The Verses

Thu 12th Aug, 2010 in Features

Killing Heidi sold enough CDs to make them part of the social fabric for many an Aussie teenager. Ella Hooper and her brother Jesse now have a new project, The Verses, which showcases some classic songwriting, beautiful melodies. For Ella, older, wiser and more in tune with how she really wants to sing: “it just feels right. It’s a maturing that needed to happen.”

Ella’s voice, which was the undeniable focal point of Killing Heidi, gets far better treatment with her new project, mainly because she’s not screaming amidst a sea of distortion anymore. “I was adamant about that,” she explains of surrounding herself with seasoned musos, “I wanted a band that could support my singing, rather than just having to hold up the whole vocal fort the whole time.” With a killer band comes killer chops, and with killer chops comes killer harmonies. The Verses’ debut, Seasons, is stuffed full of them, many of which Ella arranged herself. It’s had such resonance that the masters of combined voices, Fleetwood Mac, took the freshly minted Verses with them on their Australian tour last year. “We got to watch them every night,” Ella enthuses, “They were so consistently good. It was really inspiring!”

As anybody in their mid-twenties will know from their much-battered Reflector album, Ella and Jesse Hooper are rock and roll kids at heart. Raised in Violet Town, Victoria, which now contains less than a thousand people, the siblings grew up writing songs together and not much has changed. “That’s pretty much the nucleus of the project,” Ella says. “I’ve started playing more guitar live and sometimes I’ll write things by myself and bring it to the table, but 80% of the time it’s still me and Jesse.” In case they weren’t sure of each other’s opinions, the band headed straight from their Fleetwood Mac support gig to Santa Monica, Los Angeles, where they cut Seasons with mega-producer Mitchell Froom (Crowded House, Phantom Planet, Pearl Jam). Now with a great record in the bag, for Ella it’s a waiting game to see how her second life in the spotlight pans out.

“It’s strange,” Hooper says of returning to the public arena as an adult musician. “The landscape is very different this time around, and I’m very different.” The sold-out arenas and in-stores of old have been replaced by social media, and Ella’s slowly getting used it. ”Back in the day we never Twittered or Facebooked, or even Myspaced!” she laughs. “It does feel like we’re beginning all over again, but it’s really exciting. I love being at the start of something and building it from the ground up. We decided we didn’t just want to mutate Killing Heidi and rely on those songs or that name. We wanted to draw a real line in the sand and start anew.”

For Ella and Jesse (“He’s lost the dreadlocks, it’s a lot more subtle now. He’s looking like a grown up man – not acting like one,” she laughs), The Verses’ new challenge is dealing with a landscape in which having sales in excess of five times platinum, as they did with their last band, is something almost exclusively reserved for Susan Boyle. “Who knows how many hard copy CDs you sell [these days?]” Ella muses, “I’d love to get Seasons pressed up on vinyl but everyone will probably end up buying it on iTunes!”

And that’s why it’s totally OK to still be besotted with Ella Hooper; she sticks to her guns, even when it isn’t trendy. “I’m not a fan [of iTunes] I’m an old-fashioned CD or record buyer. I want the artwork, I want to know where it was recorded, I want the thank-yous, I want the whole process, so I must be a bit of an old fart myself. People are so into the convenience of iTunes …I don’t even have a credit card!”

Ultimately, Ella’s more at home with The Verses, and she hopes Australian audiences will be too. “It’s a lot more who we are,” she says of her and Jesse’s new direction, “We’re actually pretty relaxed people. This is much more our pace and much more our style.” Besides, short of those over-zealous journalists, there’s a lot less chance of being stalked. “Yeah, there’s no hysterical celebrity element, which we did have with the last band. So that’s another thing I really enjoy about this group. It’s a lot more mellow on that front. Now I communicate with people on my terms.”

The Verses’ debut album Seasons is out on Friday 13th August