POPULAR music is filled with heartbreak songs. Where would Taylor Swift be without them?
The cream of the crop are the songwriters who make listeners actually feel their pain, their emotion. Abbi Yeo is one such artist.
On her latest single, She, the 20-year-old indie-folk singer-songwriter takes her audience through the traumatic aftermath of learning her former boyfriend had been cheating on her.
The five-minute track builds to a string-laden crescendo before Yeo imparts the emotional final line of, "I was your liquid sunshine, I guess you'll never say, 'you're all mine'."
Yeo launched She last Friday in front of a packed audience at the Oriental Hotel.
"I wrote it right after he [ex-boyfriend] sat me down and told me and I went to my parents house and sat in my music room and chugged out the lyrics," Yeo said.
"I was writing a two-chord guitar part and just crying and screaming as I was so upset and that song came out of it.
"I was really proud of it and it helped me the most to heal."
She also comes with a stunning video, produced by Cameron Utiger and Nikola Jokanovic from Newcastle's Youtiger Productions. The clip features a choreographed dance routine between Yeo and her friends Erin Hobden and Chris Holburn.
"I knew I wanted dancing in it because it's very much a waltzy kind of song and I used to do dancing and I love dancing," she said.
The video clip also reveals Yeo's striking tattoo of a heart in the middle of her chest. The tattoo is a reminder of the fragility of life after Yeo almost drowned in December 2021 while swimming at Dangar Falls near Dorrigo.
"I had an incident where I almost drowned, which very much scarred me and gave me pretty bad PTSD from it and I got a tattoo to represent that I still love water as much as it tried to kill me," she said.
Music has long been a therapeutic release for Yeo. Her late grandfather was a musician and her inspiration growing up in the Central Coast suburb of Budgewoi.
Following his death in 2015 from motor neurone disease, Yeo wrote her first song Perfect Silence at 12.
The song went on to become the title track off her debut EP and it featured a sample of her grandpa's band playing Johnny Cash's The Old Account Was Settled Long Ago.
"I put his song on the end so he could live on forever through music, the one thing he loved the most," she says.
When Yeo recorded her EP Perfect Silence in 2021 with producer Matt McLaren at S&M Productions in Newcastle she was relatively unknown on the local scene.
A little song called Wildfire changed all that. Combining elements of pop, folk and R'n'b, Wildfire found an audience and was the inaugural winner of the publicly-voted Newcastle Music Show's Steel City 50.
"Wildfire winning definitely shot me up people's playlists at least," she said.
Yeo's next project is a debut album.
The 14 tracks are in various stages of completion and she hopes to release the record later this year.
GET CRAWLING
DON'T forget the second Carrington Crawl returns to the harbourside suburb on Sunday.
The free live music begins at Franky's Noodles at 11am with Ena Malibu and passes through the Carrington Bowling Club, Criterion Hotel, Young Street Hotel and Seven Seas Hotel before ending at Earp Distilling Co with the reformed dave the band at 9.10pm.
