After beginning her music career in Canberra before moving to Brisbane during the pandemic, singer-songwriter Lisa Maps writes from the heart with her songs leaving listeners with a tactile impression.
Tomorrow, Maps will release her first new music since 2020 with the call to arms track '21st Century Child' that is the final single from a forthcoming EP.A song she began writing while still living in Canberra, it went on the back-burner for a bit when the jolt to life the pandemic caused realigned everyone's day-to-day lives.
A lament about the state of the world that we are leaving to the next generation, Lisa penned '21st Century Child' to her partner's five children.
"About five years ago I found myself unexpectedly in a relationship with a man with kids. That obviously brought about some big changes in my life and in my perspective on issues like climate change.
"While it's an issue I have cared deeply about for a long time, it gave names and faces to the generation that is going to inherit this situation from us.
"I wrote the song imagining the conversation I'll have to have with them one day about why the world is this way – because it's going to be our fault."
Ahead of the song's release tomorrow (6 May), scenestr is thrilled to premiere the music video for '21st Century Child' today. Enjoy.
"I started working on the video before I had begun recording the song," shares Lisa. "This isn't the way things are usually done and I don't necessarily recommend it.
"But I had the opportunity to play at a sizeable climate protest at Glebe Park in Canberra in early 2020 and I realised both the scene would be a great fit for the song and that the opportunity might not come around again any time soon.
"The last part of the video that we filmed was the fireworks scene. It was tricky to pull off but I don't think the video would have been complete without it.
"During Black Summer I came to view fireworks as a symbol of absurd, unnecessary excess. That year most cities had to cancel their New Year's Eve fireworks because of the bushfires, but the ones in Sydney still went ahead.
"That seemed so jarring to me, the juxtaposition of people fighting to save their homes from the fires while others not that far away were partying like everything was fine.
"So weaving those shots in with the protest scenes seemed to be a perfect way of expressing visually what the song was trying to say. But of course for many months afterwards all the scheduled fireworks were cancelled because of the pandemic, so we just had to wait.
"Like the song, the video took its time coming together. That's just the way it works sometimes if you don't want to have to make compromises."
