“I feel lucky that I’m comfortable sharing parts of me with people through my songs,” Thelma Plum tells Apple Music. “That’s definitely not something that I would’ve been able to do before Better in Blak,” she says, referring to her 2019 debut album. “There’s something so special and intimate, and, for me at least, cathartic about sharing personal things. But then, at the same time, I feel very exposed: It’s a very vulnerable thing to be like, ‘Here are all of the thoughts in my head—I hope you like it.’” The Meanjin-based Gamilaraay artist’s second album comes five years after that debut and two after her Meanjin EP. I’m Sorry, Now Say It Back is personal, reflective and often diarylike. Throughout, she reflects on her upbringing, love, trauma and lessons the folk-pop singer-songwriter has learned along the way. It’s a lot to put so much vulnerability and truth out there: “There have definitely been times I’ve written lyrics and been like, ‘Oh, girl, come on, you can’t write that,’” she says, “but I’m a big believer in not censoring.” The album was created over several years between London, Sydney, Brisbane and Byron Bay. Here, Plum talks through several key tracks on the album. “Hurricane” “I was reading Lola in the Mirror by Trent Dalton. I love everything by Trent Dalton because the places in his books are so close to where I live in Brisbane. This book really resonated with me. I felt so inspired by it. At the start, the main character is talking about this mirror from [Australian furniture retailer] Temple & Webster. So, the first lyric is, ‘Have you looked in the mirror lately? What did you see?’ I’d pretty much finished the record and had a session with G Flip and Aidan Hogg, who’s an amazing producer and songwriter. G was in Melbourne, and they texted me like, ‘Thelly, do you want to come over and write?’ It was just for fun, and we wrote it in an hour or something. I didn’t think it would be necessarily for the record, which was maybe why it wasn’t so locked in sonically. I wasn’t like, ‘This is how it has to be,’ which was fun because we created this thing that maybe I wouldn’t have created if I was looking at it through the lens of the album.” “Golden Touch” “Writing this song was complicated. I’d been in London for a little while. Songwriting can be such an intimate thing. [Producer] Alex Burnett and I wrote this in a studio in East London. It was this little, tiny room. I started writing and playing this while I was not in a great space. I was quite depressed, and I felt quite lonely in London. I felt like I was pining over someone. A soon as we finished writing it, I burst into tears and left the studio. I was like, ‘I’m going to go now, and I don’t want you to talk to me for a little bit.’ I feel really proud of it. It’s a sad song. I’ve cried playing it live.” “All the Pretty Little Horses” “It was really fun, production-wise. It felt very pop, especially towards the end. I know when I’m feeling passionate about one of my own songs, because I can immediately imagine a film clip. And that happened as soon as I heard the mixed version. I guess it’s my version of a dance song. Not like EDM, but a song you can dance to. It’s fun and a bit spooky, but the lyrics are heavy. It references trauma that happened when I was growing up. The lyrics are like, ‘She was five when she found out life was a little less black-and-white.’ Then the chorus is like the lullaby, ‘Hush little babe, don’t you cry, go to sleep my little baby/When you wake, you shall have all the pretty little horses.’ Life is really unfair and cruel sometimes, but maybe sometimes everything will be OK.” “Guwop” “This was an older song, so production-wise it’s more in line with Better in Blak than a lot of the other songs on this record. It’s about a dog: a 72-kilo Neapolitan Mastiff named Guwop, like Gucci Mane. He was my ex-boyfriend’s dog, and he was the best dog ever. He was so wonderful and beautiful, and I just fell in love with him. When we broke up, I was like, ‘I don’t even want to ever break up with him. At least not until the dog dies. I have to be here.’ I guess it’s fun because it’s the old trick of making people think it’s about a human, but then you get to the chorus and it’s like, tricked you—I was talking about a dog all along.” “The Love I Want” “It’s obviously a love song. It references my time in New York, and it’s a pining song as well. I wrote this when I was watching a lot of Game of Thrones. So, afterwards, I was like, ‘Alex, does this production sound too much like Game of Thrones?’ It makes me giggle sometimes when I listen to it. At the time, my mum had bought me a tin whistle. It was during lockdown, and she was sending me all of these indoor enrichment activities because I’m in Queensland and she was in New South Wales. So, I taught myself how to play the tin whistle, and the theme song was the first song I learnt on it. Anyway, so I’m like, ‘I better be bloody careful with copyright.’”