With the arrival of Departure, her long-awaited debut album on Columbia Records, singer-songwriter Carla Werner comes into her own as an artist with her first full-length collection of original music. Fulfilling the early promise she’d shown as an award-winning vocal prodigy in her native New Zealand in the mid-1980’s, Carla emerges as a singer of uncanny power and great subtlety whose creative sensibility draws on life’s spiritual, emotional, philosophic and psychological realities. “I don’t think,” she says modestly, “that it’s the sort of record you can listen to just one time and think, ‘oh, I’ve got that’” Departure is the kind of listening experience that offers greater, deeper, and richer rewards upon each revisit.

Recorded with four producers on three continents over two years by one woman, Departure represents the artistic coming-of-age of Carla Werner, a musician who began her career signing country music in competitions in her pre-teens and is now realizing her dreams and articulating her vision.

She was born and raised in New Zealand, where her father worked as a dairy farmer. “I was exposed to the ‘harsh realities’ of life at a very early age,” she says, remembering things down on the farm. “You learn respect for what you have, the great chain of events. It’s a very wholesome way of growing up and it’s really enriching for a kid to be exposed to that sort of stuff. We were really imaginative as kids, we weren’t allowed to watch that much television.”

Growing up, Carla was exposed to a lot of music. Her father “had a really good record collection: Bob Marley, Neil Young, The Eagles, Abba, bits and pieces of everything” while his father, Carla’s grandfather, played in a band called the Country Boys and, nearing his 80’s, “still writes and demos”. Her mother’s side of the family featured many singers, though “none of them pursued it professionally.” Her upbringing would often be filled with impromptu musical parties, with guitar music and singing.

“As far back as I remember,” she recalls, “I was always singing around the house. I would go and grab something—shampoo bottles, the beads in the doorway—and mimic a microphone as I’d sing along to records.” (A hidden track on Departure is an audio snapshot of a 5-year-old Carla signing a song of her own creation in the shower.)

While still in her early teens, she relocated to Australia in order to live with her mother and siblings. The move proved to be a “huge culture shock” for Carla, who’d begun to establish a “small, but credible reputation in New Zealand.” Disillusioned by the pressure of competitive performing, she quit. “I’d given up music at 16,” she confesses. “I’d done it for so long and I couldn’t handle the competition aspect. Music had to be on my own terms. I wanted to come back in a different form, not singing in competitions.”

At the age of 19, Carla decided to move permanently to Sydney in order to “get back into my music. It was the first time I’d lived in the city, squished up with such diversity and culture and music was teeming out of clubs and pubs. It was a great source of inspiration.”

Carla is a huge Led Zeppelin fan, a huge Pink Floyd fan, who thinks Freddie Mercury is an unbelievable singer and counts Kate Bush, Phoebe Snow, Bob Marley, Chrissie Hyndes, PJ Harvey and the late Jeff Buckley, among many others as equally inspiring. “I have lots of different influences,” she says. “I think that singing and playing covers for five years, doing everything from jazz to reggae to pop to whatever, doing all that stuff has given me my ‘woody’ voice and given me a plethora of sounds I can draw from. The more you play the better you become.”

Meeting producer John Holbrook (Natalie Merchant, Jewel) in 1999, Carla began planting the seeds for what would eventually evolve into Departure working with Holbrook on the track ‘Iodine Red’. Signing with Engine Room Music, her first record deal, in 2000, Carla was introduced to producer/programmer Carmen Rizzo (Alanis Morissette, Paul Oakenfold) with whom she would eventually record the tracks ‘Love You Out’, ‘Enough’, ‘Departure’, and ‘Crimson & Gold’ in Sydney, Australia and Los Angeles.

With a break in production in 2001, Carla had time to re-consider the overall direction and sound of the album. She also used the time to go into Big Jesus Burger Studio’s in Sydney, Australia, with her long-time confidante and collaborator Lucius Borich, to record the songs ‘Under’ and ‘Like Mercury’. “I recorded a couple of songs with Lucius,” she recalls, “which was fabulous. We just went into the studio: Bang! Done!”

With almost-an-album’s worth of recordings as a calling card, Carla flew to London, New York and Los Angeles to begin meeting with record companies. While in New York, Carla ambled into the offices of Columbia Records, where an impromptu performance for the company’s president led to her first major-label contract in 2001. It was time to collect Carla’s songs and recordings and complete the album.

A fan of producer Ken Nelson—“I love his work with Coldplay”—Carla flew to Liverpool to work with Nelson, who produced ‘Heaven Is A Word’, ‘Wanderlust’, ‘Make It Up’ and ‘Even A River’. “I really felt comfortable when I went in to work with him,” says Carla. “There’s a consistent mesh of music now, having also done additional production to things previously recorded.” With all tracks getting a final mixdown from Ken Nelson and Danton Supple at Parr Street Studios in Liverpool, Departure shimmers with consistency and depth, each song contributing to a mesmerizing totality.