia Schoen; I love Mia she’s a queen; a multi-instrumentalist, plays in a million bands, is a brilliant painter, human etc, so I asked her and she said “yes”. Now I had to find a guitarist. I asked Chris Smith - he hemmed, hawed, decided too much of a stretch at short notice and recommended Bonnie Mercer. Bonnie couldn’t - she recommended a guitarist who she loved; Hilary Hutchinson, Hilary said “yes”. Next was bass - I’m very particular about bass - first I asked V (Victoria Mac) who couldn’t; recommended Isobel D’Cruz, as well as Siahn Davis. Iso also couldn’t but Siahn could! It went like that, and it had to be fast.
Everyone was under so much pressure in their personal lives, but they all said yes and then with only a few weeks till show time we promptly set up in my lounge room, learning the songs from scratch. People dropped in and out with covid infections and previous commitments, it was a real hero’s journey, I was on the edge of my seat the whole time but we DID IT. Old school got the fucker over the line. Terrifying, exhilarating, life affirming and all from the goodness of the heart.
There’s no funding for these kinds of adventures. We are totes not for profit hence why it is so important to me that listeners go to Bandcamp and buy the album. It’s not available on Spotify because Spotify destroyed the independent music industry, they rip artists off, fund weapons manufacturing and they suck. We need to divest and divert but I’m not going to preach about it, I don’t begrudge anyone for using the platform as it’s become the most efficient way to source music, and a couple of my old records are on there, but this time I am giving it a wide berth.
You have quite the fascination with snakes from the sounds of it, especially with the concepts of ‘Ophidiophobia’ - a fear of snakes, and ‘Ophidiophilia’ - a love of, or attraction to snakes; and that juxtaposition, which you have wrestled with. How did this interest come about and how does it relate to your release?
The medical process of catharsis in Greek mythology is symbolised by a God and a Python and I have taken these symbols as guiding material for Princess Liar. I draw on The Oracle of Delphi, Priestess of Apollo, who is personified by a Python and Apollo’s son, The God of Healing; Asclepius, is also snake-synonymous.
A snake has so many applications in myth, medicine, for example a snake creates an instantaneous effect of both sickness and health in perpetrator and victim. And as I’m looking to circuit break toxic love-patterns I’ve adopted the Cobra anthropomorphically, as my weapon of cleansing by ‘catharsis’. My choice of weapon, again, has many facets: First it causes shock, then while vulnerable the serpent has unmitigated access to inject you with the anti-toxin that sucks out the locus of a lie. Now the lie is out, transformation can begin and patients are no longer wracked by physiological havoc.
The snake is the ultimate symbol of power in its balanced form. It’s the paradox in medicine where an attenuated poison activates cure. In the visuals which accompany this release you can see I’m comfortably tethered to a carpet python, which indicates that a) I love snakes and b) am absolved of my original sin being ‘a lie’ (the lie I told myself), and no longer under the harmful effects of its poison. The casual way I handle my python is to trigger this instantaneous effect on detractors from trying to deceive me; reminding them that in the presence of a snake one must be paying full attention, be utterly respectful, lest they get bitten...thus start the toxic love-pattern cycle all over again. In this music-as-medicine, snakes are the symbol of what we fear (sickness) and what we love (health). Princess Liar is the People’s Princess remember, the kind of princess who doesn’t take shit from very bad men....
Can you tell us about your experience of being a member of the cults: Asclepius and Pythia of Delphi and your interest in Greek mythology?
Art/catharsis is powerful medicine. It comes from Greek meaning purification, cleansing by way of expressing yourself. They say stress is a precursor of cancer and I believe it. Holding onto lies, for me, has proven to be SO stressful, I felt some kind of cancerous creep happening. Total toxic overload.
I needed help from Gods. No one could help me shake the sickness. No amount of wine, no medication, no therapist, nothing came close to an affordable or lasting cure.
What I needed were myths and metaphor. Asclepius, Apollo’s son, the Greek God of healing: through art, poetry, music, embodies the rites which endow the agent/patient to face their ophidiophobia (their lie) and take the elixir (the transformative poison) that changes their constitution re-balancing them. In this way, “truth sets them free”, is how they enter into remission. And the Pythoness (the Oracle of Delphi), residing in Apollo’s temple, also cures by channelling for truth in her sick patients who seek her forecasting ability to be balanced and hopefully cured. She reads them via her gift of ‘intuition’. If their future should reveal something the patient didn’t know about themself prior, and if they understand the Pythia’s message, they will either enter into remission of what ails them or be doomed to repeat the same mistake and stay sick.
It’s very cryptic and technical and in the most prosaic way it all comes down to “owning your shit” - just in a legendary Greek mythological way. And the Spitting Cobra came to be the perfect metaphor for my purpose. It shoots venom like a laser when the need to protect itself arises... I mean how cool is that? It’s not deadly it will just instantly stop a bad man (or anyone) from doing an intended bad thing to you. I read about the amazing spitting creature in the Age (what a shell of a rag that is these days), I still have the article. Imagining my projectile saliva-shot plum in his eyeball causing temporary blindness, hopefully to teach him a karmic lesson AND give me a placebo effect of deep restitution and remission ha ha. I must sound like the cruellest bitch on earth, but I would never hurt a person intentionally and definitely not physically, yet I would hurt myself- go figure. As I said, neither are right. I needed to stop this. We all need to stop this. We need an outlet for our anger; a healthy outlet and art and music seem to be the only things that work for me.
The album and accompanying lyric videos have been digitally launched on-and-in conjunction with your website: www.juliemontan.com so listeners can have a full encompassing experience with your work. Do you plan on launching it live with the band?
In a word, no.
Finally, who are your favourite local Melb/Naarm bands at the moment or who would you like to see interviewed for Tempo?
Miss Kaninna, I saw her live at Tanks the other night as part of Shine on Gimuy Festival - she was phenomenal. Also, I love Richie 1250 & The Brides of Christ - a band who are almost never interviewed, but they are awesome. Richie 1250 and Cong Josie are a double act that are unmissable in my opinion and are playing a show at The Old Bar on December 14. My old bandmate from Your Animal, Brigitte Hart and I, will be reunited to sing BVs with Helena Plazza and Steph Brett in the Brides band. It’s going to be genuinely excitable, brilliant, fun. Oh, and I love On Diamond SO much, but you just interviewed them, right? hmm who else?
Wow, it's interesting how you framed this! What if 'pretty' words are just social engineering scritps?