Focus: Rising Kiwi star Kimbra will feature on the bill at next month’s Queenscliff Music Festival. Picture: Aimee Han
ERIN PEARSON
NEW ZEALAND-born song-stress Kimbra believes music should challenge the soul.
And that’s precisely what she’s doing with her own brand of smoky soul.
In only one of two interviews with the media between now and next year, Kimbra told the Independent she was preparing to embark on a mammoth journey to America in anticipation of her international album release.
“It’s certainly cool to take it to a new audience because they sometimes look at the songs in a different way,” she said.
“I think the best kind of music is the stuff that can surprise you and take you somewhere you don’t expect.
“That’s my focus; that excites me.”
Bringing a modern edge to the warm sounds of soul with a voice that belies her age, Kimbra said her jazz-influenced theatrical pop was inspired by a range of musical genres and artists from Bjork to Prince.
“I like to trend to as many genres as I can including gospel and soul, Stevie Wonder, Nine Inch Nails, African music, Prince and Michael Jackson,” she laughed.
“I find inspiration from everywhere as long as it comes from a place of conviction and honesty.
“The more you consume as an artist in terms of film and art the more you can draw from when you write your own music and create it unique.”
After three years based in Melbourne, Kimbra recently completed her debut full length album, Vows.
Some of the best producers in the business chopped and changed the album’s classic jazz intonation updated for the techno age.
Featuring on the album are producers Francois Tetaz, who has worked with Architecture in Helsinki and Gotye, and M-Phazes, producer for Amerie and Pharoahe Monch.
Kimbra also featured on Miami Horror’s track I Look To You and Gotye’s Somebody I Used To Know.
But her new success hadn’t come easily, the artiste said.
She spent four years working on the newly released record.
“It definitely hasn’t happened over night,” she said.
“It’s exciting now that people are starting to hear about it and resonate with the music.”
Kimbra will perform at Queenscliff Music Festival from November 25 to 27.
