Ribeiro’s got an undeniable knack for penning incisive, heart-stirring songs, and Kill It Yourself shows she’s committed to unlocking new areas of creativity. However, making music hasn’t yet become her primary occupation.
“I think that songwriting will always be a part of my life,” she says. “But when you talk about the security of performance and recording as a vocation – there’s a lot of people doing it now in a way that I suppose in the past we didn’t do it. Maybe songwriting and performing was more communal, and now it’s more individualistic. I would love this to be my main vocation in life, however I’m also a trained Steiner teacher. Two days a week I’ll try to teach at school so that I know that I have a little bit of income to pay for what I love to do.”
The strength of any artistic enterprise is highly dependent on the creator’s love for it. However, it’s not uncommon that the quest to turn music into one’s chief vocation quashes the genuine love of creation. Kill It Yourself was produced by ex-Bad Seeds member and regular PJ Harvey collaborator Mick Harvey – a man who’s spent his entire adult life making music. Witnessing Harvey at work filled Ribeiro with confidence.
“He’s just so industrious and his enthusiasm for making things was really inspiring to me,” she says. “He’s a maker and a doer. I always find it’s great to be around older people who have done, and continue to do, things that you aspire towards getting better at doing.”
Although Ribeiro’s emotionally resonant vocals still occupy centre stage, there are a number of conspicuous differences between Kill It Yourself and My Little River. The first thing that stands out is the diversified instrumentation – in contrast to the acoustic bent of My Little River, Kill It Yourself embraces electric guitars and a range of different textural elements, which enhance the melancholic, or ironic, or tense demeanour of the songs.
“I went to Mick with these half-constructed, really simple songs that I had either composed on guitar or on the keyboard, or songs that I’d workshopped with my original band in Darwin,” Ribeiro says. “I think the thing that changed it was that Mick discovered a bass organ in this warehouse [A Secret Location Sound Recorders, Northcote]. There was all of these different types of instruments hanging around and I have a feeling it was probably the piano and the organ that he brought in. I haven’t had much previous experience with that and it just anchored the sound in a different way.”
Another feature that separates Kill It Yourself from its predecessoris the darker tone. While you could draw comparisons to the likes of Cat Power or Scott Walker, if Ribeiro’s lyrics are taken to be at least partly autobiographical, real life experiences are what set her off down this path.
“I think I was going through my Saturn return. You know, they say when you’re 28 you kind of fall apart or things change. I was in America and I was visiting my brother. I went to Hotel Chelsea and I met this fortune teller there and he took me upstairs and his friends cut my hair and I ran around the building and I was like, ‘Holy shit this is where all of my heroes come from,’ – Patti Smith and Leonard Cohen and all of these amazing artists.
“But I don’t think I’m very good at pre-meditating and creating a concept album. Maybe I will next time, and go, ‘OK I’m going to replicate David Bowie,’ or something.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
