With Love and Fury

Background and release

Noonan had met Paul Cassidy of the Quartet in Brisbane in 2011, while both were performing at the Queensland Music Festival. Noonan's original idea was to create a project celebrating the work of beloved Aussie poet and cartoonist Michael Leunig but distance made writing together difficult.

In 2013, Noonan found herself in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane, at the Judith Wright Centre: “I realised with great embarrassment that I didn’t actually know who Wright was. So I went inside, found an anthology of her poetry and read it cover to cover. Her work just blew me away.” With financial blessing from the Australia Council, Noonan set about cherrypicking the project’s composers. Her brief was simple: choose a poem by Wright and go for it. Noonan got in touch with Cassidy again and she flew to London to record the album with the Quartet.

Noonan said of the collaboration; “I am so thrilled with the outcome of this project and believe we have created a truly beautiful and significant body of uniquely Australian work and I can’t wait to share this new music with you on our World Premiere Australia tour in April/May. Ever since I first heard the Brodsky Quartet with Elvis Costello on the seminal album The Juliet Letters and... with one of my musical idols Bjork, it has been a dream of mine to sing with this incredible string ensemble,” Paul Cassidy of the Quartet said; “We are so happy to be working with Katie Noonan, and are proud to be involved in this wonderful new Australian song cycle in memory of the inspirational Judith Wright.”

Critical reception

A reviewer from Australian Stage said' "Poetry has often been the inspiration for Noonan’s work. In 2011, with her trio Elixir, she recorded Australian Thomas Shapcott’s poems... This time it is Wright’s poetry that has been set to music. [they] all capture the sunlight and shadow of Wright’s poetry, its joy and despair, with Noonan’s voice swooping and soaring within a web of finely balanced delicate string parts.

A reviewer of Sounds of Oz said; Noonan has "created what is arguably one of her most ambitious albums to date with her new release With Love and Fury... I’m still not sure this is the kind of music I’ll reach for time and time again. It’s just so different, with songs that veer wildly from the classic structure of verses and choruses. While that meant I struggled to get into some songs, others really moved me. This album is brave and creative. And in a musical landscape that has a little too much beige, those virtues count for something"

Track listing

1. "Late Spring" - 4:08
2. "To a Child" - 4:57
3. "Sonnet for Christmas" - 9:01
4. "After the Visitors" - 3:27
5. "The Surfer" - 6:16
6. "Night after Bushfire" - 6:59
7. "The Company of Lovers" - 4:25
8. "Failure of Communication" - 4:46
9. "The Slope" - 6:22
10. "Metho Drinker" - 5:37