Vicki Anderson talks to Gin Wigmore
VICKI ANDERSON talks to Gin Wigmore about animals, archery, and suffering for her art on new album Blood to Bone.
When Virginia Wigmore was a child, she was determined ‘‘to live as a cat’’. She delicately supped milk from a bowl, curled herself up into a ball and napped in the Devonport sun.
It was, she confides on the phone from Los Angeles, a determined bid to persuade her mother to buy her a pet.
The Kiwi singer’s father died when she was 16 and on the strength of her 2008 EP, dedicated to him, she was signed in the United States by the legendary Motown Records.
The petite tattooed platinum blonde with the gravelly voice was, at 18, the youngest person to win the United States-run International Song Competition. She was just 23 when she recorded her album Holy
Smoke at Capitol Records where her backing band was none other than Ryan Adams and the Cardinals.
When Rolling Stone magazine interviewed her about the album, Wigmore was presented with six kittens to play with and had assistants whose job it was to ensure her beer was kept cold and that she had incense and fairy lights wherever she went.
‘‘Really, though, I’m totally a dog person,’’ she says now. Beside the 29-year-old, two dogs sit patiently. ‘‘There’s Louie who is a hound and my other dog, she looks like Clifford the big red dog. I amheavily into animals right now.’’
There’s a slight pause before she adds: ‘‘I started learning archery a little while ago.’’
Welcome to Gin Wigmore, a whirlwind of contradictions and the opposite of a girly-girl.
I remind her that the last time we talked she was living in Sydney and had just joined a knitting group and was fiercely passionate about it. She laughs.
‘‘I’d really let myself go back then, hadn’t I,’’ she says, more to herself than me. ‘‘I haven’t picked up the sticks in a while.’’
But what she has picked up is her third album, Blood To Bone, which follows on from her critically acclaimed blues-inspired 2011 record, Gravel& Wine.
Working with Charlie Andrews of Alt-J fame set the pace for the music the pair would create in Los Angeles, Wigmore says.
‘‘He is a real music man. He uses 60s kits but has an ability to throw that against the wall and manipulate those sounds and take it into a very modern world, like he does with Alt-J. In those two weeks with him I felt like I learned more than I did in the last five years. Charlie did a lot of things for me musically and to have that time with him early on in the recordmaking process, it put me in the right zone for how I wanted to work and produce this record.’’
On Blood To Bone she sings falsetto, plays piano and embraced a vastly different writing style. ‘‘I wrote a lot of this album from beats which was really different. It made me go in all kinds of odd places with my melodies and with my voice as well. Singing falsetto for the first time . . . I never once thought I could do that or felt confident enough to do that. Everyone has issues . . . but trying it was liberating, it was rad and I was into that. It only came about because of the way I chose to write this time.’’
It’s not one of the songs chosen as a first single by the record label, but Wigmore’s favourite track on the album is Black Parade, a song she describes as: ‘‘It feels like a death march but there’s such strength to it.’’
Thematically, the album subject matter flowed from a turbulent two years in her private life. She broke up with a long-time love, left Sydney and moved to Los Angeles, where she lives with her now husband Jay Butler, frontman of the punk band Letlive.
‘‘We met on the Warped tour in 2013,’’ Wigmore says. ‘‘For the first time I have no doubts that I’m with the right man.’’
There’s a story she once told me about a bad break-up with a previous boyfriend that speaks volumes about Wigmore’s approach to life.
He told Wigmore that she wasn’t marriage material, claiming she was too much of a rock star. He also told her that if she got another tattoo he would no longer find her attractive.
When faced with this veiled ultimatum, Wigmore dumped the bloke and chose the new tattoo. ‘‘I thought f... you and got my half-sleeve tattoo finished.’’
But with Butler she is happy and content. She loves her life inLA, hanging out with her Kiwi friends – ‘‘there was a mass exodus of Kiwi actors here a few years ago’’ – and her newfound American mates.
‘‘Married life is awesome. It’s really nice to know that I’ve met my dude.’’
This contented, happy state of mind flowed into her music, she says. She is less worried about seeking approval than she used to be and as a result felt freer to experiment.
‘‘This is who I am, I stopped fighting with who I was or wasn’t and how good I was or wasn’t. It’s a really nice spot to be in.’’
Butler stars alongside her in the video for her new single, Written In
the Water.
‘‘That drowning scene was the most intense thing I’ve ever done,’’ she says, her words tumbling over themselves. ‘‘It was so frightening and so amazing and exciting. We spent four or five hours in the water doing take after take in that cold f...ing water. I was bound and gagged and thrown off the boat into the water. Water was coming into my mouth, it was a struggle to breathe. There was a scuba diver underneath throwing me up after 10 seconds but sometimes he’d come in a little bit late, that extra second was terrifying.’’
Wigmore has no verbal filter. She says what she thinks when she thinks it. When it came time to do the artwork for the album she wanted something honest.
She ‘‘literally stalked’’ littleknown Manchester photographer Leigh Jeffries to take her picture. He was reluctant at first to do a commercial photoshoot but he eventually agreed. The perfect shot was achieved when he threw a bucket of water in her face in an alleyway early one morning.
‘‘Women are socialised to think that if we go out we need makeup and even more so when you have your photograph taken – you’ve got to look a certain way for yourself and others,’’ Wigmore says.
‘‘F... that. I just want to be me. Yes I have wrinkles, I’ve aged and laughed and been really f...ing bad, it shows on the face and it’s real and beautiful. I can’t be f...ed hiding behind all this bullshit any more. Being real is powerful.’’
By releasing a bare-faced image into the world she is thinking, she says, about what kind of world she wants her children to grow up in.
‘‘The photoshopped selfie world is putting out such a warped message. I’m going to have kids at some point in the future, I don’t want them to grow up in a world where they think they have to constantly edit themselves.’’
She hit the headlines earlier this year with her response on social media to someone who had commented on Wigmore’s Facebook page: ‘‘desperate dog, give it up girl, stop embarrassing yourself.’’
‘‘Why should you be silent when someone gives you grief?’’ Wigmore says defiantly. ‘‘Do that on my page? Yeah I’m going to school you.’’
Her voice is unusual and she has faced much criticism in her career. For every person who loves the unique timbre of her voice, there’s someone who loathes it.
‘‘You want people to like what you’re about but at the same time I love that there is difference. It creates diversity and that’s f...ing awesome. Don’t be rude and mean, because I don’t have time for that shit. Be a better human and offer the world something.’’
Blood and bones. The day before we speak Wigmore found a lost little dog in the street. Together she and Butler looked after it for a day before eventually tracking down its owners.
‘‘Dogs . . . they’re just cool, man. I love how they are so loyal and so protective,’’ Wigmore says. ‘‘It’s all the qualities I want in a person. With friends and stuff sometimes I’m like, f..., I wish you were more loyal.’’