Oh my, Gin’s animal instinct
Gin Wigmore is busy, all the time. She is a musician, business owner, wife, brand creative, mother, and co-writer. If that’s not enough to make any normal person’s head spin, she’s about to go one more and fulfil a childhood dream of becoming a vet nurse.
‘‘My big dream is to open an animal sanctuary, but I need to know what the f... I’m doing with animals, rather than just giving them extra cuddles and all the hugs I can get.
‘‘I need to know a little more from an ethical background,’’ Wigmore excitedly explains down the phone line.
‘‘I’m too f…... lazy to become a vet, so I’m going to do the next best thing.’’
A statement hurtling right
out of left-field like this isn’t entirely surprising from an artist who won the nation’s heart by speaking her mind.
Her on-stage persona is as recognisable as her music, and hits such as Oh My, Black Sheep and Under My Skin are now deeply ingrained in modern New Zealand pop culture.
Early next year, LA-based Wigmore is bringing those songs back to New Zealand for the first time in three years.
The shows will be in support of her fourth studio album, Ivory, released earlier this year with long-time label Universal. This album is headstrong, liberated, and the melancholy found in past releases has been traded in for songs that lend themselves to a fun live set.
It’s a bold pivot, but one Wigmore says she didn’t fear making. She’s never feared releasing music, not in the anxiety-riddled, self-tortured way many creatives feel when
putting a part of themselves out into the world.
Something that did shift with Ivory was her why.
‘‘I have different intentions behind it [making music] and they’re far less exhausting,’’ she says.
‘‘I’ll make a record and put it out and that’s it. It doesn’t need to do anything for me. It just needs to exist, and it’s already doing that by virtue of just writing the songs.
‘‘It’s actually a really Zen space. It can just be. It doesn’t need to put me on a chart or do all this s... for me, because I’m on a different track.’’
This Zen-like space has turned her into a guru she likens to being an ‘‘old wizard that lives in the woods’’. She sees herself reflected in the ‘‘little young guns’’ she writes for, but doesn’t envy them.
It’s this self-assured, sociallyconscious space that led Wigmore to the #GirlGang