INTERVIEW: Georgia Mae on new single 'Soul Like This': "I'm feeling like I've never felt better with my sound than I do now and it's just exciting to see where it's going."
Brisbane’s Georgia Mae recently released the single ‘Soul Like This’, her first new music of 2020. Written and co-produced by Georgia, the track is a gorgeously laid back guitar pop love song with melodies and harmonies reminiscent of the best American pop of the 1990s and early 2000s. The second single since she signed a major record label last year with Lemon Tree Records/Sony Music Australia (Tones And I, Maddy Jane), Georgia says of the song: “It’s a bold one. I feel a bit naked putting it out into the world but I wouldn’t want it any other way. After a string a bad relationship choices, it felt time to do some much needed introspection. ‘Soul Like This’ is a testament to finding yourself, just as much as it is to finding your ‘soulmate’.”
Georgia’s six previous singles have garnered over 1.5 million streams globally and have seen her nominated for Most Promising Female Songwriter and Best Female Pop Artist at the Queensland Music Awards. Her career has also seen her branch out into the world of film and TV including time spent in the US working in sound design at the esteemed Skywalker Sound and as a writer and recording artist for TV shows such as Keeping Up With The Kardashians.
With a new body of work later this year, Georgia Mae is an artist coming into her own and is definitely a talent to keep your eye on. We recently caught up with her to find out more.
Hi Georgia. Congratulations on your very beautiful track, ‘Soul Like This’. I'm instantly transported back to my adolescent bedroom. In a good way, sprawled out on top of the covers just indulging in the idleness.
Yes! That’s it. That's what I wanted and that was me when I wrote it. Good.
It's that feeling you know when you're lucky enough to be at that stage in your life when really you can just spend all your time indulging in those moments and those insecurities and songs.
Right, in yourself? It took me a long time to feel comfortable with being vulnerable and being open with myself. I had to do this introspection in myself to be able to grow into the person that I wanted to be. It was so important, it’s important for everyone to spend some time alone and really just look at themselves and look at what they want. So yeah, that’s good. Lying in bed - what better place to do that?
Obviously it's something we associate with idleness and indulgence of emotion. Do you think it's actually been one of those silver linings that have come out of the last year where a lot of people have been forced to lay in bed and think about their feelings?
Yes, absolutely. So, I actually wrote this song before COVID and I was tossing up what to release during a pandemic. This one stood out before as so important for me, but then when COVID hit i was like this is actually so poignant for hopefully not just me but for like a lot of people around the world because we're all lying in bed by ourselves and we're spending all this time thinking not only by ourselves, but thinking what is my future like, what's happening with my job? What's happening with my money? What's happening with my family, with my friends? Everyone's being forced to do this introspection. It's a positive outcome of all of this negativity that’s floating around the world, right now. That's a good thing.
I think you're right and obviously 2020 is just train wreck after train wreck. But what's interesting is the way people are dealing with it is tapping into themselves and tapping into their family and tapping into creative outlets and all these things
Yeah, totally. We're sort of bombarded by the negativity all day if we're watching the news or even on socials. Things aren't great right now but at the end of the day, I think we forget there's a personal aspect to all of this and we are still living our lives. I think music is something that can really help you feel yourself in a way. It's okay to feel hopeful right now and excited about the future and I think we have to. We have to feel hopeful for the future, even if it is as simple as finding someone that you can fall in love with. We shouldn't give up on that just because of the pandemic.
Your music, you have these epic emotional empowering kind of pop sounds and they get experimental with synth and you can also go darker but you really shine with those sort of uplifting tracks. What were those songs for you growing up?
That's a good question. Oh gosh. I've just been thinking a lot lately about the song ‘Hey Man’ by Nelly Furtado from Woah Nelly. I've been listening to her a lot recently and that album specifically because she was really her own person and she had her own sound and you could just tell her voice was so honest in the way she sang her melody. I was young when that album was released and I remember being mystified by this woman who sounded so confident and her music was so colourful and she had all these elements that came together that I hadn’t really heard before. Looking back at it now I’m like ‘oh my gosh she was amazing’. She created her whole vibe, it was hers and she owned it. That for me is super inspiring and that’s something that I've had to build up to get to a place where I feel like I can do that myself. So now I feel this song is really important to me because I'm starting to hit that point myself.
I love that. Everyone's got their goals. Now there are rumours floating around that you've penned your first song at 4 years old.
Well, I can confirm the rumour. That's true. I’m a little gun. I was obsessed with music from the earliest i can remember. Even when i was a baby I think my favourite baby toy was a little toy piano. I'm just a very musical person. My parents were great in giving me lessons super young and then I remember the song I wrote when I was 4 - it's terrible! I literally have been writing ever since. But it's always been so normal for me. It’s just who I am.
A lot of people say that but if you've been doing this since you were 4 you know that really is who you are. What or who was it that got you started in the actual industry? So many of us dabble in writing and even in production but the confidence to put yourself out there is often too big of a risk and we fall by the wayside.
