You'd think an album recorded in April 2019 would present a window to the past, a view of a world blissfully unaware of the lockdown, isolation and panic coming for it.
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The new album from Sophie Payten - better known as Gordi - doesn't provide that view. Instead, she was ahead of the curve - of socially isolating, of locking down, of having no idea what the future held.
The Canowindra born and bred Payten's second album Our Two Skins - recorded on her family's 150-year-old farm just outside her home town - will be released next Friday, and the period of isolation and confusion felt while writing it has only become more relevant ahead of its release.
The follow-up to 2017's album Reservoir is a stripped-back descent into self-discovery and the madness which comes with it - of coming to terms with her sexuality against the backdrop of her past and the same-sex marriage debate, of coming out to her family, of trying to figure out who she was.
I had an incredibly supportive family in Canowindra, as far as rural towns go it was really open and a creative space and I was given nothing but love and support.
- Sophie Payten
"It was a complex story, I wrote the album when I was 25 and it was the first identity crisis I'd had, there were a lot of questions I'd never really addressed before coming to the fore," she said.
"You had to ask who you were and if that changes who you are."
She was especially worried about telling her grandmother who she "loved dearly" - at the time she came out, her grandmother and Canowindra matriarch Ailsa Payten was 95 and a lifelong catholic.
The struggles of who to tell are reflected in the album - Payten described the fourth track Volcanic as "trying to explain what it's like having a panic attack" - while trying to accept herself for loving and hoping to be accepted is a theme on several other tracks.
"But in the end a lot of those anxieties were unfounded," she said.
"I had an incredibly supportive family in Canowindra, as far as rural towns go it was really open and a creative space and I was given nothing but love and support."
Her grandmother also accepted her.
"She called me - we often spoke on the phone - and she was like, 'Your dad told me. I love you,' and she said all these wonderful things," Payten said.
"It was the last phone conversation we ever had."
The farm Payten's grandmother spent most of her life became the recording studio for the album.
She'd already linked up with friends Chris Messina and Zach Hanson to lock in recording, but the studio she wanted to record in had been shut for 12 months, leaving the trio adrift.
"At the time my grandmother who I loved very much and was the family matriarch passed away and I just felt that real pull back there," Payten said.
"I'd spent a few years touring and hadn't really been back to Canowindra.
"I asked my parents if I could head back to the family farm which has been in our family for over 100 years - we think it was built in the 1860s - and asked if we could record there and they said yes."
The house and property became an integral part of the album itself. The isolation - no internet or WiFi - and only a select number of instruments forced Payten to be more creative, and it shows.
The album is noticeably more stripped-back than Reservoir: where the 2017 release has synthesizers and horns and vocal loops front and centre, the latest release features an old stereo, percussion from banging on sheds and chains - Aeroplane Bathroom even features the distorted hum of Payten's Subaru Impreza.
The isolation and confusion of Payten's quarter-life crisis manages to echo the chaos which has trapped the country in 2020.
"It's a lot about isolation and being cut off," she said.
"When we announced the album parts of it got swept up by a lot of the COVID stuff, but people were isolated and depressed and cut off, and people often turn to media to help them through that sort of stuff and it can help lift you up."
However, she knows as well as anyone the world has changed since Our Two Skins was recorded. Payten finished her medical degree in 2018 and is a fully qualified doctor and aside from a month in Canowindra recording spent most of 2019 working at a hospital in Sydney.
She quit at the start of 2020 to spend a year touring with Of Monsters and Men, Bon Iver, on her own US headlining tour - as well as a show in Canowindra - all of which was scrapped.
"It's been spanner after spanner," Payten said of 2020.
She returned to Australia in March, and immediately let old contacts know she was prepared to work if emergency rooms and hospital wards were swarmed.
"As soon as I got back in mid-March I made a call to my old manager and said I was able to come in, so they put me on a casual roster," Payten said.
"As I was in Melbourne as well I signed up with DHHS, as a first responders cover shift so if one of the nurses or doctors got COVID they could fly us in and we would cover all their shifts for a few weeks.
"I suppose it speaks to how well we've dealt with it that I haven't had a shift since I got back."
She's been filling in time promoting the album, recording live gigs to send out as well as organising a min-online music festival Lunches Without Borders, but has also had plenty of time to kill while splitting her time between Melbourne and Canowindra.
"Also did the stuff like baking sourdough and making soda and realising why we don't do these things normally," she said, laughing.
"It is really strange to be putting out an album without that face-to-face contact. We can still reach people through social media so we still do have a bit of a connection."
She's hoping to see an Australian tour put together some time this year, but she knows international tours are off the cards for some time.
Until then, she's splitting her time between Melbourne and Canowindra, with a show in her hometown towards the top of her list when everything hopefully, finally gets back to normal.
Gordi's album Our Two Skins is out on Friday, June 26.