Ruby Gill’s glorious contemplation

SINGER-SONGWRITER Ruby Gill will launch her new album, Some Control, as part of a national tour, with her politically rich, intimate songs set to feature at the Eltham Pub on July 11.

Currently living on the road, Gill said she was slowly making her way back up to Queensland, camping along the way with her partner.

“We’re living in a rooftop tent for the whole tour,” she said.

“It’s really special for me and my partner, who’s very kindly given up their life.

“We don’t love flying, and it feels better to tour slowly and change with the landscape, settle into each new place, and get to know a community.

“It gets a bit shit when it rains for a week, but apart from that, we feel inspired.”

Critics described her debut as “an interrogation of social norms and pressures of living out one’s young adulthood on a burning planet amid a postcolonial, neoliberal shitheap.”

Gill has intriguingly called her sophomore album “looser, gayer, and more raw.”

“When my first record came out, the songs were so perfectly wound, and there was no breathing space in them, which gave them an urgency and intensity,” she said.

“With this, I had space to sit with stuff longer and get to a more calm and relaxed state, and therefore the music feels more settled.

“It felt looser in that we were all playing the song as it came out and recording them for the first time.

“There’s a looseness there which I’ve found very healing and in a permission to myself to ramble and let myself sit in the songs more gently, which is new to me.”

The urgency of her youth has been mollified by Gill’s processing of the world around her and a profound acceptance of self.

“When I came out and started acknowledging who I wanted to be in relationships, in the world, in politics and society, I just felt more queer in how I was expressing myself, not afraid to be combative to the normal ways of doing things.

“It felt like a welcoming of my journey of queerness, but also letting the songs be as they are, which is about who we are at our most authentic.”

The catalyst for a creative life path was born from a musical upbringing, as well as a politically aware one. Gill’s mother was in a successful 1980s band in South Africa, and the singer’s musical ability was encouraged. Channelling her political activism through her art was just as natural.

“I grew up in a very politically active family,” she said.

“All my grandparents were journalists, my parents’ generation were freedom fighters and activists, and they all went to jail for standing up against apartheid.

“In South Africa, there’s no option; it is just part of every day.

“When I moved to Australia, people would say, ‘I don’t want to talk about politics today,’ and I couldn’t understand it.

“I don’t know what ‘politics’ is – I thought it was part of every day.

“There’s not much else for me to write about, or at least there’s no other perspective for me to be coming from.

“Synthesizing and translating what is happening into a song or a poem is such a vital part of helping a society reckon with where it’s at.”

For tickets, visit elthampub.com.au/music