Pub Choir queen on why singing is ‘the closest to magic we can get’

Welcome to CityChats, where Brisbane Times meets our city’s most interesting characters on our most iconic form of transport. This week, Pub Choir founder and director Astrid Jorgensen explains why she’s average, what happened to her space-themed band, and what she sings at karaoke.

Jorgensen meets us at North Quay ferry terminal in the CBD. She’s just flown back home from the US, with a few days spare before kicking off an Australian tour that includes three sold-out dates at the Tivoli in late July.

It’s a rainy, windy day in Brisbane, and we stand by the CityCat’s railing because the seats are sopping wet. Jorgensen graciously asks to stand on the side on which her long hair blows away from her face – instead of just asking to go inside, or asking why on earth we’re making her do this.

My dog cries with joy when I come home after a long time. It just pulls my heartstrings.

I’ve got misophonia, where I’m actually deeply annoyed by many sounds. I’m quite infuriated by the sounds of other people being alive when I’m trying to concentrate, like if someone’s chewing and I’m reading, I’m like: “Really?”

I think I pay a lot of attention to sounds, so I can’t block them out.

At Pub Choir, I invite 7000 people to make noise at one time, and then I’m trying to hear it all, and I’m like, “I’ve just found the problem” – not a person, but just like, “we need to fix this note”.

In life, that’s quite annoying, but at work it’s very useful, so I try to harness it for good. And I apologise deeply to my partner, Evyn, for all of the rest.

What do you think is so important about music and people having it in their lives?

Where do I begin? Because it’s so all-encompassing, but singing for me is like the closest to magic that we can get, and it is so easy to do. It’s very hard to sing well, but it’s very easy to sing at all. I think people get really wound up in not being great so then they don’t, they’re embarrassed.

But it’s not about being the best singer, that doesn’t even exist. All of creativity is an opinion, right? Someone who you think is great, somebody else thinks is annoying. So the reason to sing is not to be the best singer – that’s moot, it doesn’t exist.

The reason we sing is to feel better and to make the most of the fact that you are the only person that will ever have your voice. No one in the history of humanity has ever or will ever have the same-sounding voice again, so every time you sing, you are necessarily changing how the world sounds. I think this is a way more compelling reason to sing, right? It’s changing the world forever. You ar