The Melbourne Artist Finds Forward Motion In A Song Shaped By Typewriter Notes And Queenie’s Voice
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Brett Ashby has long treated movement as a way of thinking. Across painting, film, performance, photography, and even the skateboard beneath his feet, the Melbourne-born multidisciplinary artist has built a practice around catching experience in motion. “Over”
, his fourth single, extends that instinct into songwriting, not as a separate pursuit but as another way of giving shape to something difficult to hold.
Written for Sarah during a challenging post-COVID period, the song began at Ashby’s typewriter. The process suited him: thoughts arriving physically, letter by letter, before they could be refined into something safer. That origin remains embedded in “Over.”
Its language carries the directness of something written close to the feeling, circling separation, memory, and the gradual recognition that an ending does not have to become a permanent place to live.
The arrangement gives those ideas room. Rather than crowding the song with drama, the production keeps a degree of stillness around Ashby’s writing, allowing the emotional movement to happen gradually. There is melancholy here, but also a growing sense of release, as though the track is slowly clearing space around whatever came before.
Queenie becomes central to that transition. Her vocal doesn’t simply sit alongside Ashby’s perspective; it changes the shape of the song, bringing another presence into what might otherwise have remained an intensely private exchange. There is assurance in her delivery, but also sensitivity to the material, giving “Over”
a sense of dialogue even when its story remains rooted in Ashby’s own experience.
That interplay suits a song preoccupied with the uncertain space between endings and whatever follows them. “Over”
never treats acceptance as a clean break. Memory remains present, and the emotional residue does not disappear simply because a decision has been made. Instead, Ashby writes toward the slower work of recognising what has ended and continuing to move with that knowledge.
For an artist whose broader practice has often worked through scale, physicality, and public gesture, the intimacy of “Over”
offers another perspective on the same underlying impulse. The materials have changed, but the instinct remains familiar: lived experience translated into form. You can almost sense the typewriter behind the song, the pause before another key is struck, the moment an internal thought becomes something that can be shared.
By the time Queenie’s voice opens the song outward, “Over”
has moved beyond its original circumstances. What began as a personal message becomes a study of letting go without erasing what came before — less a declaration of closure than the quieter decision to keep moving.
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