Look at Us Now Dad

Editors’ Notes Melbourne’s Martha Brown had always written folk songs, but it was only when she emerged in the early 2010s as Banoffee—her glitchy, experimental electro-pop alter ego—that she began to feel like herself onstage. There was just one problem: Australian music executives said they didn’t have a place for her. “The mainstream industry always told me I was too weird, and indie labels always told me I was too pop,” she tells Apple Music. “I couldn’t figure out where I fit in.” She felt a similar alienation at home: Her family had always struggled with trauma and mental illness, but their own history and heritage were largely a mystery. Then, around 2016, her father discovered his ancestors were Parsis, a religious group who’d left Iran for India hundreds of years ago, and the finding sent Brown on a mission for answers about her personal identity and place in the world. “A light turned on,” she says. “Understanding where you come from is a huge part of healing. It inspired me to move to America and finally make this record.”

On the road to recording the album, Brown ended up touring with artists who further inspired her to tell her story, teaching her to embrace her ambition and know her worth (King Princess, Empress Of, Charli XCX, and Taylor Swift). The resulting debut, Look at Us Now Dad, is a cathartic chronicle of how she found her community, and it features two of music’s fiercest individualists: cupcakKe and SOPHIE. Here she talks through each track on the album.

Tennis Fan
“I wrote this song in a Miami hotel room while I was on tour with Charli, and it came at a real moment of clarity. I had been struggling with some people back home, and after being on this tour with all these confident, strong female artists, I felt really ready to be like, ‘You know what? Fuck you. I don't have to be okay with this treatment.’ I wrote it in like 45 minutes (you know you've got a good song when it comes that quickly) and ran across the hotel to play it for another player in Charli's band. We walked along the beach screaming it at the top of our lungs and I thought, ‘This might be the single.’”

I Lied
“This is about saying goodbye to my auntie on her death bed. She was my mentor and a second mother to me. I was unwell at the time, and I held her hand, sang to her, and told her that I was healthy, that I’d look after my mom and that we’d all be okay. I guess it was a way of letting her go in peace, but I needed to write this song to admit it.”

F**kwit
“I wrote this song while I was staying in SOPHIE’s basement, on a late night after I’d been burned by someone—they’d chosen someone else over me and humiliated me at a party. Afterwards, I sat on the street in Silver Lake watching all these trendy people pass me by, and the lyrics began to form. It was a way of admitting that I must have cared more than I’d let on. But now whenever I sing this song, I feel so good, because it’s cathartic. Especially the line ‘Fuck all your T-shirts/I know you're bluffing.’ A lot of these trendy Silver Lake people, especially cis men, own these feminist T-shirts that say ‘God Is Female’ or whatever—and they're actually complete misogynists. It’s false advertising. So I just wanted to go into this person's house, take all their phony T-shirts, and burn them.”

Count on You
“I wrote this for one of my best friends. #MeToo was all over the news and I was very triggered by it, being a sufferer of abuse myself, and I wanted to write a song about what survivors—including some of my friends—could get from the movement. We now have this international network of people that we get to hold hands with, and that’s really something. There is power in numbers.”

Don't Go Sharing Your Clothes (Interlude)
“This is the backstory to ‘Contagious.’ The person—the subject of that song—and I had split up, and one night I suddenly decided that I desperately needed them back. And I needed to tell them right then, of course, so I just turned up on their doorstep in my pajamas, wrapped in a blanket, looking pathetic. And a girl greeted me wearing his clothes. Now, at that point, we'd been together so long that his clothes felt like my clothes, so this person was wearing what felt like my jacket. I crumbled. This track is about the moment you realize that someone who once belonged to you could now be anyone’s, anywhere.”

Contagious
“I had a broken arm from punching a wall because, as you know, I had been dumped. I couldn't shower or feed myself, and as soon as my partner left after ending it, I ran into my room and wrote this song. It sums up how I often feel in the world—that my anxiety, depression, and mental health issues inevitably leak into every relationship I’m in, and ultimately ruin them. Like a sickness.”

Chevron
“After I moved to America in 2017, to a neighborhood in East LA, I pretty quickly ran out of money. I was working like seven jobs and still couldn't pay my rent. Finally, I called Empress Of and Your Smith and told them that I had to move back to Australia. They were like, 'No, no, come to dinner and we’ll work out a way that you can stay.' On the way to meet them, my car filled up with smoke on the freeway and broke down, and I didn't have enough money to get it towed. I remember sitting on the side of the road next to my car that was about to explode, gathering enough change to buy a Clif Bar from the Chevron and trying to accept that it was over. But it wasn’t. Caroline [Your Smith] ordered me an Uber, bought me dinner and frozen yogurt, and took me grocery shopping to buy me one more week. The next day, Charli XCX called and asked if I wanted to join her on tour.”

That Sort of Stuff (Interlude)
“A lot of the record was inspired by my dad’s belief in the importance of getting rid of painful things so they don’t have power over you anymore. He, like me, has been going through the process of understanding his history, and when I came home to Australia last year, he started telling me about this night when he suffered a huge anxiety attack. Rather than fight it, he let it wash over him until it dissipated, and was actually able to let go of some of the things that had happened to him. I thought that was such a perfect summary of the record.”

Permission
“‘Permission’ is about facing someone who hurt me and realizing the full breadth of the damage they caused. I had never been able to accept love because of one complete breach of consent that not only broke me to the core, but led me to seek out similar relationships. I wanted to scream at that person. This song is the way that I did it. It was easy to write but brutal to record. You know, the main question I get asked by men when I play it live is ‘Permission for what?’ And every time my jaw drops. A lot of people don't realize that whether it's energetically, physically, or verbally, every act you do with another person requires consent.”

This Is for Me
“This is me yelling at my depression. I was frustrated that my musical career was based on singing about sadness, and I didn’t want to identify that way anymore. It’s me saying, ‘Enough. It's not about darkness anymore. I’m more than that.’”

Ripe (feat. cupcakKe)
“‘Ripe’ is like eating a compilation album from the ’90s, chewing it all up, feeling sick from it and vomiting, and then writing in the vomit. It’s a celebration of all the music that I love, and I got two of my favorite artists [cupcakKe and producer SOPHIE] to make it with me. This song is about being underestimated, and they are musicians who are completely underestimated. The rich and successful need us to survive—they feed off our being, our aesthetic. So this is us saying, ‘Fuck you. We don't want to give it to you anymore.’”

I Let You Down (Interlude)
“This the second half of ‘I Lied.’ It's me apologizing to people who I didn't have the chance to apologize to in person, saying, ‘I let you down while you were alive, and now I have to live with that for the rest of my life.’ I was thinking about how much my issues had locked me away, and feeling guilty that I’d been given time that they could have had.”

Look at Us Now Dad
“This is about celebrating the tough things we go through on our paths to creating a full life. It's about looking back at a time when I didn’t think I’d be okay, and at times when my dad didn’t think he’d live long enough to have daughters, and celebrating how far we’ve come. It's really a song for my whole family, who has seen me through some really dark moments. For me, it shifts the record from this brooding and introspective project to something much more external, communal, and joyful.”