INTERVIEW: Nicole Millar on her latest EP 'daydreamin' and her upcoming live show: "I’ve basically spent the last few years trying to figure out what music it is that I want to create again."
Nicole Millar has been one of Australia’s premier electronic-dance artists since she first burst onto the scene in 2014 as the co-writer and featured singer on Peking Duk’s top 5 hit ‘High’, which earned Millar an ARIA Award for Best Dance Release.
Over the past ten years, she has released her debut album Excuse Me (2018) four EPs and multiple singles. In March this year she released the EP daydreamin. Millar wrote part of the EP in Stockholm with esteemed Swedish writers such as Amanda Alexander and Joy Deb, while it was produced by Kilter in a Airbnb in Croatia, where Millar escaped to as soon as lockdown restrictions were lifted.
It is a gorgeous EP which mixes ethereal, dreamy sonics with low key electronic beats, all encased with an European cool. EP opener ‘Feeling Good Feeling Great’ is a breezy pop gem with lyrics that celebrate a rebirth which in many ways symbolises Millar’s transition to a fully independent artist with full creative control over everything she does. “Now that I've found the healing / Follow my intuition / That life's no competition / Take it from here / Manifest my own shit,” she sings.
‘je te veux près de moi’ is shimmering pop track with an unusual structure and an addictive, funky beat, while ‘daydreamin’ lives up to its name with a stripped back, floaty, dreamy feel. ‘hugs’ is a fast paced indiepop track, which has an experimental edge to it, and the EP ends with ‘rich’, another experimental pop track that is largely instrumental, interspersed with flashes of Millar’s distorted vocals.
Millar never fails to create pop music that is polished, edgy, out of the box, and a delight to sink in to. Never taking the cookie cutter approach, she is constantly evolving and experimenting with her music with sublime results. She will be performing live in Melbourne/Naarm on 16 June, and we recently sat down with her to chat more about her music.
Hi Nicole! Apart from your beautiful EP daydreamin which I have had on repeat, how are things with you?
Really good. So much has happened over the last few years. I left my label EMI in 2019 and went independent, which has been really exciting to me. I’ve basically spent COVID and the last few years just trying to figure out what music it is that I want to create again. When you're with a major label, you kind of go into that more pop world, which I love, but I just needed to take some time and figure out what kind of music I wanted to make. That’s how daydreamin came together. I was sitting at home, on the floor, on the couch, just kind of walking around the house coming up with vocal and melody ideas. The whole EP is kind of going back to how I used to write before signing to a label. My writing process changed when I signed to a label, I got really excited, I got put in sessions, which I'd never done before and it definitely made me write better songs, and I learned a lot from it. But I love coming back to how I used to write which is by myself with beats and loops and just having fun writing whatever comes off my head, rather than bouncing ideas back and forth in a room with complete strangers.
Do you think because it is a big label, and you feel like you have to do whatever you are being pushed to do, you end up - through lack of confidence because you are a small fish in a big ocean - putting yourself into these strange places, instead of relying on the skill that you have accumulated, or the skill that actually got you the label in the first place?
Yeah exactly. It's something you always dream of, when you know you want to do music. That's the number one thing, you want to get signed and all my dreams are gonna come true. And everyone's fighting for you and working for you, and you get put in all these rooms with songwriters that have written your favourite songs. So through just me being super shy and being in those rooms and writing songs with people that have created these amazing things, I became quiet. I would just sit in the room and be like, ‘Oh well, they know what they're doing’. Even though I would put my voice into things, I felt like I had less control over what I was writing. I didn’t put songs out that I didn't like, I'm still so proud of a lot of the stuff I've done. But you forget how you started writing songs. In these sessions, sometimes you sit there with these people and you're like, ‘What rhymes with this and what rhymes with this’ and you have this pressure to write a song in a day. Which is doable, but you kind of forget what you're trying to do. I just wanted to have fun with it again. Obviously COVID had that push, you couldn't leave the house so it forced me back to writing in that way. If you listen to the songs on the EP, you can probably hear that there's a message of wanting to travel and wanting to be anywhere else than where I was in that room.
One of my favourite songs on the track on the EP is ‘nice’. I think it’s beautiful. I remember reading as well, it was your lockdown album, and it's just this fantasy of being somewhere other than on my sofa.
I'm literally looking at my orange sofa now, I still have it! I've spent too much time on that thing. I wrote the ideas at home, on the couch, on the beanbag, wanting to be somewhere, but I hadn't quite finished them. That’s the change I've had in my songwriting, I started the ideas myself and then as soon as we could travel again, I went overseas straight away and I took those ideas into a studio with some people that I had never met before.
