With Don’t Be Afraid, Carla Geneve is showing exactly why she’s one of Australia’s most vital songwriters.
Inspired by Seamus Heaney’s final words, Carla Geneve’s third album Don’t Be Afraid is a raw, intimate exploration of fear, shame, love and forgiveness, all wrapped in delicate, piano-driven melodies.
Teaming up with producer Dan Carroll, Carla has let go of perfection, creating a sound that breathes and evolves naturally, full of tender highs and quietly devastating lows.
Born from a rare period of stillness in her life, Don’t Be Afraid captures the beauty of vulnerability and the courage in facing your own shadows.
As Carla puts it, “There are no ‘sides’, there are just interconnected feelings, events and people,” and the album reflects that truth, holding space for empathy, connection, and the messy complexity of life.
We caught up with Carla to talk about letting go of control, turning shame into something constructive, and what it really means to live unafraid.
HAPPY: What are you up to today?
CARLA GENEVE: Today I just worked 9-5 at my other job, not super exciting, sorry! I’m at home eating chips right now.
HAPPY: Tell us a little bit about where you live, what do you love about it?
CARLA GENEVE: I live just east of the city in Perth. I have lived here for about 5 years now and I love it.
It’s quiet so I can just potter around and not be in the centre of everything, then choose when I want to go out and watch gigs or do other non-home-based activities.
I live in Perth because I like to be close to my family, and to be honest, because I just never got around to moving anywhere else. It’s an underrated city.
HAPPY: Don’t Be Afraid feels like such a personal record. How did that sense of quiet stability you’ve spoken about shape your songwriting this time?
CARLA GENEVE: People often say that about my music, so I feel like I don’t have the ability to not make a personal record at this point.
I’m not an expert in many things, but I am one in the way I feel and things that happen around me so that’s what I usually end up writing about.
When I feel stable, it allows me to put more time into learning new ways to make music.
Writing these songs I settled into writing in a different way, instead of rushing to make another album that had that same raw country sort of sound as my last two.
I like it, but I can’t be doing the same thing forever.
HAPPY: Seamus Heaney’s final words inspired the album title. What does Don’t Be Afraid mean to you personally?
CARLA GENEVE: Those words spoke to me because he was someone who bore witness to a lot of suffering in his life, both personally and politically.
Those being his last words, as well as the nature of his poetry later in life, said to me that he had found a sense of acceptance and peace after reflecting on everything that he had seen.
So many artists have unhappy lives, but it was inspiring to see that he was happy at the end of his.
HAPPY: Your last album, Hertz, explored the highs and lows of bipolar disorder. How does this new album compare emotionally and sonically to that journey?
CARLA GENEVE: I find myself wanting to use the time that someone spends being immersed in my album (if they listen to the whole thing with headphones or on vinyl, etc) to sonically make them feel how I was feeling at the time of writing the songs.
With Hertz, Dan and I tried to take the listener on a journey of how it feels to go through a big peak and trough of moods, not just with the storytelling, but also with how the album sounded as a whole.
This album is also based on duality.
There are moments when I want to put people on edge. Songs like ‘Wisdom Isn’t Worth It,’ ‘Annabelle’, ‘Passing’ are intended to be pretty disquieting.
To make people feel uncomfortable with those sounds while being brutally honest and examining my own shame and fear, hopefully, is a visceral way of sharing the way of how it feels to do that.
Then, a lot of the album is peaceful (Better Believe it, IIWII, Here, Look). I wanted it to feel like a hug or a warm bath. That’s the catharsis aspect, the reward for searching yourself, and maybe finding things that you do like in there as well.
To come back to your last question, this is why I called the record Don’t Be Afraid. We shouldn’t be afraid to look at ourselves, even though it can be really scary sometimes.
It’s worth it, with empathy for ourselves and others, it can lead to growing, understanding, and being at peace with things that used to make you unhappy.
HAPPY: You’ve said shame can be both helpful and harmful. How do you navigate that duality in your life and your music?
CARLA GENEVE: Shame, either internal or external, is a useful reaction to help mediate actions and feelings that don’t benefit everyone, so seeing it in that way helps create something constructive out of those feelings.
