Hello Friends, thank you for visiting our Pozible campaign!

It’s here so we can tell you a bit about our brand-new record that we have just made and if you feel so inclined, you can help us bring it into the world!

We started this record while we were on tour overseas in May and June of this year. The band had been through some big changes at the end of last year. After five years of touring as The Mae Trio with cellist Anita Hillman, it was just the two of us and we became The Maes. We spent the beginning of the year at home resting after a massive 2017, reflecting and writing songs.

We got invited to play at the Orkney Folk Festival in Scotland and the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in Colorado, so we packed our bags and set off on a two-month tour of Canada, UK, Ireland and the States without quite knowing what the band would sound like. We took Brisbane cellist Monique Clare with us who we didn’t know very well at the time, (luckily she is an excellent tour companion as well as an extraordinary cello player) and trusted to the folk music gods…

We started in Canada in Lake Echo, Nova Scotia, intending to make a four track EP to release under our new name. We spent four days in the studio with producer Daniel Ledwell. We had this incredible feeling of possibility in the studio. Like the new band was taking shape in that space. Like instead of trying to rebuilt what we were as The Mae Trio, we could expand and become something entirely new. We felt more relaxed and free than we ever had in a studio before.

After that the tour took us to Scotland. We had a couple of unexpected days off and contacted our friend Gordon Maclean who has a studio on the Isle of Mull in the Scottish Hebrides. By some serendipitous coincidence he was free at two days’ notice and we booked two trains, a bus and a ferry. In a crazy rush for the train Elsie and Monique got left behind in Glasgow and Maggie traveled on to Mull by herself.

“I spent an evening experimenting in the studio for the first time ever without a band. Playing a song I had never played live before, experimenting with playing electric guitar for the first time ever and making music that felt completely free and different and reckless.”

Elsie and Monique arrived the following morning and we sung and played our hearts out, full of joy and excitement and the phenomenal freedom of recording just for fun!

We were on a roll by then. We met Liam King on an Irish Island called Inish Bofin and ended up recording for a day at his studio in Galway on the hottest day of the year (no laughing matter it turns out). We recorded a session in John Fitzgerald’s stunning studio in West Cork, squeezing a whole song into three hours before rushing off for a soundcheck.

We got home from tour feeling fresh, excited and creatively fired up. We listened to the 7 songs we had made on the road and decided we wanted to finish the collection and turn them into a record. We made three more tracks in Melbourne winter with Brendon Love of The Teskey Brothers producing and then, before we quite realized what we had done, we had a finished record!

We are enormously proud of it. It’s full of joy, adventure and spontaneity. It’s raw, vulnerable and honest and completely ourselves. We also reckon it’s the strongest collection of songs we have ever written. We can’t wait to share it with the world.

For the next part, we need your help. We need to finish this record and put it out into the world in the best possible way as we can. We need to mix and master it, with the phenomenal Isaac Barter in Geelong, we need to manufacture CD and vinyl, pay the wonderful Madeline Deneys to design album artwork, and pay for a music video and publicity for this record.

We are proudly independent musicians and albums cost a lot of money to produce and release. We feel incredibly blessed to be able to make songs for a living and this is made possible by the support and generosity of people who connect to our music.

If you would like to hear this finished record, please consider preordering it here, digitally or on CD or vinyl. There are also a number of other exclusive rewards on this page which we had fun dreaming up and we hope some of you will enjoy. If you are not in a position to pledge to this campaign then please consider sharing it or passing it on to the attention of someone who may be interested. Thank you all so much for your love and support!

Maggie and Elsie

How the funds will be used:

Mixing and mastering - $3500

CD manufacturing - $1820

Vinyl manufacturing - $4200

Album Artwork Design - $1200

Video production - $2000 

Publicity - $4000

This is by no means an exhaustive list of the costs associated with putting this record out into the world. Any funds beyond our target will go towards some of the following: 

Photography 

Website design 

Tee shirt manufacturing

Outstanding recording costs 

Pozible fees