Jessie Monk Talks Mis O’ The Mountains Out Now!
Rooted in ancient Celtic myth and tenderly shaped by grief, transformation, and dream logic, Mis O’ The Mountains, Jessie Monk’s album, which is released today, is an arresting body of work that traverses loss's wild terrain with mythic grace. Drawing from the legend of Mis — a woman turned feral in the wake of her father's death — Monk reimagines the story through her own lived experience, crafting songs that shimmer with poetic depth, raw vulnerability, and a fierce devotion to truth.
In this intimate conversation, Jessie takes us behind the music — from dreams and spiritual intersections to the power of creative collaboration, and the healing that can be found in surrendering to story.
Mis O’ The Mountains draws from the ancient Celtic myth of Mis. What first drew you to this story, and when did you realise it resonated with your journey through grief?
I feel like finding the myth was such an auspicious gift. I was driving from Drouin, in Gippsland (my home town) to the city and had just spent the day by the river, deeply in the in between, pulling discomfort of grief. It’s rare to find a balm or elixir for that particular discomfort, but I just typed into the podcast app ‘grief’ - and found an episode of This Jungian Life with that title. In the podcast, they sited the myth of Mis, as described in Sharon Blackie’s book ‘If Women Rose Rooted’ and I was floored. I pulled over the car and wept, totally astounded by the space that encountering that myth offered me, and the deep resonance I had with every facet of it.
The album opens with “The Dream,” a vivid and surreal piece inspired by a dream you had before your father’s passing. Can you describe how that dream shaped the emotional and sonic landscape of the album?
This would be a great question for Brian Trahan, who produced the track and is mainly responsible for its manifestation. The track’s foundation was extracted from an improvisation by Fabiana Striffler (violin) and Paul Santner (piano), based on the motif from Gold Flowers (a later track on the album). They improvised around a soul leaving the body and being free from space and time. When, later, we were listening through the improvisation, this excerpt struck me as being of a similar essence to the dream I had the night before my father’s passing. In the dream, I was in a room with great windows with my brother, the room became dislodged from the ground, and we looked at each other with concern, bracing the furniture around us, then the room began to fly into the air, the sky flying past out the great windows. We had the feeling something significant would happen. Brian added the tape manipulation layer that so perfectly sonically describes this. My favourite layer in the track is the tape-reversed recitation of ‘Metamorphosising’ - a later track.
Grief and transformation are central to Mis’ mythology and your narrative. How did working through this myth help you process your own experience of loss?
There are so many perspectives from which I could answer this question. Compositionally, I would say these songs were life-saving. I would be a completely different person, and the grieving process would have looked different without them. Finding the myth was so permissive for me to allow the darkness and the monstor-ness of grief to envelop me, and allow myself the isolation and non-human-ness in a world that is so fearful and denying of the negative side of things, the decompositions, endings, resting, dying. The myth allowed me to access that and surrender to it, but it also brought me out of it. Not in a convenient ‘happy-ending’ way, but in recognising the insistence of love, life-force, and cyclicality. In surrendering to the archetypal, a lot of healing and belonging can be found. I was never foreign or alone. There was a map I was following of an ancient woman, who had been through it and come out the other side.
“I Was An Eagle” merges dream symbolism, mythology, and the philosophy of Khalil Gibran. How do dreams and literary influences typically feed into your songwriting process?
I guess I’ve poetically become interested in things that can offer as many refractions as possible. If a symbol or a poetic idea comes from the dream realm or from an old poem or myth, chances are it’s alive (or dormant) in the collective subconscious. In this way it resonates in more obscure places, or places that I hope have a more numinous or deep echo. They’re familiar images but each one encounters them with their own strange patterns of associations and maybe they touch a less conscious part of ourselves.
“I Agree” offers a lighter, more playful moment on the album. What role does humour or levity play in the context of grief, and why was it essential to include that?
I’ve been asked this question a lot when interviewing for the album. I still don’t quite know the answer. But I think WE needed that song as musicians when recording it. So much of the album is really heavy and vulnerable, which is so powerful, but I Agree was kind of the reprieve during the rehearsal process, and it is that when we play the show at gigs and so on. I guess it’s a moment to connect with the joy and playfulness of music and the cosmic giggle of it all, which was in no way absent during the grieving process, though more delicate and less frequent. But it was always welcomed when it was truthful. I guess my hope is that because we need it as performers, the audience or listeners also need it.
“Gold Flowers” and its powerful visual counterpart depict a descent into monstrous transformation. How did you approach translating such intense emotional themes into choreography and film?
The Gold Flowers shoot was one of those rare and magical creative processes. I can’t tell you how it happened, but just the right amount of creative collaborators with just the right amount of talent and enthusiasm came together in a way that required absolutely no muscling. I think translating everything to the dream realm helped a lot. Because we didn’t have to describe anything literally, and every symbol could suddenly represent so much more. It also opens up the creative field so vastly when you start to think like a dream.
“Metamorphosing/Bardo Thodol I” incorporates real voice notes from your father. What was it like to work with those recordings, and how did that impact the emotional weight of the track?
It does. In honesty, it was deeply emotional. As soon as those voice notes went in there, it was viscerally moving. There were a good few weeks I couldn’t listen to the track without crying. It’s tender to homage in this way. I was so on the fence about it for months, wondering if it was honouring in the way I wanted it to be. I couldn’t make a speech at his funeral. It took me far too long and was far to shocking on many dimensions to find words in that way, but I wanted to make some sort of shrine to him and to the journey of his life and death. I guess these Bardo Thodol tracks feel like placing a picture of him on my altar, the sonic equivalent of that.
The Tibetan concept of the Bardo Thodol features prominently across two tracks. What inspired you to connect Eastern spiritual ideas with Celtic mythology in this work?
I guess that is an intersection that’s alive within me. I imagine there are celtic maps of what happens after death for the soul. It could be I don’t have access to them or simply I haven’t dug far enough. Bardo Thodol was one I was familiar with and very conscious of after my father had passed. The eastern philosophy I have had the privilege of interacting with grapples a lot with death, and was definitely present for me in the process of coming to terms with my father’s passing.
You collaborate with artists like Paul Santner, Fabiana Striffler, and Conor Conningham throughout the album. How did these collaborators help bring the world of Mis O’ The Mountains to life?
I mean, these folks are the album. I am a very collaborative artist, mostly out of necessity. But also i’m so faithful to the idea of creating something that has as many refractions as possible, so in giving over arranging to people like Paul, Fabi, Conor, Max and Brian, I’m inviting all of their creative cosmoses to help tell these stories and I think that makes the work far more potent and mysterious. I think this ensemble in particular works because we all have a similar taste for beauty and dissonance. It’s such a mystical privilege to play with these folks as an ensemble because you know if we stay in beautiful for too long, one of us will bring something obscure or strange in, and vice versa, if we’re traversing experimental plains for too long, someone will being in something really classically beautiful that breaks a heart. This is the best thing about playing and arranging with this band.
Looking back on the whole arc of the album—from descent to re-emergence—how do you feel the process of making Mis O’ The Mountains has changed you, both as an artist and as a person?
I think this question is almost too profound to answer. Any creative work changes an artist entirely, but I think the mythological element to this work has offered me something profoundly deep. I could clumsily describe it as a sense of belonging to the human experience—and the feminine human experience. To be a midwife for this story re-emerging and re-iterating is such a deep privilege, and I feel like I've just been an apprentice to Mis the whole way through.