Kimbra's new album is her bravest work yet. Photo/Spencer Ostrander
Alt-pop superstar Kimbra talks to Karl Puschmann about her duty to grow her art, and the liberation of exposing her true self through her latest album
Perhaps it’s because Kimbra is in New Orleans’ famed French Quarter, the vibrant music-infused neighbourhood with a dark haunting history full of voodoo, the spectres of pirates and strange unexplainable happenings, that our conversation quickly strays into the spiritual and the mysteries of the universe.
“Love is the closest thing I’ve gotten to an understanding of the great unknown or God or the universe,” she tells me. But before we go cosmic we begin here on earth.
When Reset zooms in, the alt-pop star, who returns home to Aotearoa to perform at Synthony in the Domain next Saturday, is relaxing backstage at the House of Blues. She’s touring her new album, the fiercely honest A Reckoning. The record, her fourth, has collected rave reviews thanks to its sonic eccentricities, inventive experimentations and Kimbra’s exposed lyrics. It confidently slips and slides around genres, going from booming minimalist electro to alt-pop to Prince-style party funk without missing a beat. All anchored by Kimbra’s gorgeously versatile vocals.
“Synthony’s a really creative festival,” she says. “I’m always excited to have the opportunity to come home and play in New Zealand. This seemed a great way to bring my whole band over. It’s gonna be inspiring.”
She’ll perform twice, first a full set with her band, then again accompanied by the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra.
“It’s engaging for me as a creative. It’s a novelty to have my songs arranged by a composer and an orchestra,” she smiles. “I get itchy and restless when I’m doing something the same way over and over. That’s antithetical to the artist.”
Artist. That little word has big meaning for Kimbra. The artist’s life and responsibility have become central to her philosophy for living.
“For me, that word is our duty. The artist is searching and growing within their work. That’s something we do as a service to other people. To help push other people too,” she explains with an earnestness that dispels any thoughts of pretension.
This constant searching has been a musical trademark of hers since the beginning. It’s also, she says, how she lives.
“It’s all connected to life. That’s who I am. I’ve always been a seeker of answers; for meaning, for understanding myself better and for wanting to grow. I navigate the world in extremes. I can be very charismatic and engaged and curious and wide-eyed and then I can be very introverted and introspective and quiet.”
She credits growing up in New Zealand for her existential curiosity. The natural wonders of our environment had a big impact on her and left her longing to connect with things unseen.
“From a young age I’d go on these boat trips and look at volcanoes and feel a real sense of intimacy with the great unknown,” she says. “I’ve always been deeply spiritual and very unsatisfied with institutionalised religion. What it would portray as the final answer was never enough for me. I’ve continued to be intrigued by the unspoken things in life and the mystery.”
“It’s also a way that I feel less alone. I think we’re all searching for that. We all have a deep mystic and seeker in us that’s drawn to things that we don’t fully understand,” she muses. “No one really knows the deeper answers of why we’re here, but we still keep searching anyway, through music and art. Basically, I’ve always been thinking about that.”
She has a word for those moments of connection when she gets out of her own way to interact directly with the mysteries of creativity and thought.
“The best word I found for it is ‘transcendence’. When we collectively transcend our own egos and fears and feel intimately connected to something beyond ourselves which is at the same time deeply ourselves,” she explains. “It’s like some kind of deep truth.”
“Truth,” she then states authoritatively, before questioning herself. “Maybe that’s what I’ve always been really obsessed with? How do you find the thing that’s really true?”
It’s a good question. One that far greater minds than mine have pondered throughout the ages. But is that something you can ever find?
“Probably not,” she laughs. “But that doesn’t take away from the nobility of the searching does it?”
So far her constant seeking - through her art, life and music - has led her to believe that the answer lies in love and connection.
“The more I feel that in my work, the more I feel that’s the thing we’re all really searching for. Love is the great healer because there’s so much sadness in the world,” she explains. “I’m a highly sensitive person. I feel a lot of the oppression of the world. But love is also hope, so I try to keep pushing towards these things because they’re the closest I’ve found to an ultimate answer or a thing that’s worth living for.”
She says she’s been trying to cultivate love within herself through daily meditation, “because I think most of the great change happens within.”.
“I’m getting a lot more accepting of all the things that live inside of me,” she says. “That’s a really big step in being able to move through the world with less resistance and fear. You become more at peace with the diversity of the human experience and all the things that connect you to everyone else.”
Then, she laughs and says, “look, you’re not as terminally unique as you think you are.”
All these years obsessing over life and its eternal, unanswerable mysteries, have changed her. They allowed her the strength and courage to push aside all her usual fantastical excess and expose her true self on A Reckoning.
“It was a frightening thing to do. Oh, my God,” she admits. “But that’s usually why I know it’s important. If you’re saying something and you feel uncomfortable saying it, it probably means that you haven’t admitted it to yourself so it’s probably the right thing to do. I’m using my music to face my fears. It’s a less destructive way to live in the world. If you’re always running from the things that frighten you, you don’t grow in love. It’s often really scary to be so exposed. But how else do we connect unless we show ourselves as we really are?”
This awakening forced her to face many things about herself that she didn’t want to. At her most fragile she’d look everywhere else for comfort, losing herself in others instead of her own inner strength.
“I have a mind that’s going a million miles a minute and has a million kinds of thoughts and struggles. I used to be kind of ashamed of that,” she sighs. “Part of accepting and loving yourself is realising that we all have things that we’ve got to carry. If we can work with them and use them to help us find our true voice or inner strength, they don’t need to be so scary.
“When you say them out loud they lose their power a little bit. It’s an exercise in complete openness with myself that I’m experimenting with; ‘What if I just say the thing I’m scared to say? What does that lead me to think next? And what is something that I need to let go of?’. We hold on to so many stories that aren’t our own. The path of being a human is letting go and unlearning a lot of knowing and being able to find what your heart is really saying underneath all of that.”
It was the great philosopher Sting who once sang, ‘if you love somebody set them free”, and that’s essentially what Kimbra has done. She’s set herself free; from her anxieties, from her heartache, from everything about herself that frightened her. Or, at least, she’s trying to.
“It’s day by day, you know,” she reflects. “I don’t think anything in life is like, you have insight and then you’re freed of anxiety. Pain and being scared of it are very important parts of our human experience. But in it lies the answer to so much of our growth and wisdom and connection to other people,” she says. “That makes it worthwhile and not just a pointless thing that drains you of life force. It actually gives you life force because you’ve endured.”
“My friend calls it, ‘becoming a better host to all the visitors of the mind’. The resignation, the hopelessness, the celebration, all of the things. You’re becoming a better host to it all and I can kind of set myself free from it.”
She poured herself into A Reckoning in a way she hadn’t in previous albums. She describes making it as “cognitive therapy,” dropping her guard to voice her biggest fears, deepest anxieties and innermost thoughts.
“Now, when I sing on stage maybe someone is having their first experience with those things in their own life and I’m now there to help, like, hold a space for them to do that,” she says. “I’ve overcome, I’ve been there and come out the other side. Having plummeted to places that are very difficult, and then turning it into art and performing onstage is important for people to witness. That’s very important for me to communicate to the audience. There’s a triumph in all of this.”
Then, Kimbra smiles warmly and epitomises love, life, the universe and everything by saying, “Art is life.”
Kimbra performs at Synthony in the Domain next Saturday, April 1 alongside Dave Dobbyn, Shapeshifter and the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra. She’ll be headlining at The Factory, Hamilton on Friday 31st March, with support act Georgia Lines.
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