Writing Music in the Language She Learned Second

When Mila Kovac begins a song, she does not reach for Serbian, the language spoken at home during her childhood in Novi Sad. She reaches for English, the language she learned through schoolbooks, late-night radio, subtitled films, and the Montreal music community that became her adult home. Every lyric is built in a language that once belonged to other people.

That distance gives her writing a distinctive tension. Her songs sound intimate but slightly off-centre, filled with direct images, clipped grammar, and emotional details that might have been softened by a native speaker. On her new independent release, Borrowed Weather, English is less a costume than a tool she has reshaped by hand.

We spoke with Kovac about accent, songwriting, translation, and the strange freedom of writing feelings in a second language. Her answers offer a close look at how an overlooked female artist can turn linguistic uncertainty into a recognisable sound.

Language as Instrument

Lady Indie: When did English become a songwriting language for you?

Mila Kovac: I wrote my first serious songs in Serbian. They were private and very dramatic, which is probably normal for a teenager. When I moved to Montreal, I started keeping a notebook in English because I wanted to understand the city around me. I wrote down overheard phrases, signs, small conversations on the Metro. Eventually those notes became lyrics.

English felt useful because it gave me a little emotional distance. In Serbian, I know every shade of a word, including the family history attached to it. In English, I can approach a feeling from the side. That can make the song less obvious to me, and sometimes more honest.

Her phrasing carries the marks of that process. A line such as “I leave the light for someone else” is grammatically simple, but its restraint feels deliberate. Kovac does not try to disguise her accent in conversation or force her lyrics into flawless idiom. She treats pronunciation as part of the arrangement.

The First Draft

Kovac’s writing begins with sound rather than a polished statement. She records fragments into her phone while walking through Mile End, then tests them against a cheap keyboard at home. A phrase may survive because of its rhythm even when its original meaning has changed. She calls this “letting the sentence become a melody before it becomes an explanation.”

Lady Indie: Do you ask native English speakers to correct your lyrics?

Mila Kovac: Sometimes, but I am careful about when. I ask whether they understand the feeling, not whether they would say the sentence in exactly that way. If somebody changes a line because it sounds unusual, I listen to the reason. If the unusual part gives the song its character, I keep it.

That distinction matters in independent music, where polish can easily become sameness. Kovac’s slightly unexpected constructions create space for listeners. They make the songs feel observed rather than manufactured, as if the emotional meaning is still arriving.

Why English Holds the Feeling

English also gives Kovac access to a personal archive of music. She grew up hearing American alternative rock, British trip-hop, and Canadian singer-songwriters through borrowed CDs and online playlists. Those references formed before she had the vocabulary to explain them, so the language of the songs became entwined with the sound.

Her influences surface in the arrangements: dry drum machines, low analogue synths, muted guitar, and vocal lines that hover just behind the beat. The production is spare enough for each word to remain audible. Kovac says she wants the listener to notice “the little hesitation before the sentence knows where it is going.”

That approach places her alongside artists who use limitations as compositional structures. A song in a second language has built-in friction: an unexpected stress, a missing article, a phrase remembered from a film rather than daily speech. Kovac does not remove that friction. She repeats it until it becomes musical.

Montreal Between the Lines

Montreal has shaped the songs as strongly as any language lesson. Kovac writes in cafés where French and English overlap, rides buses through snow that turns familiar streets anonymous, and plays small rooms where audiences move easily between both languages. The city’s bilingual character lets her feel less like an outsider and more like a participant in an ongoing exchange.

Lady Indie: Has living in Montreal changed your relationship with Serbian?

Mila Kovac: Completely. Before, Serbian was just the language of my family. Now I hear it as one part of me, and I notice what English cannot do. Serbian can be very precise about intimacy. English gives me a different kind of openness. I do not want to choose one forever. I want the songs to remember that both exist.

That perspective will resonate with Australian listeners who move between languages at home, work, and school. In Melbourne and Sydney, multilingual artists often write for audiences who understand cultural overlap without requiring every reference to be translated. The local independent scene has room for accents, hybrid identities, and songs that carry more than one geography.

The Business of Being Heard

Writing the song is only one part of the problem. Kovac still has to get it recorded, distributed, reviewed, and played. Her team is small: a producer who also mixes, a photographer who designs artwork, and a publicist working across several releases. She describes the project as “a chain of favours that must eventually become a budget.”

For Australian artists, that budget is shaped by a concentrated market. A track can travel from a bedroom studio in Brisbane to playlists in Perth, yet touring costs between cities remain substantial. Sydney and Melbourne offer dense networks of venues and media, while regional audiences can be harder to reach without thoughtful routing. Registration with APRA AMCOS is part of the practical infrastructure for writers who want performances and broadcasts properly tracked.

Copyright matters too. Independent musicians need clear agreements about master recordings, publishing, samples, and permission for reused material. Australia’s copyright framework does not make an improvised online release risk-free simply because the artist is small. Kovac says learning these details was unglamorous but empowering: “Nobody protects the song if you do not know what you own.”

A Different Kind of Pop Vocabulary

Kovac’s new single, “Second-Hand Sky,” pairs a pulsing bassline with a vocal melody that rises whenever the lyric becomes uncertain. The chorus contains no grand declaration. Instead, she sings about practising a sentence until it sounds like something she might have said all along.

The track fits comfortably beside electronic indie-pop, yet it avoids the glossy finish associated with much commercial synth-pop. Its textures are tactile: a chair scrape left in the percussion, a breath before the final chorus, a guitar cable hum at the edge of the mix. Her producer says those imperfections make the language audible as a physical act.

For listeners interested in unusual production methods, Lady Indie’s feature on sample-built electro-pop offers a useful companion. Kovac’s work uses fewer overt tricks, but it shares the same curiosity about how familiar sounds can be rearranged into a new emotional vocabulary.

Listening Beyond Fluency

Lady Indie: What do you hope listeners notice if they do not understand every lyric?

Mila Kovac: I hope they notice the emotional movement first. A song can be understood through breath, repetition, and the way a voice leans into a word. Lyrics matter to me, but they are not an exam. Nobody needs perfect English to feel the weather of a song.

That idea is especially relevant in Australia, where discovery often happens through Triple J, community radio, local playlists, and live bills that place very different artists together. A listener in Adelaide may encounter Kovac through a late-night stream, while someone in Newcastle hears her opening for a touring act. The path is scattered, but each setting rewards a strong point of view.

Streaming has made international discovery easier, though it has also made attention harder to hold. Kovac’s songs benefit from close listening rather than background play. The vocal imperfections, unusual syntax, and small production decisions reveal themselves gradually, giving the tracks a life beyond their first impression.

How to Hear the Work

Kovac’s approach offers useful listening habits for anyone exploring independent music shaped by migration, translation, or vocal difference.

• Notice where the singer places stress, especially on words that sound slightly unexpected.
• Read the lyric after hearing the song, rather than treating the text as a test of fluency.
• Compare the studio recording with a live version to hear which imperfections are intentional.
• Follow the credits for writers, producers, mixers, and sample clearances.
• Support releases through legitimate stores, shows, and artist mailing lists when possible.

Her second-language writing is not a novelty attached to the music. It is the method through which the music finds its shape. The pauses, altered idioms, and carefully chosen plain words all belong to the same artistic decision.

Kovac says she still writes occasional lines in Serbian, but English remains the place where her songs become public. She has learned to live inside its gaps, using uncertainty as rhythm and accent as colour. What listeners should remember is simple: a language does not have to be your first to carry your deepest song.