Out of the dark: Melody Pool is finding it cathartic to open up about her struggles with depression.

“It took maybe an hour to write it, three hours of crying after I wrote it and two hours to change some of the wording to make it more poetic,” Pool recalls. “When I was writing it I was in such a state that some things didn’t make sense, so I went over it when I’d calmed down a bit.”

Black Dog is a brutally honest document of the debilitating depression Melbourne-based musician Pool is haunted by.

“You waltz in the room in your drunken perfume and you touch every inch of my being,” she sings to the disease. Other lines include “People often say there’s no time in a day but there’s way too much time for me” and “nobody sees what I do to me, nobody sees when I’m crazed.”

After the release of her acclaimed debut The Hurting Scene in 2013 Pool admits her depression took hold, making her second guess herself.

“I have this thing about feeling like a fraud,” Pool says, “that the first record just a fluke, it was only heartbreak that meant I could write like that, how could I write to that standard, do I even have a gift?”

She kept working, playing live, first as a solo act, then forming a band, and writing songs that would make up her second album Deep Dark Savage Heart.

“I’ve always been very dedicated to playing live because my dad (country singer Alby Pool) was, I grew up with ‘The show must go on’. In a good way, you’ve got a job to do and this will make you feel better. And it does.

Melody Pool prides herself on her lyrical honesty. Picture: Nicole ClearySource:News Corp Australia

“Although I could really channel it (depression) and it probably made my performances a lot better and a lot more emotive. I was just good at being in the moment when I was on stage. Before going on it would be awful, I’d be anxious, and I’d hate to go out and talk to people after because I’d be even more anxious in case I said something stupid or wrong. It was actually quite helpful to play live.”

However between albums Pool, 25, fell into a black hole, with fellow musician Ella Hooper being a crucial friend in her time of need.

“When I first met Melody I was shocked,” Hooper says. “Here was this incredibly young person who was, in a lot of ways, very naive. She was going on in the aftermath of her very first breakup. On the other hand she was writing these songs that were gobsmackingly mature.

“Melody is a very intense person. She can be a little hard for some people to get to know, but those are my favourite kinds of people and we became fast friends. I was at ground zero of that journey (with depression) for her, literally taking her to doctors and what not.”

With hindsight, Pool says hitting rock bottom forced her to get help.

“It was full on. It was scary. I scared myself with that time. I’d see Ella nearly every day. I wrote Black Dog in my room one night, I couldn’t leave the house. Ella forced me to go to the doctor. I think she was probably one of the people who helped save my life. It was that bad.

“I don’t think I actually would have done that but I was at the point where I was having such bad thoughts that I was scaring myself. When it got to that point I went ‘OK, this isn’t just me being a drama queen anymore, this isn’t just me having to deal with a little bit of depression, this is actually severe and I’m actually sick’. Facing the fact you’re actually sick is terrifying but also a relief. You realise that you can’t help it but also that you have a lot of effort to put into getting better.”

Singer Ella Hooper helped Melody Pool through her dark days. Picture: SuppliedSource:Supplied

Pool first aired Black Dog at a show in Wellington, touring with Kiwi musician Marlon Williams.

“It was f---ing terrifying to play that song on stage for the first time,” Pool says. “It felt like I was naked. I played it last in my set, I’d just written it, I came off stage shaking and Marlon had to help me downstairs because all I could think was `What did I just do?’ I didn’t want to go out in the audience, I thought they’d all know what I was singing about but people told me they loved it. That was really helpful to hear something like that. It has a good reaction when I play it live.”

As well as being the song she’s most proud of, Black Dog’s honesty is sure to resonate.

“It’s such an incredible achievement,” Hooper says of Pool’s song. “It’s an incredibly generous things she’s doing for everyone else with depression.”

Pool says she could never have aired Black Dog until this stage in her life and career.

“I had a lot of self-hatred at the time I wrote that song and I was getting tired of having to hide that. There’s this big trend with artists having to be ambiguous and all that sh--. I’m just not that person. I’ve always been honest and opinionated. I can’t bullsh — very well. It also came from a need to express that and not hide it.

“I figured a few months after I wrote it that it would be helpful, I’d be doing a good thing if I released it. There’s a lot of people who have trouble with mental illness, I don’t know if people didn’t expect it from me, my first record was pretty dark. But as a young blonde girl you don’t really expect it that much. I think a lot of people would say ‘Well what do you have to complain about?’ Well, actually I have this bitter poison in my brain. It was kind of nice to release that.

“It’s hard feeling like you have to portray a certain image, I feel like I’m way more honest with my image now. The first record I was trying to hide so much sh--, be the nice girl. At the time of the first record if I’d written Black Dog it would have really scared me, I’d have been too confronted by it to let anyone hear it. But I was so in the midst of depression at the time of writing it a few years ago I couldn’t imagine it not being on the record, it was a massive part of my life.”

While the song sits as the centrepiece of her new album, Pool is equally open about how she is treating her “bitter poison”.

