Born in a barn and raised in the Tarkine rainforest, Taylor spent her time in the apple orchards of the family farm and learning music by the fireside.

But, as the girl became a woman, the enormous concrete complexity of the city pulled at her sharpening mind.

She moved to Sydney, then Mexico, then Chile, earning a degree in anthropology and globalisation studies.

The student-strewn lawns and sandstone halls of Sydney University were about as far from a barn in the Tarkine as she could get.

But it might have been too far from home. Struggling to find connections in our largest city left her drained, lonely and missing the family farm.

“One of the most important lessons I learned [at Uni] was that people are most isolated in their own heads,” she said

“I thought how can I be so alone in a city like this?”

On the verge of existential ruin – with a head full of everyone else’s cultures – she turned inward.

Back to her music and the natural world.

“I had this determination to see my music out to the end,” she said.

“To see where it takes me once and for all.” 

She began writing music that spoke about primal, human emotions – grief, happiness, giving up and rebirth.

For someone who’d spent the last few years analysing human civilisation like a colony of sea-monkeys, it meant the daunting task of re-entering the tank. 

“It got me back to a humble place, to the songs by the fire,” she said.

“Through learning about modernisation it felt like we’re not moving forward.

“And I started to feel that, as a song-writer, what resonates are the personal stories.” 

In 2013 she took out the top spot at Bluesfest’s open busking competition and began binding the songs together as an album.

This year it culminated in her debut album Elemental – which she’s currently touring.

It starts out with, Judge, Taylor’s raspy, dark voice sliding over a stripped-down, jazzy finger-clicker.

But it’s like stepping off a sandbank – the depth and range the album quickly rushes up. 

Track three, My Mother, The Mountain is intimate, mournful and rich. 

“It came from an experience as about nine years-old,” Taylor said.

“On our big, beautiful bush property I found mum lying on her back, under the apple trees in the orchard.

“She didn’t look herself, she was bawling her eyes out, she’d just lost her mum.

“She wasn’t the mountain of a woman carrying the family.”

It was Taylor’s first experience with grief and said it stands in her mind as vivid as the day it happened.

“I think Mum gets proud when I sing it,” she said.

“At first, when I told her the title, she said ‘Oh no, it sounds too grandiose’.

“But I said ‘What the f*** Mum, no way! I don’t give a s*** I’m calling it that’.”

It’s a gentle folk song full of a lot of fear, love and family. 

Taylor said it’s an emotional song to perform for herself and – often – the audience. 

“It touches people, I never expected that intense reaction,” she said.

“It makes a lot of people cry, I sometimes feel bad about that.

“I had some guys come up to me after a show and said ‘you bitch you made us cry’ – it was really funny to hear.”

The album wanders from melodious folk songs to darker rock ballads.

“Plenty of light and shadow,” Taylor said.

Dead to Me sounds like something Danzig would be proud of. 

It undulates between an outlaw's clutch of chords and Taylor's smokey howl, lifts to an airy and resolute chorus an nose-dives through the distortion, back into the anger. 

"It's about feeling low in Sydney," she said.

"I wasn't respecting myself - it was a real dark cloud moment.

"This is about burying that part of me.

"In a weird, dark way I find it empowering."

Claire Anne Taylor will play at the Junkyard from 8.30pm on Friday night.

She will also play Dashville’s PigSty in July.