Leah Flanagan Paints Another Side
Homegrown talent Leah Flanagan hits the stage this month with her sweet, shimmering sounds in an inaugural performance of her latest album at the Darwin Entertainment Centre.
By Jenna Hoare
Flanagan shares a compilation from her album Colour by Number, which explores a new area of music and features the lush sounds of a string quartet.
“I’ve never commissioned strings before…and we deliberately made [this] knowing that we wanted to make something that had classical arrangements.”
Flanagan produced the album with singer, songwriter, arranger and composer Sarah Belkner who Flanagan also calls a friend.
“I love Sarah’s musicianship. With Sarah it’s just me and her fleshing out all the ideas. And then talking through and spending a lot of time on the arrangements, what we wanted the songs to sound like and finding complementary players.”
“It’s nice to work with someone who you know is a beautiful musician and is the sort of musician that you really notice their own particular style when they’re playing, and she brings that to the album.”
In this show, witness a different side of Flanagan and be led through some of the tales and inspiration behind her songs, uplifted by the notes of Netanela Mizrahi and the Ad Hoc String Quartet.
All these creative musical elements are brought together by Sean Healy’s visual projections, based on the album artworks created by Curran Brown, Nungala Creative and Kamahi Djordan King.
“It’s nice to have the beautiful orchestral instruments, with guitar and vocals, and beautiful projections [shared] in a venue like the Darwin Entertainment Centre,” Flanagan says.
Colour by Number was released in 2020 when Flanagan originally had planned her Australian tour, but like all good things during that time, the shows were put on hold due to the pandemic.
“I haven’t toured my album because of COVID. It made it difficult to tour the record.”
Flanagan says the visual element was originally planned as part of the show and the Australian tour.
"Sean has taken a lot of the artwork from the Colour by Number album. He took all the visuals and turned them into these beautiful projections…created specifically for each of the songs,” she says.
And what’s next for the talented musician?
“I’m spending time with my kids and working on a couple more albums. Trying to focus more on quality rather than quantity. I wanted [this show] to be something special at home. It’s not connected to any national tour. This is my only gig for a while."
Leah Flanagan – Colour by Number
WHEN SAT 21 OCT | 7.30PM
AT DARWIN ENTERTAINMENT CENTRE
COST $20-$40
INFO yourcentre.com.au
Photos: She Is Aphrodite
