Pub Choir queen on why singing is ‘the closest to magic we can get’

Welcome to CityChats, where Brisbane Times meets our city’s most interesting characters on our most iconic form of transport. This week, Pub Choir founder and director Astrid Jorgensen explains why she’s average, what happened to her space-themed band, and what she sings at karaoke. Jorgensen meets us at North Quay ferry terminal in the CBD.

She’s just flown back home from the US, with a few days spare before kicking off an Australian tour that includes three sold-out dates at the Tivoli in late July. It’s a rainy, windy day in Brisbane, and we stand by the CityCat’s railing because the seats are sopping wet. Jorgensen graciously asks to stand on the side on which her long hair blows away from her face – instead of just asking to go inside, or asking why on earth we’re making her do this.

Do you have a favourite sound? My dog cries with joy when I come home after a long time. It just pulls my heartstrings.

Do you have a least favourite sound? I’ve got misophonia, where I’m actually deeply annoyed by many sounds. I’m quite infuriated by the sounds of other people being alive when I’m trying to concentrate, like if someone’s chewing and I’m reading, I’m like: “Really?”

I think I pay a lot of attention to sounds, so I can’t block them out. At Pub Choir, I invite 7000 people to make noise at one time, and then I’m trying to hear it all, and I’m like, “I’ve just found the problem” – not a person, but just like, “we need to fix this note”. In life, that’s quite annoying, but at work it’s very useful, so I try to harness it for good.

And I apologise deeply to my partner, Evyn, for all of the rest. What do you think is so important about music and people having it in their lives? Where do I begin?

Because it’s so all-encompassing, but singing for me is like the closest to magic that we can get, and it is so easy to do. It’s very hard to sing well, but it’s very easy to sing at all. I think people get really wound up in not being great so then they don’t, they’re embarrassed.

But it’s not about being the best singer, that doesn’t even exist. All of creativity is an opinion, right? Someone who you think is great, somebody else thinks is annoying.

So the reason to sing is not to be the best singer – that’s moot, it doesn’t exist. The reason we sing is to feel better and to make the most of the fact that you are the only person that will ever have your voice. No one in the history of humanity has ever or will ever have the same-sounding voice again, so every time you sing, you are necessarily changing how the world sounds.

I think this is a way more compelling reason to sing, right? It’s changing the world forever. You are painting art into silence with your body.

It’s so crazy to me that you can open your face, push out some noise, and you can affect how people feel, you can connect with other people. It’s so instantaneous, so easily accessible. It’s free.

I mean the show’s not free, but you can sing any time you want for free. I think it’s like this dormant, incredible human quality that is just sitting there, waiting to be embraced. I think in the past we’ve been much better at singing together, but I think we’re in a bit of a dip, and I would like to do something about that because I think it is just so easy to begin.

You just, as I said, open your mouth and begin. We’ve heard that people go to Pub Choir and they cry. Because they like it!

They say it’s very transformative. Does that resonate with people? Do they find it empowering?

I try not to get wound up in what it’s like. I almost feel like it’s none of my business what people feel at the show. At Christmas, we have 7000 people at Riverstage.

They’re all feeling whatever they want to feel. My job is to facilitate the notes. We sometimes get too wound up in, like, the specialness of this and that, but actually, let’s just make something, and you will feel what you will feel.

It will unleash whatever is waiting there in you. What I like to see when I look out at the audience is when it dawns on people that they are the maker. We spend a lot of time receiving other people’s art, other people’s creativity, passively consuming things.

That’s fine, but it does feel really different to make something. Someone told me that Pub Choir felt like the first time they realised they could take up space. Just by the fact that you exist, you are a creative being.

I think we do forget that sometimes. I forget it, too. There are so many aspects of life where you just don’t even want to start trying because you’re worried that you’re not going to be great at it, and that’s not the reason that we exist.

To be the best, that’s so rare in life. We exist to experience things, to fully feel our lives, so open your face and let’s get singing, and then go paint something, and then go for a swim and do anything because you like how it feels, not because you’re trying to win something. We stop at St Lucia ferry terminal on the way back into the CBD and Jorgensen recalls that she and her p