Flip Grater "Cage for a Song" 2006 + "Lullabies for Anais" EP 2018

Flip Grater has played a pivotal role in New Zealand’s indie-folk scene, and through her music she has established a following in Europe. Her love of food, music and travelling has led her to publish several albums as well as cookbook tour diaries. The Cantabrian’s ambitious nature has also led to her involvement with activism, recreational sports, film work, and running a vegan deli and wine bar in Christchurch. Born in 1981, Clare Grater was one of five siblings growing up in the Parklands suburb of Christchurch. Her family were involved in a progressive Christian community with like-minded people. From an early age, singing was associated with faith, but her first experiences weren’t particularly enjoyable. It was when her father introduced her to the lower register of Bob Dylan and Tracy Chapman that she discovered her dislike of singing in church was partly because it was in the wrong key for her. With her newfound knack, her father, who played in the church band, taught her guitar...
...At 15 Grater became passionate about animal rights. Changing to a plant-based diet, she got involved in a project to protect Hector’s dolphins by banning drift nets off Banks Peninsula. She adopted the nickname Flipper from her activism, shortening to Flip.
Her culinary skills were prompted due to her mother’s refusal to cook her a separate vegan meal. Grater recalls the first vegetarian meal she prepared was a Simon and Alison Holst fried rice recipe from Simply Vegetarian. It featured the very nostalgic frozen pea.
In the introduction to The Cookbook Tour Europe: Adventures in Food and Music (2011), she recalls writing her first song a few years after discovering the joys of vegetarian cooking. Her early music was angst fuelled, stemming from the despair of being a young woman. She remembers playing it to an older man who became visibly uncomfortable at the lyrical content.
After high school, she became involved in outdoor recreation, teaching snowboarding, rock climbing and raft guiding. She moved to Australia and then to Sweden with her first love. Returning home, she channelled that heartbreak into songwriting and began performing her music at 21.
Soon she was working as a DJ at Christchurch’s RDU station – an occupation that she jokingly describes as her last real job. She shifted her spiritual values after a workmate invited her to attend a local Buddhist centre. For her, the Buddhist philosophy was helpful and made sense. Buddhism would also later influence her songwriting process.
With the trend towards self-releasing music in the 2000s, Grater decided to establish her own label as she couldn’t find one that felt right and fitted for her scale. She saw it as an opportunity of being more productive and independent, without an abundance of paperwork. The label, named Maiden Records, would later release the work of Urbandtramper and Marlon Williams’s earlier band, The Unfaithful Ways.
Grater released her first EP, called The Nameless EP, and in 2006 she played at South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas. The same year she released Cage For A Song, a full length album with a mixture of folk and raw, alternative music.
While driving back with friends from a holiday in Kaikoura in her newly purchased 1988 Lada stationwagon, Grater revealed her burning desire to be a cookbook author. One of her friends pitched the idea that she merge her upcoming release tour of Cage For A Song with writing recipes and collecting them from people that she had meet along the way...to be continued... - audioculture

trax:
1. Art Robot 2. Bedside Table 3. Game 4. Long Awaited Sigh 5. Where's The Door 6. What Life Could Be 7. Concrete 8. Everybody Else Is Busy Mess 9. Doing So Good 10. This Road Leads Home 11. Bonne Nuit (Bonus) 12. Keep Your Dreams Close (Bonus) 13. Dors Mon Bebe (Bonus) 14. In The Time You've Been Alive (Bonus)
…served by Gaius…