To Enjoy Is the Only Thing

“There are a lot of things I faced in myself while writing this record, and there are still a lot of things coming out of it for me,” Tori Zietsch tells Apple Music of her deeply personal debut album recorded as Maple Glider. “I know in myself I can struggle to find the space and quiet to really feel things and process pain.” *To Enjoy Is the Only Thing* is bare, emotive, and often painstakingly intimate. The Melbourne-based artist composed much of the album while living in the UK, and later enlisted Tom Iansek (Big Scary, #1 Dads) to produce and record it. The warm sounds and sincere feel that Iansek is known for can be felt throughout. And while it’s filled with stories and experiences specific to Zietsch’s own life, it nevertheless feels like the kind of record that’ll hit deeply for listeners in need. “For the people who are able to connect with this record, I hope it gives you a moment of that quiet space,” she says. Read on for more on each track on Maple Glider’s debut release. **“As Tradition”** “Love was really confusing to me for a long time. It always felt like it came with conditions. I saw this in my family life. My mother was shunned by her community for leaving the religion I was raised in, just as her mother was before her. At times, the ‘love’ I’ve known only seemed to make sense in combination with compliance. I wrote this song about the feeling of vacancy that comes from experiencing love that way.” **“Swimming”** “This was meant to be a love song, but by the time I finished it, it kind of predetermined a breakup. I’d been experiencing some of the most beautiful places I’d ever been in, and falling out of love was very confusing. I was trying to force myself to be happy and in love, but I was far from home, and really lonely. It made sense to record the song after the breakup. I kind of felt like I was able to handle the sincerity of it then.” **“View From This Side”** “My mother gave me a collection of her journals some years ago. She wrote from the time she was with my father to after she left, and covered a period of our relationship where we weren’t in touch because she was trapped in a really horrible situation. It helped me to really get to know her and to connect more deeply to her experience. When I passed the age that she was when she had me, I realized how painful it must have been to bring her first child into the world and at the same time lose her own mother, among all the other chaos in her life at the time. I am so grateful to her that she chose to share with me her experiences of the world in such an intimate way, and that I have been able to learn things from her perspective. The title of the song, ‘View From This Side,’ is taken from a slide of negatives I have of my grandmother on her wedding day.” **“Friend”** “I wrote this song for a friend I’ve known since I was 16. We played music together across the span of close to a decade. We shared a deep creative connection, but as our aspirations began to drift apart, our expectations of one another became really unhealthy. I bottled a lot of resentment over the years until I completely shut down emotionally. I think that was really difficult for him to process. There were a lot of things that happened that weren’t okay, but I think our healing made us better people. He is someone who will always be very dear to my heart, and I am so thankful for what our experiences have taught us.” **“Be Mean, It’s Kinder Than Crying”** “I developed quite an intimate relationship with someone in private. It all felt like it happened really quickly, and was quite intense and emotional. I still don’t fully understand why it was all in secret, though I was about to leave town, and I think that might have made it difficult for the other person. I hurt someone close to me in the process. I made a lot of art about it. It still feels a bit weird all these years later. We couldn’t find the right form for this song for a while. Drums never seemed to feel right, and I kept playing the guitar out of time. The final version of the song is actually shorter than the song I went in to record, but it makes so much more sense to me now.” **“Good Thing”** “This song still breaks my heart a bit. I wrote it as I was experiencing the close of a connection that had quite deeply affected me. I kept this song to myself for quite some time. I still get transported into a different space each time I play it. It holds more meaning to me now than it ever has.” **“Baby Tiger”** “It’s actually pretty weird reflecting upon this time. I’d just moved home to Naarm \[Melbourne\] after being away for two years. I’d come out of a weird relationship and was trying to land back in my skin again. The air was smoky and bushfires seemed to be swallowing everything. I felt a bit distant from everything. I just wanted someone to be there and make things feel better, even temporarily. I’d never really felt this way before. Also, Baby Tiger is our resident door scratcher. Her real name is Coriander.” **“Performer”** “I was in a pretty low space when I wrote ‘Performer.’ It was written in the same time period as ‘Baby Tiger,’ so in my mind they’re kind of twins. I felt like I was faking my own life, everything seemed to consume so much energy. I kept searching for something or someone to make me feel inspired and alive again. I didn’t own a computer at this point, so the kooky backing vocals are ideas I had sang into GarageBand on my phone days before we added the final touches to the album. I wanted them to sound really distant and muffled, which to me made sense in terms of the imagery I had created for the song in my mind.” **“Mama It’s Christmas”** “I don’t really know what to say about this song. Everything I want to say about it is kind of already there. My friend Dan sings backing vocals; we used to play it live together a lot. It was one of the first songs I wrote in a long while that felt completely me. I knew I wanted to keep sharing music like this.”

The Melbourne-based songwriter’s debut is sparse and hypnotic, drawing connections between her experiences of leaving a relationship and leaving a religious upbringing.