In a sprawling Collingwood warehouse, filmmaker and musician Kathleen Lee finds music interwoven across her daily routines.

Defying the freewheeling creative stereotype, filmmaker and musician Kathleen Lee likes to have some structure in her day. It’s an approach shared by her partner, painter Matthew Dettmer, and it’s a productive one—Kathleen recently wrote, directed and acted in the six part webseries Sex and Death, with another show in process.

From morning writing to evening walks, music plays an integral role in Kathleen’s day, particularly the soothing practice of playing guitar. Luckily for Kathleen, there’s plenty of places for her to practice in her Collingwood abode, including the sun-filled rooftop.

Who are you? Tell us a little about yourself.

I’m Kathleen. I’m a filmmaker and singer/songwriter. I grew up in the outer east of Melbourne and moved into the city after I finished high school. I’ve been living around Melbourne ever since, aside from a few stints here and there in Germany.

Who else lives here?

I have three housemates here. My boyfriend, Matthew Dettmer, who I share two rooms with upstairs. He is a painter. You can see his art all over the walls. He paints as though it’s a full time job. Mon to Fri from 8 till 6. It’s very impressive. He has turned the garage downstairs into his studio. Downstairs live Ed and Carter. Ed works in video, like me, and Carter has just started training to be a beer brewer.

What does a typical day look like for you?

I try to do the same thing every day. In the morning I get up and go straight to a café and write. The less I have to do before I get there the better. My head is the most clear and creative in the mornings and if no tasks interrupt it before I get to the café I can get some good writing out. I like going to the same place every day to avoid having to waste energy on decisions. At the moment I go to Oxford Larder. It’s quiet, I like the guy that runs it and I can get there without having to cross any noisy roads.

After that I come home and keep writing in the tiny room upstairs till lunchtime. Then I eat lunch, shower and read out on the rooftop for an hour. At about one or two I head into the office for the afternoon to edit. I work from the KEWL x BANALARAMA shared studio space on Gertrude st. It’s about a fifteen minute walk from my house.

At five ish I come home and do yoga in the little room upstairs whilst listening to the New Yorker fiction podcast. Then I watch one episode of Friends as I prepare and eat dinner. Then I go for an hour long walk that starts just before sunset and ends as it’s starting to get dark—my favourite time of day. I walk down to the Fitzroy Gardens and back. I have a very specific route that I only vary if there is a very good reason to do so. Then I hang out with Dettmer or watch a movie. That’s my go to day but often it’s interrupted with meetings and deadlines etc.

What do you love about your home?

I love the texture and colour of all the old surfaces: the peeling paint on the brick walls and the wooden floor boards. I like how big it is. There are so many different spaces to choose from depending on your mood. The kitchen/loungeroom is a great place to cook and hang out together. I love the rooftop and the tiny room upstairs the most. You can lie in the sun all day long out on the rooftop and the tiny room is very calming and safe.

Do you have any daily or weekly habits or rituals around music in your home?

I actually listen to music on my evening walks. I have a Spotify playlist that I listen to every day. It’s called Evening Walks. I just fill it with albums that I love or that people recommend to me. I love the combination of walking and listening to music. It’s like a movie unfolding around you. Especially in the evening when the light is gentle and people are all out for dinner. You can look into the different restaurants along Smith St as you walk past, and then in the park you can look up at the tree tops; it feels amazing.

Dettmer loves to put records on when we are cooking or cleaning. On the weekends he’ll usually pick something upbeat for us to cook eggs to. I like that a lot.

What spaces of your home do you play in?

My favourite place to play here is on the rooftop in the evenings. It’s nice to feel the air on you when you play and be able to look out at a distance. Or I will shut the door and play in the little upstairs room. If no one is home the living room is also good.

Tell us about a time when playing guitar has positively impacted your life, or a highlight of your guitar ‘career’.

Playing guitar has always been a soothing thing for me. Writing songs is a way of me understanding my feelings and creating meaning. I was sick for most of my twenties with an unexplainable fatigue and depression that was eventually explained by a diagnosis of ASD. The thing that got me through this time was my music. It allowed me to create something beautiful out of the pain I felt. Turning pain into beauty is what all my songs are about.

Do you feel like your taste in music has changed over the years? 

Yes. I used to only listen to Leonard Cohen everyday. Now I listen to at least ten different artists every day. I have very sensitive ears and can only handle certain types of music. Anything with too much going on in the midrange is painful to my ears, so, as interesting as I found it, most rock music, metal and even some heavier folk was off limits for me.

At first it was just very minimal and simple folk music (Leonard Cohen and some of Bob Dylan) that I could handle but then I discovered techno which is mainly just bass and treble and hardly ever distorted midrange. I have an equal love for both these genres and believe them to be essentially the same.

Recently I have been delving into more synth style music like Beach House; it doesn’t hurt my ears and it is so layered and beautiful and full. I get high off listening to it on my evening walks.

You’re at a party and get corralled into playing your guitar for the crowd—what do you play? Do you have a go to song?

My songs are all very sad, slow and earnest so this would be quite uncomfortable for the party—not to say I wouldn’t do it—in fact, unfortunately, I think it has happened before. I think it would be my song ‘Hours Gone By’.

Tell us about your guitar—where did you get it and what do you love about it? What makes it special to you?

My Dad gave me my guitar. I think he found it on the side of the road and fixed it up. He has a whole collection and let me pick one. There were lots of more expensive choices including a brand new maton but I picked the one with the gentlest most mellow sound. It is a nylon string. I love the sound of nylon string. Steel string is too sharp and wet sounding to me.

What's an album you never get sick of?

Death of a Ladies Man by Leonard Cohen. It’s very good evening walking music. It has a grandness to it that I like. I guess it’s the horn section. I think it suits the sentiment of all the songs. I love how epic it makes his quite particular observations of beauty.

And your favourite album cover?

I don’t know. I never think about that. Maybe Songs Of Leonard Cohen. But mainly because I know what it contains.

Any great resources, lessons, books or tips and tricks for learning guitar?

I learnt through looking up chord shapes and then playing around with picking techniques. I think it’s cool to teach yourself. Then you can develop your own style. The guitar is a great instrument to do that on. It’s easy to make it sound nice so it allows for a lot of playfulness.

Do you write songs and if so can we link to some of them?

Yes. I have an EP and some singles on Bandcamp. I am working on a second EP, but it’s been taking me a while. I think I’ll finish it in the next few months. I’m inspired by different experiences that cause me to want to capture certain sentiments—sentiments that I think are best captured in the form of a song.

What keeps your musical spark alive?

I suppose mainly through my evening walks. But there is no correlation between what I listen to and what I create. They are very different experiences. The desire to create always comes from something inside—never from another already existing expression of something. Although listening to other expressions of things can teach you techniques and allow you to see ways in which things can be expressed that you might not have realised yourself.

Listen to Kathleen’s music at her Bandcamp profile or watch her web series ‘Sex and Death’ free here.

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