But shame can also become a spiral and hurt more than it helps. If you are feeling shit and that makes you think you’re not worthy of feeling nice, then no one is winning.
Understanding that life is long and that shame can be overcome and left in the past invites hope and can allow you to escape that horrible downward trajectory.
HAPPY: ‘Ashamed’ went through a lot of iterations. Was there a point in the studio where it finally felt right?
CARLA GENEVE: I wrote that song in 2022 and we did the final version mid 2025.
The issue with it was that it felt like a song that could have been just me and a piano, but the album was falling into a slump at that point in the track listing and was losing momentum.
When I suggested drums, Dan wasn’t sure, but it just changed the whole feeling of the track from morose to kind of sheepish. It wasn’t wallowing in shame anymore, but felt like it had accepted and was moving on.
When I wrote the song, I don’t think I had truly figured out that shame could be a motivator instead of a pit of despair.
Finishing the final version felt like tying a bow on that unhappy part of my life in which I wrote it and adding new life to it from my perspective now.
HAPPY: This album was a real collaboration with Dan Carroll. What was it like learning to let go of perfection and control in the studio?
It’s certainly easy with Dan. I have so much trust in him and respect for his ability to make beautiful art with sound.
I feel very lucky to have more of his input to make my stories come to life sonically.
Since I’ve always worked with him, nothing is new there, but this was the first album where I really sought out his ideas and said “What do you think we should do here?” which led to most of my favourite parts of the record.
I think I’ve been letting go of that sense of control a little more with each record that I’ve made.
When I was younger, it was intense, and sometimes I couldn’t even function because I was so stressed about the end product.
I was 18 when I started, but now I’m almost 27.
With time and experience, I have begun to understand that making a song or an album isn’t about perfection most of the time; it’s about freezing a moment and preserving it for other people to experience as well.
I don’t freak out about how things turn out anymore.
The moment is already there, and moments are rarely perfect, so I just let it be and then move on to the next thing.
HAPPY: Songs like ‘Here, Look’ and ‘Woman Like Me’ dive into blame, empathy, and double standards. How do you balance social commentary with personal storytelling?
CARLA GENEVE: Well, I didn’t really set out for anything on the record to be social commentary.
In fact, I tried to avoid it because I tire of art only giving me one perspective (maybe I didn’t do a good job of that in the end).
I wanted to describe my own experiences and feelings in the context of others’ perception, or my perception of their perception.
But I suppose the personal in a political world is inevitably political.
In those two songs, I just wanted to express that nothing occurs in isolation.
Feelings, relationships, circumstances and conflicts are always holistic, whether it’s easy to admit or not.
In that way, I hope that those two songs, and maybe also ‘Annabelle,’ provide people with more than one perspective at a time.
There are no ‘sides’, there are just interconnected feelings, events and people.
With empathy, we can see the entirety of what is happening around and to us, and be less divided, both in our personal lives and in our ideological beliefs.
HAPPY: Looking at the record as a whole, what do you hope listeners take away from Don’t Be Afraid – and what would you say to someone scared to face their own shadows?
CARLA GENEVE: I hope that they walk away with happy ears first and foremost! I always wanted the album to sound lush, and we put more time into the music itself on this album than any of my other ones.
In terms of their thoughts, I really don’t know what I want people to take away from the album. Depending on who someone is and where they are at in their life, they will find something different.
That’s my favourite part of releasing music, it can and will mean 1000 different things to 1000 different people, even if some of them didn’t find any meaning at all.
It’s really special and kind of magical to me.
If someone is scared to face their own shadows, I would say:
1. There is no rush, life is long, and it’s impossible to have all the answers overnight.
2. If you’re worried about being a bad person, you’re probably not one.
And 3. You’ll be proud of yourself for doing the difficult thing that you know you have to do.
HAPPY: Lastly, what makes you happy?
CARLA GENEVE: People make me happy! I never thought I was a people person, but the more I understand myself, the more beauty I see in people just going about their lives, finding their own way and making their own joy.
We are all so weird.
