The key that ended up unlocking Liz Stokes’ writer’s block actually had 44 keys. It weighed six kilograms and was made in Britain in the 1950s.
It was a Remington Rand manual typewriter that had been given to Stokes as a present by Ben Sinclair, the bass player in her band The Beths. It ended up being the thing that saved her.
Well, one of the things. Because the journey towards making the New Zealand band’s fourth album, Straight Line Was a Lie, was a difficult one. While on tour with their last album, 2022’s Expert in a Dying Field, Stokes started realising something wasn’t right with her body.
“I was rapidly losing weight and I was getting super hot all the time and my resting heartbeat was around 130,” she says, speaking from the Auckland studio where the band records most of their material.
Breakout NZ indie band The Beths’ new album is Straight Line Was a Lie.Credit:
They performed at the Newport Folk Festival in August 2023 and afterwards Stokes passed out. After consulting doctors she was diagnosed with Grave’s Disease, an autoimmune disease that causes the thyroid gland to overproduce hormones. Learning more about her condition eventually resulted in a new song, Metal, where she sings, “I know I’m a collaboration – bacteria, carbon and light”.
“My relationship with my body has never been amazing,” she says. “I guess if anyone has a good relationship with their body, that’s great, but it’s pretty rare. The human body is so complex and I became really aware of that and started thinking, ‘my body is breaking down and I have little control over it’. That’s where that song comes from.”
Her body was not the only worry she’d face. She was, as she puts it bluntly, “in a real hole with anxiety.”
‘Being in the depths of depression is not conducive to being creative.’
Liz Stokes, The Beths
Stokes was prescribed an antidepressant, which worked and got her out of that hole. Unfortunately it had side effects.
“This is speculation, of course, but I think the medication was not helping me feel strongly about anything I was doing. I was at a point where I couldn’t seem to write songs. I know that being in the depths of depression is not conducive to being creative but I was struggling with numbness for about a year-and-a-half.”
The Beths onstage at the Laneway Festival in Sydney in 2023.Credit: Edwina Pickles
She started reading books about the creative process – Stephen King’s On Writing, Robert Caro’s Working, Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner’s How Big Things Get Done. A common theme was the need for routine and a regular practice of writing for the sake of writing.
In his book, King wrote about the benefits of using a typewriter to crank out the words. That’s when Stokes remembered the Remington. She bought some paper, dusted off the machine and religiously tapped out 10 pages a day, writing whatever came into her head for almost two months.
“I liked using the typewriter because it’s so tactile, I’m faster at typing than using a pen, you can’t just delete what you’ve done if you don’t like it and you can get a real rhythm going. Writing 10 pages a day makes you reach deeper, to things that are a bit uncomfortable to write about. That’s something that you need to do by the time you get to your fourth album.”
After playing Coachella in April last year, while bass player Sinclair and drummer Tristan Deck returned to New Zealand, Stokes and her partner, guitarist Jonathan Pearce, decided to stay on in Los Angeles for three months. By this stage Stokes had reams of paper filled with writing, and a head full of ideas. The city helped kick-start the creative process of putting the songs together.
“There’s a vibe in LA where everyone is working on their thing,” she says. “Part of being there was to get focused but the city also has a lot of input, which is important when you’re trying to pull stuff out of yourself.
“There’s a revival-theatre movement in LA, so we’d go and see all these great movies from the past, whether from the ’80s or the ’30s. And we’d see a lot of live music, like Drive-By Truckers and St Vincent, and live comedy at places like Largo.”
When she sat down to demo songs she would turn to those typed pages with highlighter in hand, searching for nuggets. It’s no surprise that what she found in those pages stemmed from what she’d been going through, and it ended up in many of the songs.
No Joy is an irresistibly bouncy indie-rock song about being seemingly incapable of feeling joy. “I don’t feel sad,” Stokes sings. “I feel nothing, heartbeat barely pumping.”
Similarly, the title track has buoyant call-and-response vocals and more hooks than a fishing tackle shop, even though it’s about depression being a cycle, not a through line with a beginning and end. Still, Stokes realises that things will come good again eventually, singing, “It’s OK to take the long way ’cos every way is the long way.”
“The last record we made was post-pandemic and it was cautiously optimistic,” she says. “It was saying, ‘we’re going to be OK’. And this new record is saying, ‘things might not be OK but maybe that’s fine’. Everything is ongoing and you just have to keep working through it. Working through it is what life is.”
And then there’s Mother, Pray for Me, which is probably the most personal song Stokes has ever written. It’s a bruised beauty of a thing, musically delicate but lyrically a real heavyweight.
“My mum is Indonesian and grew up in a very different environment to me. We have this gulf of understanding between us, which I know is common with a lot of people and their parents, especially people with immigrant parents. There’s a language barrier and cultural differences but there’s still this deep love. It’s a huge, complex thing to fit into a tiny song.”
But she does fit it into a stunning few minutes, singing, “Mother, will you talk to me? I don’t know the tongue in which you dream. Somewhere in the middle there’s a pidgin that we speak, but is it enough?”
“I was crying the whole time I wrote that song,” she says. “I cried when I made the demo in LA, I cried when I recorded it with the band, and I might cry talking about it now. It clearly hit a very specific nerve with me because it’s about my relationship with my mum. But it’s not a straight ‘I love you/I appreciate you’ song. It’s more complicated than that.”
Last year Stokes and her four sisters travelled to Taratara, at the northern tip of Sulawesi in Indonesia, to visit the grave of her mother’s mother, who died young and whom Stokes never met. Her mother wanted them to make the trip to see where their grandmother was from and to learn about her history.
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“It’s been a big couple of years of feelings,” says Stokes, shrugging and smiling. “When I try to explain things I’ve been going through, I feel like I’m explaining it badly. But if I can create a song about it then I think people get it. And it’s a nice feeling to be understood.”
The Beths’ Straight Line Was a Lie is out on August 29.
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