New Zealander Gin Wigmore can easily be described as the personification of effortless coolness accompanied by retro vibes and an unescapable mix of jazz, blues and electronic groove. After releasing her third studio album Blood to Bone with preview track New Rush and lead single Written in the Water, we sat down with Gin to discuss the exciting steps of her career such as being signed by Motown, her musical explorations into the realms of hip hop and electronica, her pre-gig rituals. Finally Gin set the table for a very unusual bunch of ideal music collaborators – dead and alive!
You’ve just released your brand new album Blood to Bone, can you tell us a little bit about that?
It’s really a reflection of the last two years of my life kind of in chronological order. It’s how I tracklisted the album as well so it opens with New Rush and into with a song called I Will Love You. In the last couple of years there has been a huge amount of changes: moving to Los Angeles from Australia, changing my whole relationship, getting married, doing all this new stuff which has been good, bad and ugly. I guess this album has taken a while to write but life takes a while to live you know!
You’ve been doing this since you’re really young, you’ve written your first song when you were 14. What would you say to the Gin of the past?
I’d probably say ‘relax, it’s OK if things take time, there’s really no rush and also don’t be dazzled by the bright lights and the bullshit’ but the thing is it only comes with age. You can only really be confident enough talking about yourself and your experiences honestly the older you get. When you’re 20 you’re still trying to fit in, you’re still trying not to make too much noise outside of your friend circle and what’s going to keep you in the collective. But then you get older and you kind of change to say ‘ah fuck it I don’t really fucking care about any of this shit I just wanna be an honest individual’. So you face up to your fears and your emotions basically.
Your sister was the one who prompted everything to submit your songs to the International Songwriting Competition in the US. Is that something that you would have done without your her encouragement?
Oh no, I don’t think so! There’s a good chunk of me that has quite a pessimistic outlook on life. It’s kind of depressing but I just didn’t think I’d win anything. I tried every fucking week at the scratchies when I went to the supermarket to get my various chocolates and ice creams and shit when I was 16. So I thought ‘well I’m never gonna win this epic songwriting competition out in the States, grand old America’ and so my sister luckily has a bit more of an optimistic view and she was like ‘cool your songs are rad I’ll enter it for you’!
You won the Grand Prize of that competition and you were also offered a scholarship to Berkeley. Did you end up taking that?
Yeah I did! It was a summer performance programme at Berkeley, out in Boston. I went over there and I had all this recording equipment that I had no idea what the fuck to do with because I was 17 years old and cared more about a dude that was 6’8” than a really cool microphone [laughs]. I didn’t know any of that, I went over to Berkeley and I was in these dorms, doing all this performing and then I played a song for a competition at the school. If you won you got a full scholarship for 3 years for the music performance programme and I won that as well! I was just on this mad winning streak of winning with my music.
Interestingly, you got signed by Motown. Was that around the same time and how did that happen? It’s quite a strange mix of musical cultures!
Oh totally! Believe me, I was like ‘what the fuck am I gonna do!?’. It was awesome obviously. I grew up listening to nearly all of those Motown records and artists. It’s brilliant and incredible music so to be on their label, in the States of all places as well, was really overwhelming and awesome. At the time they were branching out their label and getting different kinds of artists and Sylvia Rhone [served as Universal Motown Records President, 2005-2011] was really making a point of having a little white girl from New Zealand being on this label [laughs].
It feels like unusual and experimental collaborations are a recurrent theme in your career. In your new album, rappers Logic and Suffa feature on the track Willing to Die so there’s a hip hop contamination happening. You’re still true to your dirty blues sound but now it’s getting more modern with electronic twists, how do you feel about that?
I love it! I think it’s really important for an artist and just a person really to evolve, grow and to be dynamic and interesting. I think the fear with myself deeply is that I’m gonna be bored with myself. Everyday I wake up and go ‘please don’t be fucking sick of yourself’ [laughs]. With my music I want to obviously try and take that same approach. I think with Blood to Bone and the age I’m at, it was again this nice alignment of like ‘try some new shit! what do you have to be scared of?’. There’s nothing to be scared of, you get this one life, this one chance to do music in this lifetime so just fucking go for it! I think that’s why I tried to do some electronic shit, then collaborated with Logic and Suffa. I think this is the time, this is the album that I felt comfortable to do that. 
You picked specific people to work with, like Charlie Andrew [Alt-J producer] and DJ Khalil [Eminem collaborator and producer at Aftermath record label] and that worked out really well. What’s the dream collaboration for you?
Dream collaboration? I’d like to bring back Edith Piaf from the grave and just have a fucking few rounds with her. I think that would be awesome, she’s so cool. I just wanna hang out with her. I think she’d be such a laugh and I think she would just show me what is up with music and how it’s done. That would be amazing, I’d bring so many people back from the grave!
Who would you have? Dinner table: Edith Piaf…
Dinner table…probably yeah Edith Piaf, Otis Redding, James Brown just because he probably would supply a huge amount of drugs and it would be fucking fantastic [laughs]. Oh man, I think Jimi Hendrix would be amazing, just to watch him play. David Gray would be cool, I think he’s a brilliant artist and I’d probably throw in OJ for good measure just to keep it kinda current [laughs].
Watching your music videos, I realised they’re all quite physical and you do a lot! In Man Like That you’re dancing 20s style and in New Rush you’re running around getting stabbed with arrows. What’s the most fun or most demanding thing you’ve ever done?
I think New Rush for sure was the most demanding. I felt like I was in Deathproof. It was really awesome but the river or lake we were in was just freezing cold river and I was running up in this fake blood and I was wet all day. Being wet for an hour is awesome, being wet for like 17 hours…is kinda shit [laughs].
Is there anything you listen to before going on stage or any sort of religiously followed preparation before you perform?
We listened to The Cars the other day before we played. But there was this weird time a little while back when I watch The Big Lebowski again for like the 7th time and believed that I could also be the dude. So I started drinking White Russians before I went on stage which obviously made me feel really fucking sick during the whole show.
Do you feel like the venues you play add character to the whole performance? Is that a truthful representation of what you want to be perceived as?
Yeah absolutely! I will always play small places and if that means that I have to play small places for a period of nights that would be great, like a residency at some really shitty like 200 capacity club. I love it, it’s really cool because to me the whole point of playing live is to be with the people who want to see me play live and if I’m separated and too far away from those people there’s no fucking point. I wanna be close, I wanna feel the energy of the people in front of me, I wanna see if they cry and I wanna see them when they’re super excited about fucking Man Like That being played!
Do you feel Americans are crazier then European crowds? At home it must be pretty crazy as well!
Yeah it’s very passionate, the US tour was incredible. It was really really cool having it be by and large all sold out bar Boston by a few people. Just the clapping alone and so much passion! You know when you stop a song and the clapping, the yelling and the general excitement is just so loud you just wait, wait and wait and I’ve never had that before that kind of ‘keep on going’ to the point where it’s like ‘oh all right let’s wrap it up’ [laughs]. We just stand there and wait and it’s really fucking cool. I haven’t had that before, that’s when I noticed I guess the difference on that tour particularly through the US.
Blood to Bone is available now through Island Records.
Words / Claudia Manca
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