Rowena Wise is our latest Off the Shelf guest. There’s an intimacy to her songs, like a conversation you weren’t meant to overhear. The Naarm/Melbourne singer-songwriter holds beauty and mess in the same hand, and the triple j community aptly christened her a “lyrical assassin”, which reads like a gag until you actually sit with the lyrics.
Her second album, Bad Things Feel Good*, arrives on Friday 7th August 2026 via Beloved Records / Remote Control Records — we recently shared the single and video for Diamond In The Rough. Rob Muinos produced the album, and it was cut at The Ratshack in Collingwood across three days with a live band: Richard Bradbeer on bass, Jess Ellwood on drums, Matt Dixon on pedal steel. Where 2024’s Senseless Acts of Beauty traced love, loss and the slow rebuilding of self, this one explores life’s contradictions, embracing the power of being truthful about the messiness of being human…a thread that also weaves through some of the objects Rowena chose below.
For those who are new to our Off the Shelf series, we basically ask an artist to select ten objects from their home and talk about them. These tend to hold a meaning for their daily life, their musical practice, or the overlap between the two. I really enjoyed reading this one, from the start, it’s both revealing and surprising – that’s the beauty of telling stories through objects and what makes this one of our most popular series.
Off the Shelf with Rowena Wise
Family portrait, 2001
I grew up in Margaret River, a small surf town in Western Australia. We travelled the country, Ireland and the USA as the Wise Family Band, performing trad folk songs, originals and the odd Beatles cover. Dad made all the instruments, and mum taught my sisters and I to play them. Every Australian summer we used to drive across the Nullarbor Plain to go perform at the music festivals in the east. My sisters and I devoured fantasy novels and sang harmonies in the car for the whole 3000km trip, camping out in our swags along the way. This was our first band promo photo; I’m the 8-year-old blonde child in the middle. My mum told me years later that us kids were really hard to wrangle during the shoot; we wouldn’t sit still for more than a few seconds. Considering how serene we looked in this photo, it’s funny to imagine the chaotic vibe before and after this exact moment was captured.
Leica Monocular
This Leica monocular is a window into the most precious, intimate moments with nature. Using this to go birdwatching is a reminder that beauty can be loved from a distance, instead of possessed. I’ve taken it on many hikes, whipping it out from a belt holster like a cowboy to fawn over freaky tree-dwellers. I think that birds act completely differently when they don’t know they’re being observed; when they’re more relaxed, you can watch them observe things, preen each other’s feathers or roll around on the ground. I love how coincident birds are with their environment, and how beautifully indifferent they are to the problems in my life. They effortlessly move through their world, every wing movement aligning with the external force of the wind, their gyroscopic heads coalescing with the force of nature. They don’t even have to think about it; they just do it. When I see birds being themselves, it makes me think of how every living creature on this planet, including us humans, is synonymous with our ecology. I know I live in a concrete jungle most of the time, and I feel far from green spaces, but my city is technically my habitat. Broadly speaking, it’s all nature. We move through it, and it moves through us. We didn’t come into this world – we came out of it.
Tree of Life tapestry
This hand-woven tapestry is from Mexico, and represents the tree of life. My Grandma brought it over to Australia just before I was born, and it’s been hanging on my bedroom walls since I was a baby. The tree of life is a symbol of fertility and community in Mesoamerican and indigenous traditions; this one was probably made in Oaxaca or Michoacán. It’s one of the most beautiful things I own, and I cherish it as a gift from Grandma, and for the cosmology it represents. I like to think of it as a companion to my life journey, some material prophecy of my place in the universe.
My first guitar, made by my father Scott Wise
This is the first guitar that I learned to play, a nylon-string guitar my father made. He gifted it to me when I was 10 years old. It’s modelled off of a Spanish flamenco-style guitar, made of Honduras rosewood and German spruce, and in the soundhole his luthier sticker is there with the addition of my childhood teddy bear’s image. It’s a truly beautiful guitar, with so much life and bottom end to it. I remember playing the first song I ever wrote on it as a child – an 11-minute anti-war song called ‘echoes from the past’. I showed it abruptly to mum, dad and some family friends at a dinner party. Years later, I have a lot of gratitude when remembering how politely they listened through all the fumbled metaphors and choruses that seemed to drag on forever. I’ve since written countless songs on it that are shorter in length and hopefully make a lot more sense.
Wizard Lamp
Wizard Lamp lives in the studio at my house. He oversees all things creative, providing telepathic insights now and then when I get stuck on an idea. Wizard Lamp glows red when I am recording, which gives his shabby, paint-chipped attire a demonic glow. He is a silent witness to my creative doing and undoing. I bought him from a secondhand bric-a-brac store and gifted him to my partner on our second date a long time ago. I think the best romantic gestures are the most weird ones. Wizard lamp’s true origin is unknown, but I get a sense that he is from the depths of a mystical cavern on another planet.
