Writing music is the way Gordi lifts herself out of the Reservoir. "Writing music has always been and will remain my therapy, my process and my way of communicating," she explains. "I don't write songs by someone else's prescription, I write to fill my own need. I get this tightness in my chest, and nothing will make it go away other than trying to write lyrics or sitting down at a piano and playing it, and it's like a medicine. If I have a good session of that, then that tightness and that weight just totally lifts. It just centers me, and gets the things that are riddled through my mind out on paper. And then I can leave them there."

Come and catch Gordi perform songs from her Triple J feature album Reservoir at the Ed Castle on December 8.