Bachelor Girl’s debut album, Waiting For The Day, arrived in 1998 and established Tania Doko and James Roche as one of Australia’s defining pop duos of the era. Songs including “Buses And Trains”, “Treat Me Good”, “Permission To Shine”, “Lucky Me” and “Blown Away” became part of the Australian pop landscape, while the album earned Roche an ARIA Award for Producer Of The Year.
More than two decades later, Bachelor Girl have returned to that catalogue with Waiting For The Day: Artist Sessions, a 15-track reimagining of the original album. Rather than simply remastering or revisiting the recordings, Doko and Roche have rebuilt each song around a different guest artist, drawing on friends, collaborators, artists they have toured with and performers whose voices they felt could reveal something new in the material.
The result brings together an unusually broad cast of Australian and New Zealand talent, including Darren Hayes, Sheppard, Jack Jones, Guy Sebastian, NERVO, Jessica Mauboy, Suze DeMarchi, Delta Goodrem, WILSN, Courtney Act, Tommy Emmanuel, Ella Hooper, Jon Stevens, Michael Paynter and Kaylee Bell. The one exception is the title track, “Waiting For The Day”, which Doko and Roche keep for themselves.
In this Noise11 interview with Paul Cashmere, Doko takes us through every song on the album, explaining why each guest was chosen, how the collaborations came together and what it was like coordinating 15 guest artists, their management teams, labels and recording schedules. She also discusses the challenge of deciding where her own voice belonged in the new arrangements and reveals plans to take the new versions to the stage.
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