“It has become a bit of a habit…there are worse habits to have I suppose!”  EMILY WILLIAMS stops EMBER SWIFT before she jumps on plane for 20 hours, to chat about yet another return to our shores.

Ember Swift is becoming a familiar face around the Australian touring circuit. Testament to her fiercely independent ethic and hard touring ethos, she has built up a rapport with Australian audiences, who, much like in her native Canada, have a similar embrace of political change through the suggestion of thought.

“I’ve gotten quite used to the flight now. Travelling in Australia has been a real joy.” Swift explains. “There’s a real appreciation for independent music in Australia which I think is fantastic and unique, and I certainly love it geographically. I have developed some really great friends, so it’s like having extended family when I go visit.”

Studying the region as part of her East Asian studies, she laments a little that the thing that brings her out here  – touring with her music – is also the element that deprives her of seeing a lot of what she had studied. But backpacking through Asia is her ‘fall-back option’. Performing since she was ten, it is clear music was always her foremost goal.

“I haven’t had to fall back on it, and now I am going to have to force myself to fall back on it or else it is really going to disappear!” Swift laughs, realising that at some stage she needs to plan a holiday. It is quite a curious position to be in though, one where you have to force yourself to fall back on your fall-back…

“Again – there are worse things to have happen I suppose!”

Swift seems quite at ease with her place in the world. Her political activism – most noticeably her commitment to the environment and animal rights – is evident throughout her music and how she leads her life from her semi-rural abode in Quebec.

“It would get very stale and boring if I was doing the same show all the time,” Swift states for her renewed vigour after album number nine. “I am writing new songs constantly, and there’s a lot of material. The stage to me, it’s like my other home. I have a home in Canada, but I am the most comfortable on stage.”

Getting her start in the Toronto music scene while still at University in the mid-90s Swift is well aware how a supportive foundation can give a performer something to build on – and how that foundation is not always offered in other genres.

“That coffee house circuit was very forgiving and open to experimental guitar playing and all the weird stuff that I was bringing to the scene, I felt welcome there. It’s true that in the pop world, the more conventional or commercial world there are just so many more rules, like ‘what has marketing potential’…and in the folk world I didn’t feel that same pressure.”

Ember Swift plays Byron Bays Coorabell Hall on Friday & The Zoo on Saturday. The Dirty Pulse is out now through MGM

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