Beaulieu 4008 ZM II Super 8 Camera
This machine is a portal to another dimension. My Beaulieu 4008 ZM II Super 8 camera is from 1971, and it brings a beautiful immediacy to the warm, detailed footage it captures. I bought it from a Polish man online just before I put out my first album, Senseless Acts of Beauty (2024). All of the music videos from that album release were made with this camera. It was such a wild experience to renew each song through the process of making the videos. We had to conceptualise the video narratives, storyboard every shot, and rehearse every scene many times before shooting. The nature of Super 8 film is that you’re limited to 2 minutes 40 seconds per roll of film, so we had to be artistically and technically precise when shooting. I remember enjoying the terrifying two weeks of waiting for the film to be developed, to find out what it looked like. There’s something gratifying about that analogue process; it’s so opposite to the insane content-creation culture running rampant today. You may notice how the camera looks like some sort of vintage space-age laser gun – it’s a beautiful but hilariously unintuitive French design.
Travel-size Budgie portrait
When I go on tour, I take this tiny framed photo of one of my budgies, Phillip. Most of the time I love to travel and play my music all over the world, but I end up missing ritual and regulation. I knew it was a bit silly when I framed this ridiculous little photo, but when I put it beside whatever bed I’m sleeping in on the road, it does ground me. Phillip is one of my dearest companions, whom I’ve had the pleasure of knowing for 5 years. He’s a brat, enjoys knocking glasses off tables and promenading all over my dinner plate when I’m trying to eat. However, he’s a wonderfully curious little fellow, inspecting every object in the house afresh each day. He reminds me how it’s good to be in the moment, to be curious about the beauty in the ordinariness surrounding me every day. It’s nice to take that little reminder on tour with me, in the form of this photo.
Stones from Portugal
These are stones I collected from a beach in Portugal last year when I was on tour. I remember feeling so chewed up and spat out by the interchanging scenes of my trip, experiencing so much in such a short amount of time. That day at the beach, I felt time slow to a stop. I was there with someone I loved dearly, and we decided to take some acid and go for a swim. Something otherworldly descended upon me, following the dissipation of the labels my mind usually assigned to things. What was left was this raw cloud of experience that I could only feel, but not make sense of. The sun set low over the Mediterranean Sea as we walked along the beach; the sky was orange, casting a lilac glow on the wash of waves. I saw all the colours glinting on the wet stones beneath my toes. They had been formed over millions of years, under heat and pressure and erosion, and they would outlive me for millions more years. I felt respect for their longevity and their indifference to my passing through this world. Eventually I wept on my knees at the beauty of it all, trying to inspect each and every stone, feeling some tragic sense that the stones would never know how beautiful they are. I felt a beautiful sorrow that I would never truly know the beauty of myself, and that the person I was with would never truly know their own beauty. Nothing and nobody will know their own significance like that. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Cursed Chasseur Cooking Pot
Behold my French glazed cast-iron cooking pot. My sister gifted this to me on my 21st birthday, as a material signifier of my transition into adulthood. With this pot I was supposed to cook hearty stews for myself and have my shit together. Contrary to this sentiment, my memories of that 21st birthday night are messy and debilitating. I got too drunk too early at the pub, staggering back to my house as my then-boyfriend stripped naked, running down the street. My sister doesn’t know this, but the first thing this pot was ever used for was a vomit receptacle. I had nothing else to use at the time. I’ve since cooked lots of stuff in it, but I’m still haunted by the memories.
‘Consolations’ by David Whyte
This is one of my favourite books, ‘Consolations’ by David Whyte. A dear friend lent it to me long ago. It’s a series of passages about select words from the human experience, written in a style that sits somewhere between poetry and prose. The way Whyte writes is equal parts esoteric and logical, as he frames selfhood, past, present and vulnerability in this deeply relatable way. Some sentences are long and fluid in a way that reflects some elemental mechanic of thought process, unfolding and distilling meaning in both colloquial and lofty ways. My favourite passage is the first one in the book, about the word ‘alone’:
“To be alone for any length of time is to shed an outer skin. The body is inhabited in a different way when we are alone than when we are with others. Alone, we live in our bodies as a question rather than a statement.”
This book has accompanied me through periods of loneliness and uncertainty, and I read passages regularly when I want to be at peace with the uncertainty in my life.
Pre-Order Bad Things Feel Good* – https://rowenawise.lnk.to/badthingsfeelgood