Oh, totally. I’ve felt that. I mean I still feel like that sometimes. I was really heavily involved in music and I entered a competition called Score It, which was this Queensland music festival thing where you are given this short film and you have to write music over it. I was one of the finalist and I met a lecturer in music technology from the Queensland Conservatorium of Music and he said to me, he was like, ‘hey I think you'd be interested in doing this sort of degree at the Conservatorium’. I looked into it and because I had the musical aspect, the writing aspect t but I didn't know anything about production or recording or engineering or anything like that. I’d never really done that before and that's what it taught you. University was such an important time for me, it was just so inspiring. Everyone there was a musician or a producer. It was a very collaborative/creative time and that just pushed me forward. My education, my schooling, my teachers, they've had the biggest impact on where I’ve ended up now.
You’ve been over in the States, you've been writing in LA with Warner Bros. That's just incredible. I just want to know, do you feel that your music has developed from having that very American influence as well?
Oh totally, yeah. I hope it sounds like my music has matured because I think it's matured alongside my personal development. I was doing a lot of music for reality TV shows and that was a very specific type of sound and that was influencing my sound for sure. I think it was necessary for me as an artist to go through this stage of writing music that I thought I should be writing and producing music that I thought I should be producing as a pop artist in LA and specifically as an Australian pop artist in LA. I made the decision to move from Australia because I wanted to be making a different type of pop. It was this weird complex about pop in Australia. I just thought, ‘oh, I couldn't be making the kind of pop that I was making for TV in LA in Australia’. I was just confusing myself I think. So I went through this stage of just trying too hard probably. I think I have the confidence now because of doing all of that to write the sort of music that's really, really pure to me and going back to my roots basically and starting from there and building on it with everything that I've learnt in the process. That’s exciting for me now is to be able to go ‘yep, I've done that and this is where I am’. I'm feeling like I've never felt better with my sound than I do now and it's just exciting to see where it's going.
In pop music, Australia has the tall poppy thingy going on but also it's been a dude rock country for a very long time. So, I think emerging pop artists, particularly female, often do struggle. Even if they do get heard they won't be appreciated so a lot of them do leave. On that note, you're a singer/song writer, you're also qualified in sound engineering and producing. You're an all-rounder and I just wanted to know, what have you found being the pressures of it being all on you, particularly with regard to the fact that there's a huge huge gender divide in the music industry, particularly behind the scenes.
Well, as you can imagine - I'm trying to find a good way to say this - I've often been discredited [as] I'm only seen as a singer. I think that's something that all female singer songwriters can relate to. It's just the added layer of I do produce my own music and often people don't believe me. Essentially people don't believe that I produce my own music and that I engineer and that I can write for other people. There's just this layer of disbelief and it's like ‘oh, well maybe she has but someone probably did it with her or she had help or...’ And for a long time, I was doing everything on my own. I've always worked with co-producers and that's something that I think is integral to the creative process - before you finish a song you want to bring someone else on who you vibe with and that just makes the song better. But it's very hard I think for people to believe that women can do what typically men are doing in the industry and have been doing for such a long time. It's just breaking through that gene of a woman can do exactly what a man has been doing since the beginning of the music industry. With my Lemon Tree and Sony record deal, that's the first time that I've really had a team behind me and that's been amazing. But before I've been very much a loner. I'd set up meetings with a bunch of studios in LA and I'd just be giving them these demos that I'd just done in my bedroom. Literally no one else had touched it and I'd be playing it to them and it was like I'd get this feeling like they thought I was lying to them that I'd done it all myself. That pisses you off. But now I feel like I've got this support behind me, I have this credibility that I can kind of lean back on with Sony and Lemon Tree for the first time ever and it's relieving. It's like ‘oh maybe people will start to believe me now.’
Well, of course. you've got your fans as a cheer squad, but you’ve got your labels as validation and support. Of course, it means you're only going to do better things.
100%. I see all these amazing female producers and song writers, singer-songwriter producers out there just in Australia. Even just Brisbane. There's so many that are killing it and they're doing their music by themselves. They're not signed. They're independent or they don't have management. They're self-managing and I can relate with the struggle that you're trying to compete with these men that are saying ‘yeah I'm a singer-songwriter-producer’ and just automatically they're given this clout. And a female, it's just harder to be seen at that same level. I can really relate with that. But you got to keep doing it. Eventually the industry will catch up. We will all catch up.
Lastly, before I have to leave you, what is on the horizon for you, Georgia?
Lots of music - like lots and lots! I'll have an album out soon and that'll be my first ever body of work for myself which is the most exciting thing ever. Obviously I can't really be playing shows at the moment which is sad. But that means there’s more time and more effort being spent writing and creating some cool stories!
‘Soul Like This’ is out now via Lemon Tree Records/Sony Music Australia. You can download and stream here.
To keep up with all things Georgia Mae you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
