The Gift Of Disillusionment

A word on how he we got here...

Through life’s soaring ups and downs I have always had the written word. Long before I sang, I wrote and felt the world open up.

Photo by Rinse Fokkema 

After almost 6 months of touring my fourth album, I sit down in my New York apartment and contemplate wether this is what I want anymore. Since leaving my homeland of New Zealand at 17, life has been a whirlwind of untethered flight, magic, stimulus and at times, extreme burnout in pursuit of the thing I crave most; connection. Music and songwriting gave me a portal into the human heart. Into my own and others. 

But transitioning that secret after-school hobby, my heartfelt song-prayers into my livelihood and my business takes its toll as every artist can attest to. Many long depressions sunk me to lows that only writing could soothe. Seasons of analysis-paralysis, self-doubt and anxious toil would lead me back time and time again to the only thing that made sense in these moments; grounding the abstract in language, rhythm or melody. Capturing that infinite loss, love or longing into something finite and graspable, for a moment…..

I’m Kimbra. I’m a Kiwi bird who has now spent a decade in the United States. We’re said to be flightless but that’s just not true, we just travel when no ones looking. 

I’m a singer, songwriter, producer and musician. But before all that, I’m a writer.

I was discovered (why do we assign our ‘discovery’ as artists to someone else? It’s curious…) through a song I made called ‘Settle Down’ which I had uploaded to my Myspace page for fun. I finished high school in 2007, withdrew my University Application (to study Hebrew but I’ll save that for another Substack Post) and moved my life to Melbourne, Australia to begin work on my first album ‘Vows’. 

In 2011 I worked with an artist called Gotye, and together we performed a song called ‘Somebody That I Used To Know’. 

My life changed pretty quickly. I was 21 and I had already released my first album and begun a life of world touring. 

I used to cover one of Gotye’s songs called ‘Hearts A Mess’ at a pub called The Evelyn on Brunswick st. I remember how one night he came to see me perform and my voice shook like training wheels. 

One bedroom recording session later and the song was Number 1 in 18 countries and had streamed on Spotify more than 1.4 billion times. The video went to 2.1 billion views on YouTube. Prince gave us a Grammy for Record Of The Year. He’s the artist that made both of us want to music. Life felt very wild and alive and immediate.

I signed to Warner Bros in 2012 and released three records with them. We parted in 2019. 

This year I put out my fourth (and first independent) studio album, A Reckoning. I own my first body of work at 33. 

I wrote the new album about reckoning with the parts of ourselves that feel displaced. The fragmentation we’re experiencing as a species and the need for a head on collision, confrontation and conversation with ourselves and each other. Little did I know, my own reckoning was coming for me. I was forced to completely reimagine the ways I want to move through the world as an Artist and how I want to relate to the community who have found a home in my work. 

Melbourne Recital Hall, 2023

I wanted to return to where it all started. Writing. Before the itch of melody temptations. Just the stark word. Saturated in that perfect silence. 

So I turned to the poets I loved. To the mystics, to the heroes and heroines of my life who would, like sweet lavender balm, soothe temples with the quiet but firm reminder, artists have felt the tension of their calling and the inevitable loneliness that comes with it, for centuries. You ain’t so special, kid.

For me, writing is the great humbler of the soul. It connects us with so many who came before us, and maybe, most importantly, with all those to come. People like you, who may open this Substack post, read that poem, put on that song, cry to that lyric, echo the sentiment to someone else….. and before you know it, BAM! Ripple effect, activated.

I live for that shit. 

So this is where I will attempt to quell my quenching thirst for community, take a break from the bite-sized, caption-focused life of social media accounts, tell you how I’m really feeling through this particular present worldview I have. I’ll speak through long-form reflections, poems, paintings, queries written under the sheets of sleepless nights, glimpses under the hood of my creative process…. 

There’ll be some fly-on-the-wall type stuff, and that’s not to say you’re a fly, in fact, I think of you more like a butterfly on the wall. Yes, I would like to think of this new community as a group of butterflies who seek to soar about with me through the week. The internet feels often like a lot of flies. All flying around. Being flies. I’m ready to share from a different place. 

I am starting this with hopes that I can create a lasting dialogue on here, offering something meaningful to your lives, with consistency and shared understanding that this being human is hard. I will be dedicated to turning up here on Substack in an authentic way though all the ebbs and flows of my creative seasons. If you’d like to support my work you can do that right now but whether you sign up or not, the invitation is still here to be a part of this community.

Each week, I’ll send out a short digestive and a longer meal for the munching. Subscribing will bring access to all the longer form posts which will often include voice memos, reflections, fictional stories, essays and art. But the subscriptions aren’t why I’m here. I’ll write wether you read it or not. Lord knows I need to. But if you decide this has genuine value in your life, then I want you to have the opportunity to give in alignment with those values. 

As the world grows more and more fragmented, perhaps I’ll simply seek to be a spider and spin beautiful webs that help hold all this stuff we carry. Perhaps they’ll be threads of silk like a hammock to lay in, maybe they’ll be like a trampoline, a springboard for you to catapult off with all your great ideas. I have a future post coming about this but i think some of the most useful, powerful, activating 6 words one can say is, ‘I’ve never thought about that before!”

What a beautiful, curious, flexible and creative state! 

Again, I’m Kimbra and I’m really excited to be on Substack. I make music as an independent artist, but that’s a small part of who I am. I’m a writer first, a singer second, a producer of all things sound, and a deep seeker of silence and divine spark. I cook Ethiopian food often, paint with watercolours and talk to amazing people on my podcast ‘Playing With Fire’.

You can expect that I’ll talk about my life as a musician, but I’ll mainly wax poetic on the transcendent, share secret whimsical fictions and filter out anything of worth that comes to my mind on a Sunday morning (my favourite time of life).

Talk soon,

Photo by Adam Paiva, Greenfield Park, NY

REMAIN AT YOUR TABLE AND LISTEN.
DO NOT EVEN LISTEN, ONLY WAIT.

DO NOT EVEN WAIT, BE WHOLLY STILL AND ALONE.

THE WORLD WILL PRESENT ITSELF TO YOU
FOR ITS UNMASKING, IT CAN DO NO OTHER,

IN ECSTASY IT WILL WRITHE AT YOUR FEET.

~ KAFKA