‘A very fun, strange job’: The Australian who has turned whistling into a career

Somebody wise once said, “it’s impossible to be miserable and depressed while whistling”.

Molly Lewis, an Australian who was living in New York until a recent move to London, has an entirely different motivation for whistling than cheering herself up. She has turned her favourite form of musical expression into a career.

“I’ve been touring for the last two years,” she said. “I played in Istanbul last year and Bergen [in Norway] and Paris and Tokyo. I’ve played at the Royal Albert Hall in London.”

It’s fair to say whistling makes Lewis a more niche musical export than Kylie Minogue or Keith Urban but she has performed at such popular events as an Oscar nominees’ luncheon in Los Angeles and opened for Beck on a North American tour.

She has released an album, two EPs and, in a neat piece of marketing, her own brand of chapstick.

“It’s my art form,” Lewis said. “It’s something I love doing and that I’m very grateful for because it’s given me so many wonderful experiences.”

The daughter of filmmaker Mark Lewis (Cane Toads: An Unnatural History) and music supervisor Rhyl Lewis, she realised as a child that she had a talent for whistling.

“It was something I could do well because I had a good ear for music,” Lewis said. “I could whistle what I could hear.”

The arc of her life changed when, while at Byron Bay High School, her parents showed her the 2005 documentary Pucker Up, about a whistling competition in North Carolina.

“I realised that I was as good as these champions,” Lewis said. “That was a turning point.”

For a long time after Lewis started performing in public her family would wonder how she was getting by.

“My parents were like, ‘Are you OK? What’s paying the bills?’ But I do make a living as a whistler in a lot of different ways. I perform, I do shows, I sell my records. Your music gets licensed.

“It’s always different. I played a wedding in [Spain’s] Costa Brava last weekend. I did the walk-on music for a famous wrestler in Dallas, Texas, months ago. It’s a very fun, strange job.”

Famed record producers have hired her, too: Mark Ronson had Lewis whistle on an orchestral version of Billie Eilish’s Oscar-winning song What Was I Made For? for the Barbie soundtrack album; Dr Dre recruited her for a track that is yet to be released.

“I’m trying to make music that’s good – music that people who like bossa nova might like, or people who like old film scores would like, or people who like jazz,” she said. “I’m just trying to make music that I would like to listen to.”

Unlike a classical musician, Lewis does not need to practise for a certain number of hours a week.

“I just whistle for fun,” she said. “If I’m going to be performing a song, or if there’s a [new] song I’m learning, I’ll whistle it. But it can blend into my daily rhythm – I’ll go for a walk in the park and whistle.”

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that it is an expression of happiness, though.

“You can whistle and be feeling sad,” Lewis said. “People used to whistle or hum because they wanted to carry music with them: your grandfather would whistle a tune that he loved and it was stuck in his head. But these days everyone has their ear pods in, everyone’s listening to their own music.”

While she is a devotee, Lewis admitted most people don’t think of whistling as musicianship.

“When someone asks me what I do, I’m like, ‘I’m a musician’,” she said. “And then they ask me what I play and I say, ‘I’m a whistler’. People don’t understand what that means until they hear it. Then they realise that it can be an instrument. It can be more beautiful than a little riff that they hear in a pop song or someone whistling badly on the street.”

Lewis is heading back to Australia this week – on a whistle-stop tour, if you like – for the premiere of the documentary Whistle at the Sydney Film Festival. Directed by Christopher Nelius (Girls Can’t Surf), it’s a look at the colourful characters performing at the Masters of Musical Whistling competition in Los Angeles. While the Melbourne International Film Festival program is yet to be announced, Whistle will potentially screen there as well.

“I’m glad that somebody captured a whistling competition and all of its craziness,” Lewis said. “It’s a very funny, strange, heartwarming community.”

Whistle screens at Sydney Film Festival on June 5 and 7, followed by a whistling performance at the Festival Hub.

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