INTERVIEW: Kate Miller-Heidke releases new album 'Child In Reverse': "I feel so much more confident and that’s huge for me"

Oct 30

Oct 30 INTERVIEW: Kate Miller-Heidke releases new album 'Child In Reverse': "I feel so much more confident and that’s huge for me"

Kate Miller-Heidke, Interview, Album release

Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Tajette O'Halloran
Australia’s Kate Miller-Heidke is one of the true chameleons of the music industry. A classically trained opera singer who devotes much of her music career to pop music, she is the only known artist to have performed across three very diverse musical stages: the hipster festival Coachella, the highbrow New York Metropolitan Opera and the cheesy but delicious Eurovision Song Contest. Today, she releases new album Child In Reverse, her first pop album in six years, a collection of tantalising, addictive pop gems. And after twenty years in the music business, it is with Child In Reverse that Miller-Heidke feels she has finally found confidence in herself as a musician. “I feel so much more confident and that’s huge for me,” she reveals. “I feel less scared of failure now. I’m more inclined to go with what’s fun and what feels good to me.”

Purposefully seeking to explore herself and “dig inside myself until I found a little nugget of shame I could bring out into the light and examine every corner of” Miller-Heidke says the theme of the album is of ‘unlearning’ her old habits and establishing a new way of thinking.

The examination of uncomfortable memories is most apparent on the album’s standout track, the synth-heavy, 1980s-riffing ‘You Can’t Hurt Me Anymore’, which is quite possibly one of the greatest moments in pop music this year. Its perky melodies hide a dark story of escaping abuse: “We’re so good at hiding bruises / We’re so good at feeling shame / When you’re tiny no one listens … / Now that you are in the ground / We’ll never hear your lies again.”

On the sparkling, almost tropical swing of ‘A Quiet Voice’, Miller-Heidke confronts an internal monologue of crippling anxiety: “It’s all too loud inside my head … / Give me back my choice / Let me listen to a quiet voice.” The frantic, claustrophobic, dramatic ‘People Pleaser’ is almost Miller-Heidke’s dialogue with herself – one voice pleading to change her behaviour and the other confidently making the required changes. “I’ve got my own thoughts and dreams / I can’t be a people pleaser anymore … / Don’t just abandon yourself.”

Child In Reverse showcases a supremely confident artist at the very top of her game and is an album of breathtaking scope and utter pop joy. One of the highlights of this year, it is highly recommended listening. We recently caught up with Kate to chat more about the album.

Congratulations on the new album, Child in Reverse, it is such a stunning gift box of your music and heart. It's beautiful. How are you feeling about having it out in the world?
Thank you so much. Oh, super excited. You know, we've been sitting on it for a little while now, when COVID hit I umm-ed and ah-ed for a while about whether I should push back the release. But ultimately, I just wanted it out in the world. It's quite different to anything I've done before, but I'm proud of it as a record. It's got a beautiful, fresh, easy spirit and a great, coherent statement.

I'm so glad you released it, because it's what people have needed, we as listeners are just so grateful that artists are still releasing music despite the lack of touring. One thing that really cheers you up is a good song.
Yeah, I've noticed my listening habits, too. I'm not sure if it's just that I'm a raw nerve, and being in Melbourne, the rolling lockdowns make me more vulnerable to it. But music has meant a lot to me recently. It' a beautiful sort of escape or a tool of connection in a really disconnected time.

I want to talk to you about how you bookended the album. You've got your opening track ‘Deluded’ with your signature contortionist vocals and this nice little beat running through it. And then you bookend it with my absolute favourite track, ‘This Is Not Forever’. They're like therapy in a four-minute track. What was your intention with bookending the album that way?
it wasn't a conscious thing. ‘This Is Not Forever’ always sort of felt like a final track for me because it's such a ballad ‘Deluded’ just stood out as a great opening track. It was an order I wrestled with for a while, though. The album does traverse a whole bunch of ground, and I think it's nice that it starts off from a more energised place and then it leads you to the end into a place of stillness.

‘This Is Not Forever’ is such a beautiful track. The lyrics are incredible and the video is just something else. Can you talk me through the origins of that song?
 It was actually written pre-pandemic and it was written about watching somebody close to me fall into a depression, and wanting to just let them know that I was there for them in a serious way.

And then of course releasing it at such a perfect moment, because we find relation in all songs we listen to, but this one seemed to really get people and of course, it went hand in hand with your beautiful self-shot dances at home video. 
Yeah, you know, I love that. And it’s one of the kind of magical features of songs, particularly from the songwriter's perspective that you make something that means something to you at a certain point, but then it's almost like organic matter. It changes shapes depending on the context and the ears and the brains of the people who are listening to it. And obviously, in the context of the pandemic, that song almost grew and almost became more universal and more meaningful than it had been. It certainly wasn't one that I'd earmarked as a single, but in the context of the pandemic I just felt that I wanted to put it out.

You do always write such very personal songs and your songs seem to follow this collective consciousness of a three-act structure that we're all so familiar with. We want to hear the ending. Does that come do you think from your theatrical background, or is it just something you’ve always done? Thank you by the way. But I don’t know. Maybe the three-act structure is something I’ve internalised. As much as the importance of theatre has been huge for me, similarly I think folk music has a lot of those characteristics. Particularly the storytelling. You know, when I was a teenager I would learn some of these epic folk tunes that just took you through 15 verses and ultimately they always ended in violence and death. I do ultimately see music as a story-telling tool. It’s just so potent. It’s like you’re painting with emotions and as a listener I love that – when I hear somebody convey an emotion through music that you know, an emotion that is beyond words. Something that I’ve never heard anyone else describe.

My other favourite track on your album is ‘People Pleaser’. It is such a bizarre avant-garde sort of mind labyrinth of a song. It instantly brings tears to my eyes while simultaneously making me prepare for some killer boosh-doof. Can you talk me through your desires for this song?
Well, somebody told me that when I was first writing stuff for the album that I should make a song like ‘Bad Guy’ by Billie Eilish and I just went home and angrily wrote a song about how I was never going to do that. But I did it with the exact feel and sonic palette that ‘Bad Guy’ has. So that was my angry, ironic response.

Your defiance
Yeah, ‘okay fine. I’ll do it, but I won’t be happy about it!’ There was just something about the song that really loved. It started off sounding a lot like ‘Bad Guy’ and then it went through a few different incarnations and more things changed. It’s by far the most cinematic moment on the record. I’m looking forward to playing that song live.

Lastly, Kate, what is on the horizon for you?
Who knows? But I cannot wait to play these songs live in front of actual real people. In saying that, I’m lucky enough to have a couple of big writing projects to work on at home There’s one particular meaty thing that my partner and I are digging out and piecing together at the moment, so that’s been really fun too.

Child In Reverse is out now via EMI Music. You can download on iTunes and stream on Apple Music and Spotify.

To keep up with all things Kate Miller-Heidke you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

Child In Reverse tracklisting