You recorded this in Croatia, didn't you?
Yeah, not the final vocals, but I finished all of them there. So [producer] Kilter and I, we went to Croatia and got a Airbnb for two weeks, and just sat there with all the ideas and forced ourselves to finish them. Being in that environment of what I had envisioned in my little room in my house, just took the songs to a whole other level of dreaminess.
What's wonderful about this collection is I know that these are individual tracks, but they are strung together, they bleed into each other so beautifully. It is really, really beautiful, From what you were saying before about coming from the label, it just makes total sense that this is the next thing you've done.
Thank you. I really wanted songs that I could listen to in a chill scenario, because a lot of my previous songs are party tracks. I really wanted something that you could sit in a car and it just flows without some piercing sound that makes you just want to skip the song. That means a lot that you say that they flow because with the track listing, it was a ‘those two, they work well together’ kind of thing.
It's really beautiful. Can you talk to me about the song ‘rich’? Where did this one come from?
The most experimental one! Which has also been fun, just not overthinking songs and just being like, ‘Oh, that's a cool vibe.’ That one came to me when we were in Stockholm and we were in this dungeon studio, and I was sitting on the couch and we were working on finishing ‘Feeling Good Feeling Great’ and this melody and lyric of ‘I want to be rich’ just came into my head. I voice noted it and didn't really think much of it, and then we came back to it when we were in Croatia. I was just like, ‘this melody has just been stuck in my head, I feel like I just need to play it out and see what happens’. I feel really sorry for Kilter because he just didn't know what to do with it, he had a different idea, and then I had this weird idea in my head and I just kept making him change it. We changed it like ten times, to the point that we were both like, ‘maybe this song is not gonna make the EP’. We ended up using the voice memo that I had, we got the microphone and then recorded the memo into the Ableton session and that kind of formed the idea. I just really wanted something that is more like being in the clouds, because I was travelling when this one was formed. I listened to the demo on the plane with headphones on just looking out the window, and it just felt really euphoric to me.
Lyrically, it was kind of a take on so many songs about you money, because we all love it. We all love money. I just kind of thought, if I won the lotto, what would I do with money? And I'd love to help myself, but I would love to help other people as well. I've spent a lot of time last year not living a normal, nine to five lifestyle. We spent a lot of time travelling and staying with family and I just get really sad when I think about money. How everyone works so hard to only enjoy life for a certain amount of time. The same days off, Saturday, Sunday, and then everyone has to work Monday to Friday, and I don't know it just made me sad. So that's kind of where my head was at when I was writing.
Tell me, we had the daydreamin EP live show in Sydney in April, and now you've got a Melbourne show coming up at Gasometer on 16 June. Talk to me about your show.
Coming back from overseas, I just really wanted to get back into shows, but didn't know where to start, because COVID just killed my touring career, if I'm honest. It was kind of nerve wracking getting back into that, but we did the Sydney one in April and it just reminded me why I write music, just to see how it affects people. So I thought let's do one in Melbourne/Naarm and see if anyone will come! I did an Instagram post looking for supports and so many people commented on my post for this girl Matilda Pearl, so she's joining me as well. Her music’s really cool pop. I've kind of changed my show a bit because of COVID, I wanted to do something different and because I wrote all the songs on the EP in my own little bubble, I created an inflatable live dome with this company based in the UK! It's so cool. It almost looks like a big see through shell, and the lights reflect on the bubble and I'm in there in like my own little world. I don't have my big band because the bubble takes up most stage, but I do have a band member on stage with me playing synth.
This is brilliant, and I'm also loving the shout out for your support acts. It's always nice to see in the industry people really reaching out and giving each other a leg up. A get stuck in together kind of attitude is really important. The elitism of old of the industry is definitely dissipating in many areas in Australia, and it's really nice to see.
Yeah, I agree. We just always have to think of new ways. The old ways of putting on shows and stuff [is over]. Even just the word ‘supporting’- it's a collab, she's doing much work asI'm doing. Even how I see people doing features now, I just did a song with Snakehips and instead of it saying ‘featuring’ it's with, which I think is really cool.
daydreamin is out now. You can buy and stream here.
Nicole Millar is playing at The Gasometer in Melbourne/Naarm on June 16. You can buy tickets now.
To keep up with all things Nicole Millar you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Twitter.
