Jess Ribeiro

Having recently inked a deal with Remote Control Records, Ribeiro is witnessing perhaps more interest in her music than ever before. She has 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, 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,” she says. “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 creativity. 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. They’re usually more mature and a bit more relaxed. He was just quite reassuring: ‘Don’t be so precious, let’s make some songs. We make some things and they’re shit and we make some things and they’re good, and we keep making stuff, because we’re not brain surgeons. We’re musicians.’”

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 that enhance the melancholic, ironic and 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. “They were really sparse and we kept it pretty small – it was me, my friend Jade [McInally] on bass and Mick on drums. I think the thing that changed it was that Mick discovered a bass organ in this warehouse [A Secret Location Sound Recorders in Melbourne]. “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.”

The updated textural palette is a clear example of the benefits of collaboration. However, Ribeiro and Harvey weren’t always on the same page. “I’ve got good string player friends, so that stuff was in my mind,” Ribeiro says. “I think that freaked Mick out a bit, because I probably came across as being really disorganised. I said, ‘I want strings on these parts,’ and he just said, ‘How the hell do you think you’re going to have strings on these songs? Do you even know how to arrange strings?’ I was like, ‘No, but I know how to work with my friends.’ I think he was quite cynical about it. Then I just played them my song and talked to them about what I wanted roughly and they came in and both [Harvey] and the audio engineer thought it was great.”

Another feature that separates Kill It Yourself from its predecessoris its 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 on this path.

“I think I was going through my Saturn return. You know, they say when you’re 28 that you just kind of fall apart or things change. I was in America and I was visiting my brother, and I think it was more the photography of Cindy Sherman, and reading all of these books about Patti Smith. 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 premeditating and creating a concept album. Maybe I will next time, and go, ‘OK, I’m going to replicate David Bowie,’ or something.”