Interview: Getting to know A.GIRL
Western Sydney-based RnB artist A.GIRL has just unveiled her debut single. We asked her to tell us about herself:
I am… a girl doing her best to take what I make and express it in the best way I can. Fresh new beginnings and being of Maori heritage, I love the place I’m from. I am only 19 years old and always hungry.
2142 is… the place I was raised, the streets I grew up on. Shit wasn’t always pretty, from drive-by shootings, to stabbings, police riots in my front yard and finding bullets. However, all those things taught me to have tougher skin, better peripherals, trust in the right people, have a humble heart and treat everyone with the respect they deserve. When you walk around all you can smell all day is the greatest charcoal chicken, shout out to El Janah. 2142 is the people, always.
Home is… Australia, born and raised, however as a Maori, my home at heart is Aotearoa without a doubt. As soon as I step foot in New Zealand I feel physically plugged into the land and recharged. My people are there, my ancestors are there but the life my Mum gave me here in Australia and my childhood belong here. Australia has my memories, but Aotearoa has my heart.
I spend too much time… working on other people’s problems before I can reach inside myself and sort out my own. Sometimes it feels like a curse, but I’ve been given the opportunity to speak so much wisdom to help people when they’re at their lowest. It’s like having a magnet forcefield around me that attracts broken people, whether that be family, friends or even strangers. They will pour their heart out to me, usually when I’m going through a hard time myself, but my heart can’t push anyone away that needs help. Building people up when they’re at their lowest and ironically, it’s usually when I needed them to message and ask me if I’m doing ok. I say it’s like a curse, but really, it’s a big blessing to be able to do something like that especially for the ones I love.
I’ve never… skydived before and I’m a big adrenaline junkie. My boyfriend and I went to Queenstown NZ, which is on the South Island, and we did the giant drop swing. It was the most amazing feeling in the world, my heart was in my stomach, and my stomach was in a place where the sun don’t shine. We also went to an indoor skydiving joint, the closest I’ve ever got to actual skydiving. I would drop anything I’m doing to skydive, top of the bucket list.
It might surprise people to learn that… I started my singing career in a reggae band, Maori’s reggae is in our bones. I told my Mum I wanted to be a singer and she did what any Mum would do, she formed a reggae band with the help of my four uncles, with me as the lead singer. I was only about eleven years old, the lead singer of a family reggae band. We rehearsed every weekend, practising songs and sets, and before I knew it, we were performing local gigs. Man I loved it. I was dedicated to music from a young age, but that meant I had to sacrifice a bunch of my childhood. While I was rehearsing from Friday – Sunday for six hours in my uncles’ friends’ garage, all my cousins were playing by the pool or watching movies. So you could say I had ‘temptations’ but I remained loyal. I did my first proper gig at a night club in the city opening for a well-known NZ reggae band, 1814. Because I was underage the manager of the club reserved the whole upstairs area for me. I literally sat there, stared at the stage and said, “this is what I’m going to do for my whole life”. I’ve come a long way and I’m not stopping anytime soon.
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