There’s nothing quite like a pocket rocket to get your attention, just ask Lenka.
Her song Follow was featured on an episode of the TV series Dirt, during a scene in which Courtney Cox pleasures herself with a vibrator.
“That was my first TV pickup,” the ex-frontwoman for pop act Decoder Ring said. “The whole show I was waiting for it and then it came on and I howled. I never expected that. I thought it was great.”
Since then, the Australian actress turned singer-songwriter has been touring the world in support of her self-titled solo debut, from which songs such as The Show, Trouble Is A Friend and Live Like You’re Dying make ubiquitous television appearances.
The album’s bouncy arrangements of pianos, vibraphones and glockenspiels belie the darker experimental electronic ambience of Decoder Ring. “It’s much more sweet and poppy,” she said. “I always had this desire to do singer-songwriter, vocally driven folk music which was very different from them.”
Lenka comes by her folky artistic bent honestly. Mom and Dad were hippies, and she spent the first few years of her life in the outback. At seven, the family moved to Sydney, where she studied at the Australian Theatre for Young People under Cate Blanchett.
The two haven’t kept in touch, though Blanchett was disappointed to hear she was turning to music full-time. “She was amazing. We all loved her. She definitely passed onto us a love of the craft.”