Melody Pool recorded her second album in Nashville. Picture: Kylie ElseSource:News Corp Australia

“I’m a lot better now,” she admits. “I got a lot of help last year, I’m on medication now which has changed my life. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. My dad has diabetes, he need insulin every day, I need my serotonin every day. It might not be forever but at the moment it’s made me way more perceptive. I was scared of losing creativity but it’s just made me way more normal and able to not dwell on sh — and not hate myself so much. It really attacks you that disease, it’s f---ed.”

The stunning Love, She Loves Me was released as the first taste of her second album — its poetically-charged swear words and drunken waltz seeing it fall between commercial and alternative radio.

“Some dude on my Instagram said something like ‘Love, She Loves Me was really depressing, hoping the rest of the album is more upbeat’. I just replied that the whole album is about depression!”

While her record label Liberation pushed for the track to be the first single, Pool’s grandparents weren’t so sure.

“They love the music and the video, but they text me, as you know we don’t like the lyrics but we’re really proud of you. Plus it means I get a language sticker, I’m such a badarse.”

As with her debut, Pool wrote the entire album herself, politely declining the offer to co-write with others.

“I’m an only child, and as a kid I loved playing with my Barbies but I hated when my friends would come over and want to play with my Barbies because they’d change all my stories I’d made up for them. I work better on my own. I’m happier to co write for other people but when it comes to my stuff they’re so personal I don’t feel comfortable.”

As with her debut, there’s plenty of heartbreak woven into the record. Even Black Dog touches on a “man who is craved the crowd” during its story.

“At the time I wrote it I was dating a musician, my friend was dating a photographer and another friend was dating an artist,” Pool says. “All these guys were really egotistical. They weren’t very well themselves, but at the same time they were using us, I was so angry about all of it. It felt like all these guys were being praised because of their art, everyone wanted a piece of them, girls wanted to be with them, we all just felt in the back seat just waiting for them to stop f---ing us around. That’s where that line came from, being surrounded by egos.”

Love, She Loves Me is a love song, but written to love itself. Old Enough is about trying to ritualise sex. “There’s so much s--- about women having to hide being sexual or to be modest,” Pool says. “F--- that.” The album closes with an almost happy ending, Better Days.

Romantic Things was an exercise to write a Stevie Nicks-style song after bingeing on Fleetwood Mac. When producer Brad Jones (Missy Higgins, Ben Lee, Matthew Sweet) heard it while recording the album in Nashville during a 12-day period last year (“my debut took six days, so 12 days was a luxury,” Pool says) he insisted it was exactly what was needed to lift the mood.

“Brad said it would be a bit of light in the mist of the darkness. The night before we were due to record it I got really pissed and the next day I was so hung-over and thinking about how unprofessional I was getting drunk the night before I had to record this song. But then I found in my phone at I’d drunkenly written the next verse at 4am and put it in notes. That was pretty impressive.”

City Lights was written before Pool relocated from Kurri Kurri (near Newcastle) to Melbourne, crystal balling about how she didn’t want to compromise — the lyrics run “experts talking, vultures stalking, mannequins walking, perverts gawking” and being “pressured to show only light, to be filled with all that’s good and bright but I’m a slave to a darkened mind.”

“I was putting a lot of pressure on myself,” Pool recalls. “I wasn’t really handling the pressure because I was depressed, I didn’t think I could be marketed or commercialised, I’m just not that person. I was struggling with it at that time. And I’d done shows where old men had come up and talked to me about my image, told me I needed to lose some weight or do something with my hair, or they’d just be gawking at me. It was really gross.”

Pool admits she’s stubborn about career decisions.

“I’m really protective of myself, I don’t allow myself to be in positions where I feel uncomfortable, especially after what I’ve been through. I always thought that was something you could only do if you were a really big artist but I can’t sacrifice my health for that. I’m really set in my ways. I’ve had fights with people I work with as well but I’m lucky they actually care about me as well and they understand. They know how hot headed I am, I think they accept me for who I am which is very handy.”

A heavy touring schedule has opened her to a wider audience (including opening slots for the Eagles and Tina Arena — who hand-picked her) after lazily being called a country artist on her debut.

It’s a tag that used to bother her, Deep Dark Savage Heart demonstrates she’s closer to our new Paul Kelly — a singer/songwriter who can straddle whatever genre her songs require.

“I didn’t like being called country for a while because I didn’t feel like I was a country singer and I didn’t fit in the Australian country scene,” Pool says. “When you hear ‘country singer’ and you don’t know someone’s music your mind goes to something stereotypical. I grew up in country music, there’s country music that I love and still listen to. I’m always going to have those influences, they probably still come through, I can’t tell anymore. It’s not that I hate being called a country singer I just don’t think that it’s honest. If someone calls me a country singer they’ve never f---ing heard me.”

HEAR Deep Dark Savage Heart (Liberation) out tomorrow.

SEE Melody Pool, Shadow Electric May 13, Grand Junction Hotel Newcastle May 18, 5 Sawyers Newcastle May 19, Paddington United Church May 20, The Front Gallery Canberra May 21, Old Museum Brisbane May 26, Trinity Sessions Adelaide May 29. melodypool.com.au

*For help with emotional difficulties, contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or www.lifeline.org.au