Interview: Gretta Ray connects
Melbourne’s Gretta Ray has just released her sophomore EP, Here and Now. Cherry Anna Brearley spoke to her about it:
Hi Gretta. How are you? What’s on your mind? What’s inspiring you today?
Hey! Going well, pretty busy at the moment! Just in the middle of getting my hair done for the first show of the ‘Here and Now’ tour which is in Melbourne. I have a bunch of things inspiring me today and am running on adrenaline as a result, but if I’m going to be specific I actually just watched Thelma Plum’s ‘Clumsy Love’ music video which premiered last night. Thelma has been an influence of mine for years, and I absolutely love her work. This clip is my favourite of hers yet so I can definitely say I’m feeling inspired after watching that!
Care to indulge us a little about yourself and your sound?
Well, to put it simply I’m a 20-year old based in Melbourne, and I’ve been obsessed with songwriting and performing for pretty much as long as I can remember. Growing up, I listened to a lot of country and folk music (my parents’ music taste is something quite special), so the sounds of those genres heavily influenced my songwriting when I first started out. However, I’m equally inspired by and in awe of modern pop and have allowed that music to influence my work more over the past few years. As a result, I’ve just put out an EP called ‘Here and Now’, and I think it is very much like a sonic patchwork of all of my influences.
‘Here and Now’ was written and recorded over the course of the last two years. In music terms, that’s a pretty long time. Were you working on it full-time for two years? What have you discovered about yourself, and how you’ve changed, over that time?
I definitely wasn’t working on ‘Here and Now’ full time… my vision for this body of work changed and developed a lot over the duration of that two year period. Originally, I imagined it to be a full-length album. After I had a song that I wrote called ‘Drive’ produced and mixed, I listened back to what we’d created and loved the sound of it so much that I hoped to make a whole album similar to that song. But when I began writing with that idea in mind, I quickly became a crippling perfectionist and therefore didn’t get that many songs completed! After a while, my team and I decided that we had what we thought was a strong, lush EP staring us in the face and that the eventual debut album would come later in a time wherein I was writing more consistently. Now that I’ve released this little body of work, I’m so glad that we made that call because I really have changed so much since ‘Drive’ was released. My songwriting is a little more daring lyrically; my style has changed, I can definitely feel myself growing up and not shying away from who I’m meant to be as much… The songs that make up ‘Here and Now’ have assisted me in getting to that place. I think writing my debut album will feel much more natural as a result.
Based on what conclusions you’ve drawn, do you have a vision for yourself, and your music, for the next two years and beyond?
I want to continue on with this career path for as long as I can. I’m still gradually figuring out what I want my next body of work to represent and sound like, what stories I want to tell, etc. One thing I know for sure is that I don’t want it to come across as an extension of ‘Here and Now’ if that makes sense. I want it to stand on its own. But considering we’ve only just released the EP, I think I need to be one with that chapter of my life for a little longer, rather than getting caught up in a brand new idea too soon. The next thing will come into its own in time. I’ve learnt to trust that process, so far now I’m going to focus mainly on performing and connecting with my audience. Now’s the time to thank them for their patience and support, as well as encourage them to enjoy this new music!
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Gretta Ray’s Here and Now EP is out independently now. Grab it here. And catch her at the following venues.
Thursday 23 August (tomorrow!) – Oxford Art Factory, Sydney with FEELDS and Connor Black-Harry
Friday 24 August – Woolly Mammoth, Brisbane with Al Parkinson and Asha Jefferies
Interview by Cherry Anna Brearley.
