
Short Snarl’s Thea Lucia discusses creative process
Written by Thea Lucia
My favourite word is entanglement. I love words that sound like what they mean – a twisting, an entwining, the feeling of becoming enmeshed. A snarl.
Writing and recording Gossamer Songs felt like both succumbing to and embracing the entanglements in my life, as my worlds as a violinist, my background in the institutional ecologies of classical music and my work as a teaching artist in schools, overlapped.
I made a decision at age 3 to play violin. That is the kind of kid I was. I was extremely fortunate that my parents were able to support this decision both emotionally and financially. I grew up musically in concert halls, Saturday morning orchestra rehearsals, and the sunny front room of my late violin teacher’s fairytale-like house. I fell in love with the folk-infused music of Bartok, and felt confused and ashamed as to why I didn’t love Haydn or Mozart the way I was supposed to. I learnt to play incredible music, and I received a technical training that I am deeply grateful for. I also found myself in the strange position by age 15 of thinking of myself as not even remotely creative. Making things was not related to what I did as a musician.
My week is now spent driving, grumbling about Adelaide’s dismal public transport infrastructure. But I’m driving to places I really want to be, to 4 schools; one up north, one down south, one in the hills, one in the west of the city. I have the privilege of working with young people, all of whom have significantly varying levels of access to arts education. I am constantly thinking about what experience with music and art I hope for them to have, what they deserve. I always return to a constant – I want to support young people in connecting to and discovering their innate creativity, and finding the tools and processes they need to articulate themselves through sound. What I didn’t expect was what this would do for my own relationship to creating. Teaching has given me the permission to engage with my creativity without judgement and with profound care for my ideas and sonic interests. Healing my inner child, one might say.
I’ve written songs for most of my life, all to be promptly discarded.

As I supported my students to record their ideas, to layer new sounds together in ways that interested them, I also gave myself permission to learn more about recording. I had to have that belief in my own capacities to be able to best show up for them. This is the main reason I could trust myself to learn to record my debut EP at home, DIY, with the resources I had at my disposal. There’s a glockenspiel in Above The Knee because the school down south has a set of yellow, plastic-cased glockenspiels. There’s a missing half-bar in Part II: Time Passes because the way young people create their first songs is so often unbound from regular meter.
I’ve written songs for most of my life, all to be promptly discarded. The 4 songs on Gossamer Songs survived mainly because my friend, bandmate and now partner Sam Wilson taught me how to tune my guitar to open D. Suddenly the relationships between the guitar strings resembled my violin. I knew what to do with those sounds, a new but familiar world of harmonic possibilities fell open before me. All of the songs on the EP are in D major, a key that the violin falls comfortably into with its open strings tuned in 5ths. Open tuning allowed me to meet myself where I was.
I had to have that belief in my own capacities to be able to best show up for them.
Learning and unlearning, unravelling and finding confidence to lean into uncertainty with curiosity about what could emerge, is how Gossamer Songs came to be. Learning to teach music has largely been about learning to ask good questions. A simple one, but one I use often is “what comes next?”. It tells a young person that what they are making is something, and will become something. It tells them that I trust their creative decision-making. Sometimes they know exactly what the next sound will be, sometimes they don’t. Then together, we find a new question.
Short Snarl Gossamer Songs is now available digitally and to pre-order on 12″ vinyl.
