Matilda Hassall’s latest single Dinner Table is on brand for the self-described Aussie sharehouse pop singer-songwriter: honest, whimsical, catchy and deeply personal.
Released last week, the new track takes the Geelong artist’s experience of misophonia – a disorder where certain sounds trigger emotional and/or physical responses – as its starting point, but speaks to the broader experience of feeling out of place, different or inconvenient to other people.
For Hassall, misophonia causes intense physical and mental discomfort when she hears the sounds of other people eating, particularly in enclosed spaces.
“It’s pretty weird to be talking about it… I don’t really talk about it because it makes people feel pretty guilty around me,” she said.
“And I don’t want anyone to change their behaviours because of it. But it’s the wildest, most specific thing; it’s really random, and there’s a lot of people who share the exact same struggles with it.”
Hassall said honesty was a key intention with her songwriting.
“I’m always going for specificity, experiences that may only be experienced by myself,” she said.
“I think a lot of songwriters steer away from that because it can feel unrelatable, but I think it can often be the most relatable stuff. So honest, specific, relatable stuff is what I’m going for.”
Dinner Table is the first single from Hassall’s upcoming album Means More to Me Than It Does to You, slated for release in early July.
Recorded at Golden Retriever Studios in Sydney, the album title itself springs from Hassall’s attempts to separate her songwriting from her tendency to overthink.
“I don’t know if I’d call it writer’s block, but I was struggling to write songs,” she said.
“And I realised this was because I was always thinking about the listener more than myself when I was writing. So I started pretending to write for an album called Means More to Me Than It Does to You, so I’d write songs that could mean nothing to anyone else.
“It did really help get songs out, so I ended up running with it.”
Based in Melbourne for the past year, Hassall will launch the single at Fitzroy’s Persa Bar on February 22, with a Geelong show soon to be announced. Dinner Table is available on streaming sites now.
